The Urban Soup (Part XVIII)
Long lulls are really watersheds. I have, in an important sense, lost the motivation for this series of posts. The only thing really uniting then was the "friendly city" vibe an adjunct of the the "magnificence of the mundane" mindset. But these days a sinister edge has crept in. 4 a.m. shadows are no longer the deep castings of an impossibly unattainable moon, no longer the reflecting depths of my own inward dive that comes with drunkenness or reverie, or loneliness and pining. My pining is has died away. I live a life of immanence, at least for the moment. and how do you deal when such a part of you is suddenly removed. I am happier, but who created out of happiness? I always created out of joy. And I was rarely happy. What do I find? Joy is more renewable but less extreme. Everyone needs both. but how does this relate to that guiding metaphor, the Urban Soup?
The nighttime shadows lose their extra layers. The dark siudewalk becomes a conveyance to an end? A lover's house? A meeting? The terrifying shadows on my walls at night are no longer the kaleidoscopic messengers of something beyond what I can put here in these lines; they are now maple-leaf pinpricks of bad conscience as I heave dry sobs into my sheets--rarely, but often enough. Streetcar wires support balancing fools: the harlequins in search of their fix, spiralling outwards from intersections in ever-increasing arcs, disregarding the rules of traffic, the rules of walls, the solidiry of fences, the normalizing force of "get off the grass" public spaces. Corners are now home to jesters with bottles becoming Molotov cocktails, burning up the Prague Spring. The whole edifice of midnfulness training is now a means to the end of drawing a crowd on a beach, or of being able to juggle fire to the same end. Curiousity about the trees and birds and leaves, and the gulches and swamps, the highway overpasses and stairwells, and even the farms and babbling brooks and ancient ferns and limply hanging caterpillars now becomes channeled into discourse of "altered states of consciousness"; read: getting jacked, seeing visuals, feeling the walls now becoming a part of you, K-holes, nose fun, blacking out. Dionysios unearthed behind the nouveau-art posters. This is my soup now? Not so! Get grounded! Centered! Whole! Immanent! One! Be an agent! Affirm! Condescend your attention!
The struggle is thus laid out in its confusing entirety. But whereas my dialogues were totally intra-psychic before, now they are between two actual people face to face in the swirling noodles and mint leaves and fat droplets.
Consider: "The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."
The nighttime shadows lose their extra layers. The dark siudewalk becomes a conveyance to an end? A lover's house? A meeting? The terrifying shadows on my walls at night are no longer the kaleidoscopic messengers of something beyond what I can put here in these lines; they are now maple-leaf pinpricks of bad conscience as I heave dry sobs into my sheets--rarely, but often enough. Streetcar wires support balancing fools: the harlequins in search of their fix, spiralling outwards from intersections in ever-increasing arcs, disregarding the rules of traffic, the rules of walls, the solidiry of fences, the normalizing force of "get off the grass" public spaces. Corners are now home to jesters with bottles becoming Molotov cocktails, burning up the Prague Spring. The whole edifice of midnfulness training is now a means to the end of drawing a crowd on a beach, or of being able to juggle fire to the same end. Curiousity about the trees and birds and leaves, and the gulches and swamps, the highway overpasses and stairwells, and even the farms and babbling brooks and ancient ferns and limply hanging caterpillars now becomes channeled into discourse of "altered states of consciousness"; read: getting jacked, seeing visuals, feeling the walls now becoming a part of you, K-holes, nose fun, blacking out. Dionysios unearthed behind the nouveau-art posters. This is my soup now? Not so! Get grounded! Centered! Whole! Immanent! One! Be an agent! Affirm! Condescend your attention!
The struggle is thus laid out in its confusing entirety. But whereas my dialogues were totally intra-psychic before, now they are between two actual people face to face in the swirling noodles and mint leaves and fat droplets.
Consider: "The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."
posted by A. D. at 11:10 PM
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