Scenery

[Dæmon]

Driving home from work, on that hot afternoon, was a welcomed relief.
My feet ached, from standing all day, and I was drenched in the rare summer swelter.
I lowered the window and let the rushing wind dry my skin at the tempo of overplayed rock ‘n roll tunes from the car radio.
The outlying clouds formed threatening shapes in the southern sky and there before me one of them rose like an apocalyptic mushroom to catch my eye.

I followed it along my winding rout, my eyes darting from its airy splendour to the asphalt road ahead, trying not to lose it.
It hovered there on display. A singular piece of frozen beauty resembling a churning ball of dense white smoke, lighted from above by the setting sun, as if by design, and contrasting perfectly against the pale, muggy backdrop.
I pulled over on the side of the road and sat on my car’s rusting hood, staring at the cottony sculpture while traffic whizzed by undisturbed and lost in the delirium of timetables.

Beauty comes at us unexpectedly.
We can either ignore it or sit there, dumbfounded by its glory, absorbing its momentary magnificence before it deteriorates in the turmoil, leaving behind remnants of its near-perfection in our mind.
The rain falls, calming and cool.
I walk through it, slowly, wanting every drop to touch me, wanting every particle of it to flow down my skin.
It flows down my face until I savour its accumulated course on my lips.
My every molecule is stimulated into wakefulness.

I vibrate with comprehension and I become drenched by sense.
I feel alive then.
Invigorated and sensually awake until I want to run and unleash this renewed energy in me.
But still I walk on, savouring the controlled emotion, enjoying nature’s release, my heartbeat pulsating with the rhythm of the downpour in a synchronicity of matter.
There is something very private about a walk in the rain, something internally invigorating and full of instinctive passion, like ones own blood trickling down ones face, or like mud stained skin.
Then lightning flashes, as if to warn me, before thunder rumbles in the distance - a drum roll to accompany the symphonic tirade of striking raindrops - a baptism of hope, speaking of a new tomorrow but also captivated by the present, constricting reality into a tiny ball, blanketing the world with a cleansing shower.

A divine erasure…..
Nature speaks so rarely with such intensity - she usually only whispers in the dark – so I take notice and listen intently to her voice.

The scent of dandelion mingles with the grass and they both dance over me on currents of swirling wind.
A bug whizzes by on the turbulence, and is gone.
I lie there flat on the earth, in stillness, in a complete state of relaxation, as if I were never born.
No past to deduce my present by and only an unknown future to tempt my sparse vanities.
My dimensional horizons are altered and along with them my thoughts.

It is funny how the position of the head can affect psychology, how perspective is transformed by a simple cranial redirection. No doubt much can be blamed on the spinal column and on binocular vision.
Lying here I have no way of seeing my shadow….I begin doubting I even have one. The eternal, airy distance of the void stretches infinitely above me, and below: an impregnable history, as hard as death.

My body sinks into the Earth, seeking a final resting place before its time, wanting to find the Hunter’s Home and a way to release its weariness upon the soil; knowing that place so well.
As the bonds between what is and what will be, are severed, the mind gains an added weightlessness, and it drifts over the swaying dandelions.

I forget myself and the world is made anew with every breath.

Fall is always a season of melancholy for me, as I suspect it is for most.
The body’s energies are turned down low and the mind, released from some of its concerns, tends to flow into abstraction and the ensuing metaphysical despair.
Reason is unleashed and clarified.

It is disturbing to find beauty in decay and death, and yet nature spares us not from the spectacle of her fading virility. She explodes in colour and deteriorating change, like a spasm of spectacular release, casting aspersions about our own demise.

But her warnings fall upon blind eyes.
We are lost in the beauty.

There are those moments of serene perfection where things fall into place, as if by design, and we momentarily experience the sensation of being fully agitated yet simultaneously fully at ease with reality. Then every beam of sunlight is cast just right and every gust of wind blows by design, and our mind dances upon speculation, being completely absorbed by the present, to a degree where no past or future matter.

The body relaxes into euphoria and the mind is calmed into insight.

Σωφροσηνι - The deceptive character of composure within the turmoil of fervour, is similar to a hurricane’s eye: A calm serenity in the centre gathers around it a whirlwind of violence. At its centre it appears to be just another average day when it is really a nexus to a gathering storm.

A mind prone to surrendering to its every extremity becomes a chaotic, disorganized mass of rain and wind. Give this force a unifying inner calm and it becomes focused and far more powerful than any other atmospheric disturbance.

Sheets of clouds cover the horizons, promising to replicate their condensation upon the Earth.
In winter, reality is cocooned into hibernation. Time seems to slow down and every gesture takes on an added gravity.

