Author: trespasserine

The Man Mountain

Uncategorized

 Ennui colours the sky with the blues. Yesterday’s clouds are gone away and in their place are ridges running up to spurs of mountain rock that when you trace your finger over the ridges the lines are so clean this optical illusion cuts to the bone. You watch, perspective screwed up, as your life blood drips down the bare rock mountainside, nourishing nothing because nothing can ever grow from nothing.

It is the survivor who lives to tell the tale, by by the skin of his teeth. Roped to the past, dangling into the future, he is hanging on there by a thread. He sees in the mountain his father and in his father himself. Though he does not yet see himself in the mountain, not until, that is, he has let enough blood on its ridge top blade to call it his own.

Time is a merciless master of us all. It takes the young and frail and makes them old and toughened. To the in-betweeners who kid themselves that the peak never will never end it makes their wait an anxious one. To the newly old it enfeebles them. These old ones, they dream perchance to sleep, caring not for piffling little things like argument’s sake. What might once have been them against the world is now them within it. Now they care not one iota, for they know that iota is merely another letter in a long alphabet. They have had to wait a lifetime to realise that what is for you will not ignore you. The world is old and knowing, almost as old and knowing as the old themselves. The two are a Celtic knot, their fates entwined.

Time is a unforgiving mistress. She bequeaths all the knowledge in the world then delights in humiliating when piece by piece she takes it back. First it’s a minor detail, but it doesn’t stop there. She starts taking back in chunks, chunks of time and place. She carves out Mount Rushmore only to start erasing the faces on it. First a nose, the parts that stick out. Then the face and with it the years it gave to governance. She schedules for remembrance, which only result in meetings of forgetful minds.

I saw in him the face of the mountain, the same but different. Piling up in pillowed lava were the lines under the eyes. Hollowed were the orbitals into a corrie with clear green water. The cheekbones, for so long concealed under layers unless a chuckle forced them up and out, now overhung like a cornice of ice streaked raspberry red. Shrunken with the seasons and tired of lying standing up, while still the mountain of old it was now eroding. I knew, upon seeing it, I had to gather my things and head closer to the mountain before it disappeared altogether. Instinct tells me there is life in the old dear yet. Old hills contain hard plugs and an igneous-hard will to live on, but for how many more seasons? Life’s a bitch and then you become senescent.

Sitting at distance regarding the range, I think of him growing old. Tracing a line along a ridge whetted by the bluestone sky, I let my blood on the mountain. A small sacrifice for those years of shelter, for that solid ground beneath my feet, for that quiet presence we always orientate back to. Seeing the scree glistening in the folds, the metal ore laid bare by the unremitting nature of the elements, noticing the things that age does to a man, feeling the brevity of all life in spite of his long years, I sense a stirring from deep inside telling me I am me only a few seasons shy of becoming him.

 

 

Arresting the Thief of Time

Uncategorized

Time is a volley of arrows, piercing the outer perimeters of creation. Time is a river, flowing into the cosmic ocean, carrying all in its variable current. Time is the fourth dimension, the space within the up, down, and across. Time is an illusion, a conscious burden carried only by humans at the expense of all other animals. Time is passing. It has been eight months since I saw my father and my brother, who are this moment flying in a Qantas Tardis to be reunited with me. In losing three hours of their lives to be three hours ahead, I gain priceless hours with them, hours felled by time’s arrow, drowned by time’s river, or otherwise never existed in the big cosmic cover-up.

Seeing my brother and father again in but a few hours from now has made me reflect on the passing of time. By the time they wheel those trolleys through the arrivals gate tonight it will be eight months since we were last in each other’s presence. That adds up to a lot of water under different bridges. They in their kingdom prone to flooding, their river was a torrent. Me in this sheikhdom of ephemeral rains, mine was nothing followed by a trickle, a torrent, a trickle, then nothing. Time’s perfect bell curve.

Looking back on it, August seemed to evaporate in a blistering heatwave. September melted onto the end, producing two months in a Swedish sauna with the door jammed closed from the outside. October came and went, punctured as it was by a road trip to a baked layer cake of jutting rock called the Musandam Peninsula. While hardly an odyssey of Homeric proportions, that event at least laid down a temporal marker. The flag fluttering at some indeterminate point on life’s course bore a message for posterity. On it was written,

…October 2015, camping in the fjords and on the high plateau of the Musandam, Sultanate of Oman….

