The world sees you in terms of opposites: light and dark, love and hate,
good and evil…
and that is how you learn to see yourself.
You throw yourself from one extreme to another, turning your life into
tragedy performed in the binary rhythm of a farce;
you adopt grand poses and build unbelievable justifications, Don Quixote
fighting conventional windmills…
How precious then is your reflection in the eyes of a child, where
values become unimportant
and you can simply be.
Clowns – the soul of the circus.
Not an act as such – a connection between the worlds.
They engage our empathy and cruelty, provoke kindness and fear…
Coulrophobia is translated as “the fear of clowns”, it means “the fear of self”.
Tell me what makes you laugh and show me who you are.
Their bodies litter our roads:
expected, almost unnoticed, left by the wayside…
not murdered –
killed accidentally by inattention to familiar routes,
too trivial for pathos, too pointless for tragedy.
We live our lives next to each other,
leaving behind little corpses of our selves and of others’,
unseen, extinguished by inattention of habit:
road-kill.
I wonder how much will be left alive
by the end of the day?
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.