Nature, indeed, is no stranger to excess. It is the fate of some individuals, in their attempt to outdo and outbid the other, to resort to riskier, self-detrimental and often foolish behaviour.

Exaggeration is where competition forces individuals to seek out self-realization. In one instantaneous or prolonged moment of ecstatic discharge, individuality exhausts itself, desperately trying to embed its essence in the surrounding multiplicity, in code. To the rational mind – that is to the uninvolved observer – such behaviour
seems absurd, almost insane, when one evaluates thoroughly the cost/benefit consequences; one needs to be directly affected and involved in ones own dying, or one’s need to empathize with that of
another, to consider such practices worthy of self-sacrifice or even meaningful in any way.

Sharks – Anxiety precedes awareness, as consciousness precedes self-consciousness.

At first one is fearful of the depths, where mysterious creatures, such as sharks, lurk pursuing their own destinies – terror clenches the heart at the mere sight of one emerging from out of the turquoise haze, its eyes unblinking and its movements menacing, as it swims in your direction.
Then, if one survives the first encounter, one learns the shark’s methods, recognizes patterns in its ways and the mind attaches motives behind them, seeking control.

Fear of the shark subsides but is not fully vanquished. It is replaced with a combination of pity and wonderment - still weary of the shark’s unreasoned hunger but also curious about its essence.
It is the shark’s immunity to reason that renders it simultaneously dangerous and predictable and, as a result, its actions become excusable through understanding. As with humans, the most obtuse and stupid, even if pitiful, still retain the threat of their blind nature – innocent and unyielding.

With such creatures one must swim fast and carry a long spear, showing no mercy for ignorance, or one must avoid their habitats, choosing to deny the primordial allure of the open sea; only observing these creatures from afar or ignoring them altogether.
It is true that the call of the wild is strong in all men and the temptation to return back and stay there is often an uncontrollable temptation, especially in one’s youth, but once the lungs have tasted fresh air, the eye grown fond of the bright sunlight and the foot become accustomed to solid ground, any return is brief and unfulfilling, yet interesting.

The water is a uniting element. The thickness of it bonds all sea creatures into unavoidable affects, far more obtrusive than on land where the air is more supple and inconspicuous.
One enters the shark’s realm as a visitor does into a stranger’s home – careful, curious and willing to defer to the host’s whims, so as to gain insight into his true nature, without becoming imposing, gain intimacy with his world, without becoming intrusive, and gain a connection, through him, into one’s own lineage, without becoming
insulting.
In the element of salt water a shark is king despite its many limitations. Here it swims constantly, unable to stop for even a moment, and its every sense is attuned to the perception of the slightest movement or scent of blood in its environment; it lacks the malice that would make it hateful and is only reactive instinct, forever agitated, and unquenchable thirst in oceans of undrinkable water, passed on from parent to offspring.

We can only imagine the solitude and freedom of a complete void.

A deaf minstrel serenades me with a happy dirge and I whisper the words in agreement.
No time now for laments and empty regrets.
What is done is done.

A word, now, burns my ears, but it is part of my self- indulgence.
Did I not, as well, want it all only to find it all wanting?
Jagged and desperate except for my wrath and it sounds so…sweet.

Cry, now, before me.
It will find no sympathy as none is expected in return, or even desired.
My humanity was burned out of me, by the light of day, until darkness was craved, and all my tears have already been shed, before idols and clowns. I now seek revenge!!!!
And the best kind, I am told, is to live well.

Ambition is what I lack…except the ambition to not be ambitious. It is what makes me unattractive to females of a
particular quality and of any sex. I represent the indolence they crave and are taught to feel ashamed of. Yet, if I keep quiet, it is this very thing that, ironically, serves to make me all the more attractive towards those females, of either sex again, who makes of my disinterest an idol to worship.

Why I never wanted to be somebody? Because when I looked, I saw that becoming somebody would mean I would have to become less of what I already was.

I’ve changed my mind and the first thing I changed my mind about was about …changing my mind.

I respond in kind and then face the outcry when I do it more effectively and with much more style. That’s when a retreat into silence becomes the only alternative that makes any sense.
But I fail to take my own advice and I delve deeper into the darkness of irrationality, amongst beasts and stunted growths.
There I find pride in being soiled without being warped, and I celebrate the circumstances that made me be.

The ego is a hard thing to control, especially when it is taunted by morons and decadent weaklings, pretending they are more, and attacking others with the very words that would best describe them. The irony is excruciating. Disarmingly so.

I am often mistaken for a Dionysian but I am more of a wanderer trying to find his way to Hyperborea and running
with the wolves to dissolve the tensions. I wear goat skins only to hide my scent. I hum paean tunes amongst the trees trying to silence Dendrite’s call.
I am one and both.

