The Cube

This is why I love Jim Henson.

Windmill

Numb. What would it take to feel numb? To not spend my life focusing on the paintings trapped deep inside my heart. With the very core of my being muttering like a drugie that he doesn’t need the memories, that he can rid himself of care and concern and all the thoughts that ricochet across the inside of my brain.

I reach out. I grab my British Racing Green Squire Stratocaster. It’s not expensive, but it’s got a nice sound, and a good feel. I plug it in. I grab a pick. I start to play. My arm spins in a windmill trying to shake these thoughts out of my mind, striking against metallic cords with every rotation. Centrifugal force pulling and pulling to no avail. Fingertips growing calluses my heart begs it could someday have. All human terms of meter and rhyme sink behind the terrifying question of how to remove a low E-string from my heart before it contracts splitting the pumping organ in half. Six strings and five fingers cant purge me of this image.

Projecting thoughts that sound like fantasies, they bounce off the wall and into my eyes, into my brain. Like Alex Delarge, strapped to a chair, eyes pried open. Saline dripped in, stopped from blinking. Forced to witness the same images again and again. Images of pain and beauty bound together. Blended so perfectly I can’t even tell where one begins and the other ends. Every instance. Every frame. Every nanosecond pounding against my chest, tearing me inside out.

Every frame drives me further and further from sleep. I desperately gather up my pile of restless nights and stuff them into notebooks, word documents, songs and blogs. Try to hide them. Try to forget. All to no avail, there is no bottom. More and more ideas surface the deeper I dig. Buried alive. Nothing is forgotten but me.

Why must the universe be left alone? Why do we always settle for peace when we can have something so much better than accepting the bed we lie in. That pins and needles will be poking and prodding at us for all eternity. Nothing changes until we announce that Lazerus has come back from the dead, that he never died in the first place. That he was alive and well this whole time, deciding to sleep in, sipping on tea from the comfort of his own bed. Finally leaving the comfort of a tomb just to remind us what he looks like.

Part of me only wants to ignore the smoke alarm. As if concentration and positive thought will extinguish a fire. Deny it’s existence and it still burns. Time won’t heal it, only let it spread. Overtaking everything. Leaving nothing behind but ash and rubble. The fire must be addressed. Either it will be put out or fed, letting it take over.

Will winter ever thaw? I know it did last year. But this year is different. So just speak to me. Tell me that ice melts and I know it will. Tell me that leaves, and grass, and birds will return and I know they will. Tell me this frost is not forever. Remind me spring is coming. Tell me what the sun looks like and I’ll believe you.

The String that Holds the Sun

I can’t stop losing the warmth in my fingers. One moment warm, secure, fine. Then the next they feel like ice. As if my heart at some grand emotional cue has decided beating is too great a stress, and certain extremities are somehow less worthy of blood. At a time like this the only solution is to write. The friction between my fingers and the keys feels good somehow. Helps me think straight.

I don’t think I really see the sky any more. Not really. I look up and see a gorgeously painted backdrop, nothing endless, nothing mysterious. I see the sun and my only thought is to question what string holds it so firmly in place. The world is a place of half-built storefronts built by techies. There is no reality, only deception, only that which men should convince us to be real. Solid ground is merely an illusion, if I choose to stand even for a second it will collapse beneath the weight of ambition casting me to the ground. And the world looks. And the world laughs in my ear. The poor tramp who thought he had the strength to stand.

So we sit still. Alone in the darkness, transfixed by shadows, denying the light. Chains that trap us, stop us from finding truth, finding deception in everything. We search for the seam. We are so much more comfortable prying apart the cracks and seeing the broken and unstable. Survival is a scary image. A hand breaks forth from heaven and offers salvation, but we can’t take it. Can’t wrap my hands around it. We can’t trust it. Can’t risk the hope.

We fell to the ground a long time ago. To stand up threatens gravity. Intimidates it. Teases it. Tempts it to strike back. To slam us back to the ground where we came from. Destroy us all over again, breaking us, cutting us apart. How do we trust the strength that overtakes us? How do we trust our own legs, our minds our hearts, to all act in concert with one another? How do we trust ourselves with such a great responsibility? The responsibility to truly live, to feel warmth fill our lungs, to make our every childish idea a reality. They’re too big to fail. Can we someday resort to socialized dreams, a world where men in suits take over achieving our wandering passions? Absorbing our unwarranted pain. Equal suffering. Equal pain. Equal joy and anticipation. Perhaps then when all control is lost we can lose the taste of granite in our mouths, let the scars fade and finally find acceptance in broken cries and whimpering voices.

Fear wraps us. Envelopes us. Chokes out the temptation of sunlight. Convinces us that if we’re going to be made hopeless it will be of our own doing. Tells us to prefer a defeat of our own design. Perhaps jumping out of the plane will save some broken bones. Better than feeling the sting of crashing down while we’re in the cockpit. Now we take great care to create the illusion of choice. Choose only to live life in the passive tense. For now we gently drift to sleep. To dream of distant shores within our reach if we’d only take a step off the boat.
The fear of what we don’t understand. The fear of being powerful. We don’t fear being conquered, we fear being the conqueror, we fear being powerful. We fear the earthquakes we create every time we take a step. We fear the fusion and fission found in the beating of our heart. As Nelson Mandela never said “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

With one smile we can turn this blue sky red; turn the hopeless into lovers and dreamers.

