Life Not Lived

I've imagined walking into many, many rooms: up stairs and down stairs, into clean furnishings and into piles of messes, into nervous wrecks and into smoke-filled basements, into moral reckonings on balustrades and inconsequential time kills, into missions of mercy for the elderly and into fiery political cataclysms (memorialized by artists painting for posterity), into plushness of bean-bag chairs and into the controleld tenderness of rare wood exuding rare soporific scents, into open windowed spaces overlooking vistas of conifers and cacti and barenness, overlooking jagged peaks and tree lines and lakes, overlooking bustling pedestrian crossings and fallow transit corridors, overlooking mazes of streetcar wires and barometric lights of the peaks of modern cosmopolises, overlooking the darkness of a perfect country evening punctuated only by swarms of fireflies tracing their arabesques against the walls of the barn; by the same token I've imagined many basements: many windowless rooms rotting in their own heavy gases and smoky dreams: the opiated gathering-places where men sleep on wooden benches four high along the walls, the nightclubs hewn out of meat packing plants with their infectious hooks still jingling to the driving dance beat, the melting faces of old men in a brown joint with a bar in the corner telling each other sordid tales, rude full-scale jokes or whispers of revolution, windowless rooms where teens fornicate on Japanese-style bed cushions, windowless rooms bearing the full causal story of all the alcohol and opium snuffed there, cold basements furnishing the shivering masses with the need to find anyone with a warm body, any voluptuary, any odalisque, basements with tree-like runs in the plaster or star-like rips in the wallpaper, basements with candles laid out and the shadows vying with each other for dominance of walls, basements where goats are sacrificed, basements where human eye sockets fall into the "eternal shadow", basements where faces flit like imps against the backdrop of haze: grey haze or bluish haze, basements lit up with monochromatic lights playing their games with our rods and cones, basements cordoned off by the police after a prticularly smoky night; I've imagined walking up stairs: stairs covered with half-torn posters proclaiming bands and ideologies and revolutionary new treatments, feeling elated and tired and anxious all at different times, stumbling sometimes against the creaking paltforms, boxing my ears sometimes to stop the buzzing in my eardrums courtesy of the bass through the terrorized wall, wailing for company to stop because the strobe lights are playing havoc with my mind, stopping and shuddering or falling making creaks the entire time until the see-through door comes into vision; alternately: stumbling drunk from the same stairs, feeling the repulsion of air filled too much with spittle and smoke and ashes of every sacramantal urn that was dropped in the hallway above, feeling the need for the cold November street, running from the pounding under the stairs and the complaints above them, running from the posters extolling the virtues of bands like "Tit Fuck me Jesus", or causes. So it went, that a life imagined and landscapes explored in my head forced me into a life of sedentary listening, intent ears perked up at every mention of fodder for my combining faculties, making sure to pick up as much as I can and bear it into short stories, into epigrams, into aphorisms, into novellas and future novels, into weblogs, into forum posts, into advice for adolescents and advice for those exaclty like me, advice for the opinionated who would not listen but managed to consistently exact their poud of flesh.

(It's Nietzsche sweeps week, quote-wise.)

Consider: "All names of good and evil are parables: they do not define, they merely hint. A fool is he who wants knowledge of them!"