Thoughts From The Floating World

It was quite comfortable weather today and seeing as it was my last day off before school starts on Monday and I triple my work load for a hopefully rewarding semester that will, in return, put me in an uneasy state of a debt racking above my head as far as the eye can see, I decided I needed some time to look at the real world. I drove east for an hour and stopped in what appeared to be an empty space where I could let go of my thoughts and let them twist above me like steam rising from a boiling pot.

It felt good, laying there in the grass with an ageless sky above me. My only wish is that the grass would be lush like the fields up north, how it feels so good that you start ripping it out of the ground. Or if it's long, like the horse pastures I would keep my horse in because of his tireless metabolism, you pick one long strand just to gnaw on, as if you could nurse the lush youth out of it. I loved those days; how I'd lay next to an animal that could easily crush me but know that he wouldn't. That bond was sacred; my horse would never hurt me and I would never hurt him. I'd listen to him next to me, vigorously chomping at the grass like it was holding him to the Earth and he needed desperately to find one substantial cluster to grab on to. Sometimes out of curiosity he'd wander over to me, flicking his lip up and down over my face and sniffing, proceeding further when he would get a reaction of laughter out of me because his breath would travel into my ears and tickle a nerve somewhere. When he felt comfortable, he'd lay his head down far enough for me to grab on to his neck and he'd pull me up with a massive strength into an awkward embrace with my arms around his neck and his head down my back.

Sometimes I'd take off my shoes and get on his back, wrapping my feet around his belly, feeling him breath, feeling his great muscles in their movements. And I'd grab his mane, making a glob of his coarse hair the only thing left to cling to before the ground if my legs couldn't hold. I remember how it felt up there, a sort of quiet, trusting thrill. I knew that if he spooked, there would be no way for me to stop him. But something about being one with this huge creature as he grazed peacefully gave me comfort. I loved his company. I never needed the horse shows with their ridiculous decadence and politics that swarmed above the arenas. I only needed the air in that lush grass and the sound of him and the trust between us. We were a part of a bigger world, one greater than the horse shows, the trailers, the cars, the cell phones, all the devices that we added to a simple relationship between two species. It was always a good place to think.

The nostalgia made me think of a Japanese phrase that I have read in a few books, one being the actual title of the book, "an artist of the floating world." How pretty the words were together, maybe even more so in their original tongue. It is as if this "artist" is above our world, not because he or she is any better or any worse, but because it is a place of no organization and a dreamlike picture from which he or she can look down upon the real world occasionally and paint what is seen. I thought about how if you wanted to be a part of that world, you'd give up the weight of this one and glide through the clouds, feeling the water brush against your cheeks. I thought about how it might be filled with moments like that one in the pasture with my horse, feeling like ancient spirits tied together. I thought about how the air would be thin and crisp. I thought about how peace isn't always happiness but still allows room for serenity to fill in.

As the sky began to change I felt the cool atmosphere fall down upon me. I had lost track of time in the midst of my dreaming. I was gliding to the floating world. I had reached the destination where I felt a part of the changes, the growing, the breeze, the ants invisible underneath me and the sun falling on me, feeding us all the life we crave. Perhaps for that moment I was an artist of the floating world. Perhaps, I have never been. Perhaps it is something that is to be earned over tiresome, loathsome years of isolating anguish attempting to turn these heavy thoughts into beautiful words. Attempting to breath. However you get there, to this floating world in its weightlessness, effortless beauty, and childish innocence, I need to find the way.
I need to get home.

"Integrity has no need for rules."

~Albert Camus~

L'Etranger (The Stranger)

"I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

~Albert Camus~

Do you remember what it was like to be a kid? Can you think back that far? Can you put yourself in that place? Imagine the feeling of holding a balloon as a child; how it felt real to you even though a part of you understood that it probably wasn't alive. It existed as a being for you and that was all that mattered. It was the faith that you had in its existence, in the tiny inkling that there was really something that could feel in that balloon, that made it worth something to you. And you would spend days with the balloon, drawing faces on it, running with it, maybe even talk to it and share things that you wouldn't tell anyone else because you felt that the balloon was a real friend to you and had no tricks to pull; Because inside you there was a belief that the balloon was listening and the balloon understood and that somehow the balloon loved you back even if it was just between the two of you, even if these were secret moments.

But a few days would go by and without warning the balloon would begin to deflate. It was happening every second you spent together but you paid no attention to it because to you, balloons never really died. So you made this promise that you would still love it, no matter what. But one week later your mother would come through your room to see this deflated balloon with maybe one bubble of air left and the faces you drew shrunken and smudged. She would tell you to get rid of the balloon, that it wasn't worth keeping anymore. And even though you knew, you would never be able to run with the balloon flying above you anymore and that its smiley face would just be a black splotch and not have the same pleasant air as it once did, it was still worth something to you. It mattered and was still just as important to you as when you first saw it flying high above you with that magical aura of invisible life that it evoked. So you'd let it stay, maybe even distract your mother from ever seeing it.

But a week later she would see it again. She would tell you that it was ridiculous to hang on to it, that it was dead and it was time to throw it away. And even though you knew that it had just become a relic of sorts, pathetically tied to some chair in your bedroom doing nothing but taking up three inches of ground and creating an eyesore, that it was no longer a playmate but just a dear memory you were holding on to for sentimental sake, it still breathed some sort of life in your mind, its blotched ink still smiled for you. And sometimes you thought that maybe you could blow some air into it and it would look a little more like itself again. But you wouldn't because you couldn't run the risk of completely deflating everything that it was, everything that it meant to you. So you left it alone.

Eventually your mother would throw it away while you were at school or at a friend's house and you would come home to find the balloon gone. And because you felt for it even then, you searched through every known trash can in the hope of finding it still there. But it would be gone. Forever. No balloon ever replaced another. Was that so foolish a thing to believe?

Now imagine the balloon as a person.

People give all kinds of advice. They tell you to let go of things because that would be the best thing to do. Because what you had with it didn't mean anything anyway. That it was worthless because it wasn't real. But regardless of the circumstances, of all the actions that speak louder than the words, regardless of the fact that nothing will ever be the same, in your heart you know it would be wrong. Never mind the fact that the walls collapsed around you and that everything in your head has told you how pathetic it is, in the end it was the company you enjoyed. In the end, it was worth something to you, no matter how solitary that feeling was. In the end, you always believed in it even if it tore you apart. That alone is worth more than all the "good" advice in the world. That alone is what makes people better. I believe in the good that there is in people. I always have.

Letters To A Young Poet

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing [...] And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate."

~Rainer Maria Rilke~

"I am awake and feel the ache, but I wish I'd see a field below."

~Regina Spektor~

In Bare Quiet

Dividing the spare rations among us,
we've become more of a phantasm
but separate is our illusion.
nursing on words that linger
sparkling above the trees as the storm sets in.
There are giants out here where this road narrows in
and they'll be watching my pockets for a dime
fools in petty crimes
where the air is warm and they take nothing
crows fly low above the scene
twisting all the in-betweens, awaking to choke you back to sleep.
To pull, by a thread, to hold it there
until the weight sinks in
and they can't be held responsible.