With one thought we can turn tyrants into beggars, rewrite the world with justice and peace.

If we can walk just a few feet we can circumscribe the world painting it with every shade of love and kindness.

Right now could be planet Earth’s turning point if we let it. If we stop numbing down our power, numbing the pain of seeing with clear eyes. Forget the adolescent delirium of alcohol and vicodin and remember who we really are.
We have this fear of corniness. Fear that if we ever aim for being really truly good the world will take us for naïve and stupid. We style ourselves to make sure we stay deeply trapped in our own personal faults. Unable to save ourselves from the shelter of style we’ve fashioned ourselves. Make the journey from anti-hero to hero. See a mountain in every valley. Let light fill every darkness of our lives.

When can we remember how it feels to follow our ambition’s every whim? To fight, and truly bleed. There’s no safety in this gentle landing we give ourselves, but still, we lie here, immobile. Unfeeling. Cold. We could shake the world, but instead we choose to drown in a puddle. Too tired. Too scared. As if our neck cannot crane far enough to escape the water.

Lift your head.

Breathe.

Life in the Denouement

The most important things I’ve ever learned in life came from my high school English class. English class was to me the part of the day a teacher could really talk to you. A period when you weren’t treated like some computer chip charged with the task of holding a set of useless numbers and symbols. It was a period of the day when a beautifully poetic, older, vaguely socialist version of yourself prods you to think about the vast extent of humanity for 45 minutes a day. Now, if the aim of school is to make you ready for the workforce I acknowledge English class didn’t give me practical knowledge to that end, but let’s be honest here, if I really intended to have a real job I wouldn’t be writing a blog right now. What English class did teach me was how to think, how to think too much at times, but it taught me how to think nonetheless. It taught me how to express my innermost thoughts. It taught me how to break down on a piece of paper and form the shards of a broken heart into a sort of mosaic. It taught me to love people who stand against everything I believe in. But perhaps one of the most important things I think English class taught me was the standard story arc chart.
It’s a symbol I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with, considering it’s been crammed down each and every one of our throats at some point by a teacher trying to help us understand literature. It resembles a checkmark flipped upside down. It starts on one end with the exposition, the description of the characters and setting. From there it slides into the rising action when the events of the story and the conflict build and build up until the story reaches the climax, the moment that the writer’s own world cannot take the tension anymore and collapses into the denouement, when the events settle back down to the solid ground of the conclusion.
This basic outline pervades every piece of writing ever created. Almost every story relies on this concept of small events building and building until the universe breaks and crumbles into the conclusion. I’ll use It’s a Wonderful Life as an example, as I always do. The story introduces George Bailey to us and shows his life as the tension between his dreams and reality build and build until it reaches crisis levels when an angel comes from out of nowhere to show him the error of his ways. From there it shows the events falling back down into the conclusion as the town rallies to save George. This arc is in every story we tell. It’s even in the songs we sing. Songs build through the first two verses and choruses, leading to the ultimate climax of the bridge, and back down to the chorus and the outro. We find this pattern in music, poetry, literature, movies, theatre, video games and even sex. All our greatest works follow this idea that life is just building up to some climatic revolution that will overthrow all of the problems in the world. It seems only natural to all of us that real life should hold to the same pattern. We cling to this idea that these tribulations are just a build up leading to the moment when all of our problems explode in front of our eyes and point to our final salvation. We have no clue how to live outside of this pattern.
Maybe we’re fools for thinking of life by these terms that we’ve created. Maybe life isn’t such an ordered thing. Maybe the simple truth is that our problems may never lead to a final climax. Maybe we’re meant to spend life sleeping on pins and needles so the coffin is the most comfortable bed we ever can find. Maybe we’re sitting here waiting for a revolution that will never come.
And even if this archetype is real, how are we to know what part of the story we’re at. Are we rising or falling? To me, it’s more comforting to think of this as rising action. That today there is conflict, but somewhere just beyond the sunset salvation is waiting for me. That someday soon a climax will come that’s so gorgeous it will blind us all. My greatest fear though is that maybe all the conflicts in my life are gone. Maybe this is the bed I will sleep in for all eternity. Maybe life has boxed me away in a storage unit and has stopped me from ever finding a true resolution. It’s told me to settle down. To live life in the denouement. Could it be that I’ve made too drastic a turning point already and found myself eternally separated from the promised land.
For now I can only hold on to the idea that maybe our concept of a story is so much smaller than what humanity really is. The truth is we look at life as if they’re one long battle, but the truth is we have a thousand battles to fight. We will have a thousand victories. A thousand defeats. A thousand broken hearts. We’ll have a thousand steam engines to race against. While we fear being trapped in a denouement, we never can be. Life is always rising and falling at the same time. One conflict building onto another, there’s always a war to fight. Easy sleep may be a dream that only comes with blindness. If we keep our eyes open, there always is a war we’re trapped inside. All of us were born with hammers in our hands, and until we die, they’re going to stay there.