How do you carve the soul of a soul-less stone beast?
How do you step into the heart of a heartless giant?
You cannot fit into his shoes, they are too big and heavy for you. You are not heartless. You try in vain to plot his motives: why would he do the things he has done? A stroke of the paintbrush in an imaginaut's mind, a canvas stretching from horizon to endless horizon. The horizons that cannot fit a giant.
You sit in your chair and try to imagine your way out. To rise out of the dreamscapes you've been trying to create. A movie about dreams within dreams comes to mind. You yearn for the darkness, but you fear it too. What if you get hopelessly lost? Too lost to find
your way back to the surface of sanity?
But were you ever sane?
You are pacing endlessly in your room in the light of dawn, cursing yourself that you are late to start the day. The shade of night has lifted, but the day is not yet here. You want to make the best of both worlds, so you can connect worlds. To fill the shoes of a giant. You keep trying to make him speak, fill speech bubbles with dialogue in an empty mass of stony flesh. But it is artifical. There is no life in your creation, and your attempts at resuscitation have failed.
Soul-less giants cannot live in the light of the sun.
You sit down again in the darkness of the night, and turn off the lights. All you can see now is the road of destruction your beast has plowed through your narrative. But why would he do that? It does not make sense. You picture the beast in the hazy distance, a mutated and fragmented piece of your imagination.
You wish it were real.
You decide to depart for a walk in the dark. You wish you had a blindfold, but all you can dig out are headphones. They will have to do.
You've never had drugs before but you suddenly know how it feels to get high. Self-conjuring spells of madness. The neighbors watching from their windows don't understand why a shadowy figure walks up and down one street, round one corner and back. Down one street, up another. In circles, rectangles, skips and diagonals. Chiseling, sculpting, painting, traversing, charting... A world all on its own. Almost epileptic fits of ecstasy.
You size up the beast as your world opens up. Those men at the end of the street will do, and you try crushing them between your fingers. Three fingers in front of your eye to match the guy fifty feet away. You want to scale up the beast a little bigger. As big as a mountain you say. You try to pound him with one finger, and you take the trees behind him with two fingers.
He seems large enough now. Too large for you to fit into his shoes. You are content at carving him from the outside instead, trying to look into his red slits of eyes, which are lost somewhere high, high above the tallest apartment buildings around you. His stony head has blotted out the waxing moon.
Your spell is abruptly broken as you hear a man over the blaring instrumental scores playing through your headphones. He is asking for directions and you discover that you are not irritated, but in an elevated state of sharing neighborly spirit. He asks you where one gate leads, instead you give him the bearings on what lies beyond all three exits of the apartment complex. You plug the music right back in and face your dead creation once more, down an alley, gazing up at the sky and into his eyes. The lifeless pupils of a new Frankenstein's monster.
The car whizzing past you has no chance of making it past his protruding toe. You suddenly know how he will treat the world around him. From the outside, you decide that you don't need to understand everything he has done. He is one who inspires fear and that is explanation enough. You have stood your ground against the beast and discovered his ultimate weapon. The core emotion that rests in the heartless cavity of his breast.
Suddenly, you feel much more alive. Mad and alive in the darkness. A mad man in love with his own designs, too lost in his world to care what the people walking past him think. You believe you can make the giant curl up on the side of a mountain to sleep, breaking off a slope as a blanket. He is a glacier of rock, lost in the clouds.
He is coming to life.
The kid grazing past you on his bicycle carries with him a gust of wind. You realize you are feeling hot on a relaxingly cool evening. You have been flying, running and talking loudly to yourself without hearing your own voice when no one was looking. There are lights, falling shadows of trees. China randomly comes to your mind, but maybe that's because of the chink in the music in your headphones. But you suddenly want to fly over Jerusalem. Not today but back in the 12th century. And stop somewhere in the streets of that old city for a rest in the shade. You spot a beautiful ginger-furred kitten on the sidewalk instead, and you sit down to stroke her, rising out of your inebriated self.
You have just created your soul-less beast. But you are all soul, all heart. You are in love and wish you had hung on to that kitten.
