Little yellow flowers grow on the crumbling bricks of a ruined building.
They dance in the warm spring air, they bring life to stillness and desolation.
Their faint smell mixes with the sour odour of decay and makes it complex:
no longer one note of sadness, but a palette to chose from.
They bring joy to my eyes.
In time, my eyes will turn to dust and – who knows – may be made into bricks
for little yellow flowers to grow on.
I would be glad to repay the favour.
When as a child you look into the world
the magic of reality is there.
The world is fluid,
boundaries – weak,
cause and effect – unclear and remote…
The world is full of patterns to discover,
it’s varied and exciting to behold,
but also frightening…
and you begin
the job of organizing your impressions
in surfaces and colours,
when collected,
they can define the things;
you give them names,
the names are then collected once again
and through another level of abstraction
form into language –
so much more useful
than spots and lines,
but so much more rigid –
the magic’s almost gone…
You look again,
look carefully –
it’s bleeding through the edges,
it’s seeping in through places of confusion,
creating chaos,
giving you the option
to see new things,
to name them, change the rules,
expand the language
and the world we live in…
The spiral turns again.
Advertising is filling up spaces in our lives,
oversaturating them with salient words and images that carry no meaning,
leaving no space for thought and action, only for reaction,
robbing us of time and space.
After all of the years learning to pay attention,
I find that the most useful ability is the ability to ignore.
The mad eye of the sun is rising above suburban rooftops, tinting the morning fog blood-red, twisting bows of the trees – its arteries.
A frightened crow is yelling at it to stop, but it keeps coming – inexorable, implacable, indifferent;
making familiar landscape writhe out of the confines of expectations,
making commuters shudder and hunch their shoulders against the cosmic winds of uncertainty.
Breathe in deep the cold air, let the harsh silhouette imprint on your retinas
– today anything can happen.
Principles and rules are very important, they make you think why breaking them in this case is justifiable.
Thinking requires freedom to question, it is a necessary prerequisite.
Hence, there is no such thing as “right thinking”.
There is either free thinking or no thinking at all.
That is why people who think always end up outside any establishment –
whatever it is attempting to establish.
I’d rather lose an arm and a leg
than be afraid of trying.
After all, limbs and bank accounts
can be fixed,
but a broken spirit is irreparable;
it will haunt you
for the rest of your life –
which would be extremely trying,
indeed.
Our landscapes are haunted
by monuments of the past:
castles and churches –
protection from greed and fear.
New landscapes are coming,
new desolate surfaces – Moon and Mars,
inhabited by curiosity
how will they appear?