While everyone else was wilting on the Arabian Peninsula, we temperate-seeking individuals were shivering cold next to a fire at 5,000 feet above the heat, above the bullshit expat culture, above even the song of the adhan – that quilt of Quranic verse patched together from the voice of more mosques than you can possibly imagine. Jumping from islet to islet with pointed fingers on an archipelago of stars in a night sky of purest black, their names were the only glint of gold of that Islamic age, gone as the time since I last saw my dear father and brother. They were the only reminders that we had cast ourselves out of the lands of our birth. There’s Deneb, the tail, and Aldebaran, the follower of the cluster Pleiades. And there rising on the eastern elliptic, over Jebel Harem (the mountain of the women) Orion the hunter. The rhinestone buckle on his belt, put there by the great astronomers of Abbasid Baghdad, they called Alnitak, the belt. And there above it, just as the donkey starts to bray somewhere far or near – who can tell – the burning coals of Betelgeuse and Bellatrix. Not everyone can claim to have that experience marking time on their short course to oblivion.

Winter eased gently in and before long the temperature was summer everywhere else that was not the Sahara, or the Australian Outback, or Death Valley. While Europe took a drenching and the US got snowed under in more ways than one, we were sitting on the balcony disbelieving ourselves that this was not too bad after all.

December came and with it new horizons. From the yellow to the green. To Angkor, founded into the world’s largest city, then lost into the jungle, then found again by a French archaeologist armed only with a machete and a vague idea, now lost again in a sense to tourist hordes. Eye-popping Pattaya where bottles disappear into the unlikeliest of quarters. Myanmar followed. Last chance to see an old curiosity before globalisation rehashes it into another mass-produced trinket worth hanging a cut-price label on.

January saw a return to the desert. The rains had fallen, the humidity crashed, and suddenly we could all see clearly again. The dust and the grime had been cleansed from the windows of our apartments and our minds. Now we could see just how many tankers lay anchored offshore. The mountains were no longer a mirage, but that was about as far as clarity got. Time continued to obfuscate judgment, to defy youthful hopes. Still the doubts weighed heavily on the lingering notion that though time was passing quicker than ever, our sense of alacrity was not quite up to speed. While it was being stretched and pulled asunder, turning days into weeks, I was feeling as lugubrious as I had ever felt. While it was being compressed and choked, turning months into minutes, I was feeling manic helplessness on a runaway train. I lumbered and lurched like a bi-polar dog on a leash he can’t decide is short or extendable.

The pathos bit hard. Time called time on me for a while. These were what some referred to as the mid-term blues, and others the dog days. I preferred to compare them to neither blue nor dogs. Blue for me is that break in the clouds we from the overcast north consider heaven sent. And dogs are friends you need to consider indispensable when the alternative is talking to the wall.

The mood recession of early 2016 didn’t quite become a full-blown depression. It was salvaged by a stern recovery brought about through a surge in consumer confidence. Once again, investors were willing to risk on return, and time’s borrowers were willing to chance it on a reasonable APR. The confidence came in knowing that all who comprehend the weird passing of time both borrow from it and invest into it. Knowing that made dealing with time’s funny fluid dynamics easier.

When it wasn’t spinning out of control, it was juddering to a halt. Confounding all who try to swim against it, sweeping away those who go with it, time bit me hardest here in a land where there are no seasons, no discernible way of measuring the metrics of time. Yet through it all, I can rise above it here and now and let it be known that you might have placed much temporal distance between my brother, my father and me, but you, Old Father Time, never managed to diminish the love I have for them. You may have even done me a favour by revealing a better, kinder and more gentler version of yourself to us over the coming days.

Supervolcanic Blackhole

Uncategorized

What in the world is going on in this world? While it spins around without much sign of slowing down, the little self-appointed beings it spawned from a soup of mitochondrial DNA in some primordial rock pool gear up for the end of days in a dizzying headf**k of joyless Jihadism, treeless technoscape and future uncertain.

How did we come to be in the state we are in today? They say that when the Lake Toba supervolcano erupted on the island of Sumatra 76,000 years ago, our numbers crashed to a mere handful. Those few good men and women, hardy hunter-gatherers in tribes unswayed by a little thing called disaster, survived a die back under epic skies choked with a change in chemistry. So how did we go from a few thousand living under the ward rules of Matron Nature – she of the curfew who ordered ‘Lights off ’ by 7pm – to fourteen billion feet and galloping? To use the parlance of the new age: W.T.F.?