How do you step into the heart of a heartless giant?
You cannot fit into his shoes, they are too big and heavy for you. You are not heartless. You try in vain to plot his motives: why would he do the things he has done? A stroke of the paintbrush in an imaginaut's mind, a canvas stretching from horizon to endless horizon. The horizons that cannot fit a giant.
You sit in your chair and try to imagine your way out. To rise out of the dreamscapes you've been trying to create. A movie about dreams within dreams comes to mind. You yearn for the darkness, but you fear it too. What if you get hopelessly lost? Too lost to find
your way back to the surface of sanity?
But were you ever sane?
You are pacing endlessly in your room in the light of dawn, cursing yourself that you are late to start the day. The shade of night has lifted, but the day is not yet here. You want to make the best of both worlds, so you can connect worlds. To fill the shoes of a giant. You keep trying to make him speak, fill speech bubbles with dialogue in an empty mass of stony flesh. But it is artifical. There is no life in your creation, and your attempts at resuscitation have failed.
Soul-less giants cannot live in the light of the sun.
You sit down again in the darkness of the night, and turn off the lights. All you can see now is the road of destruction your beast has plowed through your narrative. But why would he do that? It does not make sense. You picture the beast in the hazy distance, a mutated and fragmented piece of your imagination.
You wish it were real.
You decide to depart for a walk in the dark. You wish you had a blindfold, but all you can dig out are headphones. They will have to do.
You've never had drugs before but you suddenly know how it feels to get high. Self-conjuring spells of madness. The neighbors watching from their windows don't understand why a shadowy figure walks up and down one street, round one corner and back. Down one street, up another. In circles, rectangles, skips and diagonals. Chiseling, sculpting, painting, traversing, charting... A world all on its own. Almost epileptic fits of ecstasy.
You size up the beast as your world opens up. Those men at the end of the street will do, and you try crushing them between your fingers. Three fingers in front of your eye to match the guy fifty feet away. You want to scale up the beast a little bigger. As big as a mountain you say. You try to pound him with one finger, and you take the trees behind him with two fingers.
He seems large enough now. Too large for you to fit into his shoes. You are content at carving him from the outside instead, trying to look into his red slits of eyes, which are lost somewhere high, high above the tallest apartment buildings around you. His stony head has blotted out the waxing moon.
Your spell is abruptly broken as you hear a man over the blaring instrumental scores playing through your headphones. He is asking for directions and you discover that you are not irritated, but in an elevated state of sharing neighborly spirit. He asks you where one gate leads, instead you give him the bearings on what lies beyond all three exits of the apartment complex. You plug the music right back in and face your dead creation once more, down an alley, gazing up at the sky and into his eyes. The lifeless pupils of a new Frankenstein's monster.
The car whizzing past you has no chance of making it past his protruding toe. You suddenly know how he will treat the world around him. From the outside, you decide that you don't need to understand everything he has done. He is one who inspires fear and that is explanation enough. You have stood your ground against the beast and discovered his ultimate weapon. The core emotion that rests in the heartless cavity of his breast.
Suddenly, you feel much more alive. Mad and alive in the darkness. A mad man in love with his own designs, too lost in his world to care what the people walking past him think. You believe you can make the giant curl up on the side of a mountain to sleep, breaking off a slope as a blanket. He is a glacier of rock, lost in the clouds.
He is coming to life.
 |
| Pleasant neighbors |
The kid grazing past you on his bicycle carries with him a gust of wind. You realize you are feeling hot on a relaxingly cool evening. You have been flying, running and talking loudly to yourself without hearing your own voice when no one was looking. There are lights, falling shadows of trees. China randomly comes to your mind, but maybe that's because of the chink in the music in your headphones. But you suddenly want to fly over Jerusalem. Not today but back in the 12th century. And stop somewhere in the streets of that old city for a rest in the shade. You spot a beautiful ginger-furred kitten on the sidewalk instead, and you sit down to stroke her, rising out of your inebriated self.
You have just created your soul-less beast. But you are all soul, all heart. You are in love and wish you had hung on to that kitten.