Uniqueness is another one of those words used to describe what is absent. The fluidity of life proves that all instances are derivatives and all derivatives are interpreted as instances due to ignorance and feebleminded horror. When a phenomenon cannot be traced back far enough it is made into an idol and an idol is shattered by tracing it back to an inheritance.
There is nothing more unflattering to a weak soul than its heritage.

When I am disappointed or surprised in any way, either positively or negatively, I do not try to find the subject at fault, but I look into my own errors in judgment that resulted in my inability to correctly foresee. In a similar manner I am always ready to accept the disappointment in the other when I do not live up to their expectations and their flawed judgments of what and how I am supposed to be like.
In the end, I just don’t give a shit…but I am amused.

I had an epiphany the other day…but by the time I could document it I had already forgotten it. This was proof enough, to me, that it wasn’t such an epiphany after all.

Not only is ignorance often mistaken for courage, but stupidity is, likewise, often mistaken for open-mindedness.

I cared once; my sensitive consciousness was constantly assaulted by the crudeness of the base and abundant.
I was affected by the slightest…slight, even when it wasn’t directed at me. I carried the world’s woes on my shoulders and cried on the behest of others who often could not perceive the tragedy fully. But, like constant burning, my skin grew thicker and more callous with time.
Now I face the other’s predicament and I rarely feel a thing.

Many times I am accused of racism or sexism or a number of social derogatory terms which are meant to silence me with a public condemnation or a scarlet letter of disapproval. Those that do so usually confuse me with their own conceptions of what a man believing what I do – even when they do not know or can fully appreciate what I believe – must be like or what such a caricature must be motivated by. If they do not dismiss me out of hand, using these delusions, saving themselves much heartache, they soon find me to be a formidable opponent and one they
cannot deal with using their contrived cultural myths and adopted opinions.
That is when they seek a way out of the debate…one way or another. I can be dismissed emotionally but I must be reckoned with rationally.

Hurting another is not evidence that an action or a thought is wrong.
An action is wrong or right, from the emotional position of one that cannot separate his self-interests and his own
emotional reactions from reality. These, imbeciles, are often and under the right circumstances the ones capable of the worse of atrocities under the guise of righteousness. Any mind that can convince itself that what it hopes is true or would like to believe is true, is actually so, lacks the courage to fully deal with the world as it really is. For such a demented mind no action is vicious enough to silence this fact.

This filth is sufficient to breed misanthropy.

I had a dream…once. Then I grew up. Now I have rational hopes based on educated guesses and strategic positioning on perceived probabilities. True, not as romantic as my past state of childish want, but much, MUCH, more successful.

Actions speak louder than words and past actions must not be forgotten, but only forgiven, otherwise one becomes a victim of one’s naiveté and one lays himself before the hidden nature of the other.

I have realized that the other evaluates your successes and failures using his personal ambitions and his own desires for guidance.
He, or she, assumes that what (s)he wants is what everyone wants and (s)he is mostly correct, given that
ambitions and wants are often fabricated by social and cultural forces and distributed into the populace of mediocrity
like any other product. Where one goes astray is in considering the exception they can never relate to.
In so doing one fails to recognize that the other’s failures, from a popular perspective, are really his successes and his, supposed, successes his most hurtful failures. This is how mankind is fragmenting.

I saw a clown, the other day, and I wondered if he was smiling to hide his frown or frowning to hide his smile. I decided there wasn’t much of a difference.

In thinking about friendship I take guidance from the ancients.
I then realize that these are different times and an age they could never have imagined. In this age friendship is not only rare but what is often called friendship refers to a faked intimacy and a partial, more guarded openness.
In this time of decreasing threats and perverted nature the other human becomes the predator and prey and mankind is differentiating itself along idealistic lines.
Then it is far more difficult to tell the friend from the foe and the brother from the barbarian.

A moron needs to put his hand upon a flame to be warned against it.
Intelligence only needs to witness the moron do so.

There is no forgiveness here, no compassion, no understanding that leads to indifference.
With me you will only face the cruel face of reality – survive it or not – and I will offer you the sting of a world I did not choose but I found and I now pass onto you as a gift.
My only gift.
I expect nothing less in return.

Do you remember me?
No, I am not the one you remember.
Life has already changed me.

I catch a glimpse of the future, once in a while. Usually when I am innervated and my rational brain has been sufficiently unseated by the chaotic stream of instinctual feedback.
Then I see things I know will come back to me when I least expect it and I will, once more, feel what it was like when I abandoned my self to providence.

It’s difficult to tell an idiot that they just don’t measure up, especially when it has to do with females and all the possibilities they provide. Then one must take account of possibility versus probability.
The results are rarely encouraging.