It’s all down to the night lights. You cannot go practically overnight from tallow candles and oil lamps that barely bite into the darkness to an interconnected grid that delivers so much generated light to so many planetary places that the earth is inviting an invasion of the body snatchers. We are sleepless in everywhere but Seattle. Hello, universe? Can you see me now?

The lights are on, alright, but nobody upon nobody is home. Well, actually, there are so many of us home we’re positively busting down the door. In those hearts that self-combust in a mass suicide pyre, that’s where we are. It’s the absence of mind that is cause for concern. Social and political psychiatrists prepare to deploy….

Brussels bombed under the watchful nose of the EU/UN/NATO and any other shady acronym you can fit together. Does this bring new gag fodder to a generation of comedians hungry for explosive material? Three men walk into an airport…. Boom, boom. The time bomb is ticking until another atrocity is committed by young radicals seeking redemption, but not the kind that either Jesus or Bob Marley advocated. Dressed for dystopia like the Village People in the their figure-hugging vests, when it goes off – and you’ll know about it when it does – their redemption will send shock waves through the immediate vicinity. When the pieces are gathered up for a religious burial, the flesh&bone collectors will know at least they’ve been honest in their cause, for those martyrs will be wearing their hearts quite literally on their sleeves. Not that their sleeves will be attached at the elbow.

Why did the Toba supervolcano leave a few of us as a human seed bank? It’s all wrong. Since when did martyrs feel the need to make martyrs of those standing next to them when they never even stopped first to introduce themselves? And to call them nihilists. At least if they believed in nothing, as true nihilists do, they wouldn’t bother getting out of bed to take up arms and bomb belts in the cause of making a good impression on God (like He hasn’t enough sorting to do as it is).

A black man about to leave a White House who has done more to decorate the walls wise than any other since the president in the wheelchair who taught the world to get on its feet again. Oh, yes, that White House, HQ of our last, best hope. Its Oval Office draws all manner of term-appointed residents, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Any schmuck with money  can run for the Oval Office but it takes a special kind of schmuck to throw his hat into the Republican Party ring, thus leaving the hair on his head quite as ridiculous as the man himself. With Obama exiting stage left, the next to enter stage right might be a different kind of player, specifically the type that would mate with his offspring if only she wasn’t so inconveniently chipped off the old block. Then again, America can’t have lost the plot to the extent of letting in a juggler-cum-clown with incest in his balls, surely?

Brexit, schmexit. Dominoes topple, Brexit onto Frexit, Frexit onto Tragix. Rome sacked by itself. When finally we Europeans, for the most part, are getting along like a tribe on fire, we toy with the idea of tearing apart the family. And why? Because, Daddy EU Commissioner, you’re cramping my style. We’re through. I need to find myself, my lost identity. Deep down I’ve always hated you. With you bearing down my neck I’ll never achieve the…self-actualization…I so deserve. I’ll expect a favourable settlement, of course. Forget Tolstoy. He can’t help you now. It’s Freud’s narcissism of minor differences we need turn to, all over again. That’s what’s fuelling it. Narcissism, and history’s habit of repeating on itself. 476AD, 1618AD, 1914AD, 2016AD, 1812 Overture. Those among us who don’t think a well-timed terrorist atrocity won’t be the tail that wags the dog in the referendum stakes. Lest we forget, lest we forget.

History repeating itself first as tragedy, second as farce. It really is. If it wasn’t so farcical it would be tragic. Humanity busy making mountains of PVC garbage out of molehills of common sense, common sense that reads: you cannot keep trashing the house and still expect the landlord to renew your lease. Baby green turtles garrotted by a plastic ring from a six-pack tossed away in Botany Bay, washed up in Valparaiso, Chile. 100,000,000 sea creatures killed by plastic and chemical effluent each year. Primary forest culled to make way for palm oil to make the food that makes industry penny-wise and fat consumers pound foolish.

There’s one born every minute, but is this the best moment in history to be living? You cannot be looking up at the stars in the galactic medium when half the world is nose down in Samsung’s Galaxy at the stars of the social medium. We’re looking at someone else looking at someone else looking at someone else; mocking, pitying, ridiculing them, never a kind word spoken in jest. There are more filmmakers than there are films worth filming. There is real loving to be had but it’s always the guy next door who’s the one getting it. At least the Band plays on with Bob Dylan doing the freewheelin’. There has to be some redemption in that, still none that our Jihadi Joes would ever appreciate.

What in the world is going on in a world going off? And what would our proto-parents, who survived the Toba supervolcano of 76,000BC, make of it?