Sculpting Stone Giants

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.

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.

Impossible?

Pigeons, their beady orange eyes stare inside the window with furtive, curious looks. Their proud breasts ringed in feathers of purple and green, reflecting the early morning sunlight. Perched on the weather beaten window sill, they silently stretch themselves and ruffle their feathers. Their teal blue bodies a welcome splash of color amid the dreary background of dull, splotched building panes which are in dire need of cleaning.

I sit at my workstation in the partial darkness before the first of my colleagues arrive, the only bulbs on in the office space shining above me. The hour is premature as I try to spill out the words on an endless document on my laptop; my mind imagining, reminiscing, aching, almost retching to grasp the exact thoughts and words, trying to do justice. Around me is darkness, I am in an ocean of my own mind, drowning in my own consciousness.

It is night time. I am in my room and the day is almost over. Something continues to tick inside me, the morning’s desperate struggle at reminiscing and painting words on a canvas yielded something. Hope. The lights in the office space switched on one by one, the people started filing in, and the work started piling up. I clung on to the little hope I had conjured from seemingly thin air. The challenges mounted, task after email after meeting after presentation in waves charging at the hope I set ablaze in my heart. The fire dimmed, it flamed again as the gales thawed, it dimmed once more. I returned home, to comforting company. They don’t know, and I can’t speak but they unknowingly lull the bruises, soothe the aching and throw a few more torches to the flame. It is night time, and I warm up to the flame and churn out a stream of words.

It is a Saturday afternoon, and I decide I need a change of setting. I drift into place on a comfortable wooden chair with my bottom firmly pressed on a cushion. Music flows through my headphones, as I take in the ambiance of the small café, observing others for a moment as they work, study, chat and discuss. The music keeps the energy running, as I shift gears. I go blind to those around me, driving on my own highway, my head in my laptop screen. The thoughts come as signs on the roadside, and I faithfully follow the directions, the road stretching for miles before me, melting into the horizon. I keep driving to the melody of music, the notes giving me company on the road trip. My playlist ends, and my car starts drifting off the highway, my eyelids drooping. I order coffee… and brownies, to keep the fire going.

It is Sunday morning. The sun is yet to rise and the biting winter cold gnaws at my freezing toes in bed. I am scared of failure, it springs me out of bed. I struggle to warm up to the fading embers from last night’s flames. My heart wakes up as I shuffle out into the living room and open the window blinds, trying to re-ignite the flames, to keep the fire going in the cold. In the darkness, my imagination takes shape before my eyes, the thoughts darting around the living room like wild doe as I struggle to catch them on to paper. Golden rays filter in through the window blinds, stupefying the doe as they jump about. I catch them and finally get my thoughts flowing. The living room grows brighter as the minutes pass, and the warmth starts to come back again. My parents are bemused when they discover me up so early, but they don’t know since when.

I don’t want to become a phantom caught in my own limbo. I decide to meet some friends, to socialize per se. I need a change of setting, I feel. We go out for lunch, and talk about the world. They don’t know, and I dare not speak but I collect some fuel wood for the fire, to keep it going in the darkness of the night. One of them asks me, he knows. The wild doe jump across the highway as I drive through the ocean of my thoughts, the hope sparking up once more. I dare not answer there; let’s watch the movie for now, I say. The show ends, we discuss the antics of the characters, the sheer dastardliness of the villain, and laugh our way out of the theater. I pocket the hope like a thief and disappear back to my room. I burn through the firewood all evening, challenging the tempests of winter outside, the cold zephyr to breach my stores. I retire in triumph, confident of the dancing flames as they lick the stars in the night sky.

I wake up cold, the embers but a fading glow, jolting me up as I sleepily rouse myself. I struggle in the zephyr’s icy waste, warming my fingers as they strike at the keyboard in the cold office. I am the sole soul on the floor, the fool who comes way too early. The fool sitting in a halo of light in the corner near the window, they say. I give up as the fire goes out, my head in my hands. I hear a peck… Peck, peck, pecking at the window.  Yellow, beady eyes are looking inside the window as a head shifts from side to side in spontaneous bursts of motion. The winter bellows in ferocity outside, the faded, cloth awnings from the window panes flowing in the freezing wind, but the beak continues pecking. I shift in my seat to stare outside, the pigeon’s neck flashing in brilliant greens and purples. For a moment, our eyes meet. A flutter of wings echoes in the somber silence of the empty office, an azure angel taking off in the morning chill.

I turn back to face the endless ocean ahead. Something else lights up inside, something that burns without the firewood. It’s warmer than hope, it’s brighter than the sun. Something glows inside, something that keeps me chasing after the impossible.  

105th day of the climb... The summit is beautiful; the fall, treacherous!

An Idea Grown in Exile

It has been many long months, and how I have longed to fill this space of mine. I had easy excuses at the start as I was extremely busy, loaded with assignments, reports and presentations to the point that I had to skip a night of sleep completely, on two occasions. However, I went on to visit Dubai with my Retail Management class after the end of term and that left me with loads of thoughts which I could pour out here. However, I chose not to. The trip left me with many mixed and conflicting emotions, which I often cannot describe myself.

After I returned, my mind became a shell. Empty, devoid of thought! It was just this state in which I could not write at all. Perhaps I will discuss these past four months on a separate occasion, but now I must move on to the real purpose of this post, which has also, more or less, been the purpose of my blog. In the later half of this period, void of writing, I really wanted my next post to be a story and not some log about myself and my obsessions. Many ideas came and went, one of them however, has grown in my mind and I am working on it. However, I feel that it will become excessively long, and may be delayed by some more weeks, maybe months (I really hope not..) before it's complete. But I wish to post this little (read "puny") excerpt that charts the beginning of what I feel is one of my better ideas to date. Hopefully, when you next get to read this it will be part of a much larger plot that will capture your fancy. Let me know your thoughts... gibberish? promising? etc.

*Clip clop, clip clop* the sound of horse hooves resonated loudly in my left ear which was glued to the floor. That is the sound I hear every time I stretch my memory back the farthest I can, the very beginning. *Clip clop, clip clop* it continues, always haunting me, playing at the edge of time itself. *Clip clop, clip clop* the horses went, marching in rhythmic fashion, as if to establish a state of orderliness which signified authority. An authority that dictated that what I remembered from then on was to be the only truth of my life, what I was, and what I was ever going to be.

*Clip clop, clip clop* the sound of their hooves shot like the strokes of a blacksmith’s hammer on my head, magnifying the pain in my skull. As the hammer fell harder, it broke the rhythmic charm of the marching horses, forcing me into a state of uneasy consciousness with my eyes still shut. Still in terrible pain, I tried to gather the rest of my senses to get a bearing on where I was. I rested on my stomach with my left cheek plastered firmly on a moving floor. The side of my face touching the floor felt numb; I tried to find my hands in the overwhelming void and felt them move somewhere above my head. My fingers touched some moist hay and a cold, metallic surface.

*Clip clop, clip clop* the horses trotted on ever so passively, that I felt my world go into a blur of black and white. I felt a breeze flowing on my face, which drew away some of the numbness. With my eyes still shut, I tried to form a more complete picture of my surroundings. In my state of limbo, I could feel myself moving as the horses marched on behind my back, and rocked whatever was carrying me, to and fro. The air was cold, and I could feel no light from behind my still closed eyes. I tried to stretch my legs, but cold metal bars prevented my feet from going any further. Although alarmed, I rested my bare feet on the cold bars to bring some feeling back into them. A loud neigh from a horse suddenly raised my senses but I still kept my eyes wired shut, and desperately wished for some answers to present themselves when I opened them.

Stuck on a Ship

This post is quite unexpected in that it was never meant to be blogged about. For my second post, I wanted to put up a story I have been working on for the past week. But it turns out that I have lost my way again, though not as badly. For starters, I can just tell you that this story is set to take place on a sea vessel and I have already placed my protagonist on the ship's deck.

Now the trouble is that I have little knowledge of layouts of huge ships, and I need to form some accurate blueprints in my head to move myself around, along with my protagonist. Dear ol' Google has been of some help and I am more familiar with certain terms, practices and ships now than before. But it has been frustrating work so far, and I still have not acquired some knowledge that I desperately seek. Perhaps I am not searching for the right terms as I am not well-versed in sailor lore.

This search and seek practice of the past few days has opened my eyes to a new kind of irony: my dependence on facts and research to form the support columns of my imagination. Imagination is supposed to be an all-powerful weapon that can define new frontiers. However, it is something that can neither exist nor develop on its own.

For a powerful imagination, one must be open-minded and absorb the lessons of their surroundings. Even for an imaginary setting where the imaginaut has defined surroundings completely other-worldly and alien to what is known to us, they form roots out of what they gained from their own experiences on the real earth. Wonka's great glass elevator may not have the same characteristics as our normal elevators, yet it was imagined from the foundation of a normal elevator of which the esteemed imaginaut Roald Dahl was aware of. Tolkien was a skillful linguist and used that knowledge to create languages to support Middle-Earth. He also used his appreciation for the wide-open spaces in England, where he lived, to gain inspiration to conjure the Shire.

Right now, I may have the imaginary power and the inspiration to write my story but I lack the knowledge to do so. I can still define the boundaries of my own ship, the like of which has never been made before, but I believe that will not connect my audience too well with the setting. The artificial layout will need to be polished and waxed too well, and the depth of characters will need to be quite intense to delusion the reader into believing that those walls can really exist. After all, Khaled Hosseini re-imagined a true Afghanistan that gave him the power to connect well with his readers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle placed Detective Holmes in London so well that his statue actually graces Baker Street today. And I have simply not reached that level of experience as an imaginaut yet.

So I am afraid that unless I find some true knowledge about sea travel which I need, I cannot proceed with my sea tale. It's not that difficult, but will need some time and more effort on my part. I think I need to go to the Karachi Port and have a tour of a huge cargo ship myself. And if any of you are guessing as to what the story is about, well, it's not that hard to guess and the theme may be predictable but not in the way you imagine it. For now, I shall leave my protagonist to stand at the ship's deck on their own until I can create the world for him to move about in.