Postcards from Purgatory

1st Postcard2nd Postcard

The universe of the surreal no longer comes to us through Rene Magritte's imagery of hypothetical subconscious symbolisms or through the pen of Andre Breton.
It has spilled over into the world at large.
It has left the dream-world for the conscious one.
And what is the difference? If the real and the surreal have become indistinguishable then what does fact matter, or action, or truth, or inertia?
All is malleable and nothing matters.

The first casualty is that of severity.
In a culture where not even the self is taken seriously, everything loses weight and gravity becomes a myth.
Imponderable realties come to be and all sense of permanence and reliability vanishes along with interest.
Cynicism is the lovechild of extreme scepticism, where no single thing has value unless it fits into a self-created personal reality where nothing external is allowed to disturb its internal harmony and tranquillity.
But reason wasn't meant for exploring the manifestations of its own subjectivity.
It was meant to create subjectivity through sensual elucidation and with it build strategies and castles of power, to withstand the unperceived objective.
When it was forced to turn on itself, due to the absence of creative frontiers, it became a cannibalistic entity, a self-effacing glutton.

The second casualty is that of energy.
In a jaded muted world, referential second-hand experiences are just as reliable as any other.
War, violence, brutality, love, sex, adventure could all be explored while lying on ones back reading books of fiction/non-fiction or watching screens of imagery or listening to a tune.
Acumen built on minimal effort; bought in used bookstores, in DVD outlets and corner magazine stands.

The experience of battle is shared through camera lenses and the voyeur convinces himself that he is just as worthy of expressing the terror and euphoria of combat as anyone that was actually there.
The deconstruction of authority begins with the absorption of distinction into a multiplicity of voyeuristic co-experiencing.
One mans involvement becomes everyone's involvement and action/adventure another product to be distributed and consumed.
We no longer exist, we observe existence.
The hero of the quest loses his face and turns into a 3-D character in an interactive simulation; he becomes a detachable prosthesis that is worn by all so that the cellular memory of the limb is downloaded into a communal trough.

But the totality of the experience is lost through such an appreciation by proxy.
In place of what is lost, the parts are severed from the main body and are nit-picked with surgical precision and scanned with microscopic accuracy.
The medium focuses on fractions and disregards the whole; frozen images, camera angles, sound-bites, micro-bites, microphones, micro-technology, as the miniaturization of the real distracts the senses from the entirety of nothingness.
In pornography the essence of the sexual act is misplaced in the conglomeration of images of body parts, writhing and sweating. The spectator is a participant and an observer at the same time and the event is assimilated into the consciousness, as if it had been in reality.

That's when everyone becomes the idol, everyone turns into the leading man and the event loses its magic.

But what happens to these doppelgangers of surrealism?
They speak with the commanding certainty and ostentatious power of the unaware and on their heads, the quintessential bowler hat to draw the eye away from their faceless craniums.

Yours truly, from the deserts of anonymity,
Wanderer


3rd Postcard 4th Postcard

I wrestled with the devil again tonight and, like always, I was badly beat.
He knows all of my moves, by now, and he always manages to pin me with a clever promise and a dexterous threat.
It's my firmness that lets me down; my mass.
But all is not lost.
In his hands I have learned much about myself and I have seen the world as it is.

Through defeat I've become ethereal, losing substance with every fall.
I've become skeletal.
He now struggles to hold my will and gets winded trying to find a part of me to exploit, a part of me that still cares, a part of me to manipulate, as he once did so easily.

In the race of the everyday I have lost all concept of solidity. Objects drift through my fingers and pass through my mind without touching me.
I am like a fog.
Nothing is mine and I belong to nothing.
This is becoming more and more disconcerting; it confronts the essence of my primitive being.

I danced with the devil again tonight and, like always, he was the lead.
Floating through the moonlight landscapes, a nightingale played a note and I struggled to find a rhythm.
Dark images that once made me gasp now only fill me with longing for the world I left behind.
This too is slowly draining out of me.
My tears: crystal dewdrops forming on luscious canopies and dropping on the thirsty soils of continuous recurrence.

These silly creatures I called my kind, now look so absurd to me; penises and vaginas fighting for a place in a vast bacchanal, ******* their way out of meaninglessness.
This is called life.
A fool's existence.
Mucus filled corpses governed by chemical necessity, spewing excrement, releasing gases, gushing liquids from every orifice.
Then with ridiculous appendages and soft grey-matter they search for eternity, for nobility, for truth, for understanding so as to become more than animated dirt; a slow decay of cadavers obscuring the stench with perfumes, deodorants and disinfectants.
I laugh to stop myself from gagging.
Consciousness, as it is defined, is an orgy of engorged testicles and ovulating ovaries; every meeting a ****-fest to weather mortality.

Cocks, pussies, tits and asses sum up humanity and an orgasmic spasm defines mankind's creations; all that you see are remnants of multiple ejaculations splattered against emptiness, excrement of desire.

Priapus should be erected in every town square as a symbol of our real spiritualism.
Every other idol has been but a variation of the original.

Holy trinities representing mans triangular balance: father/son/holy spirit, mind/psyche/body, life/becoming/death, justice system/government/the people, instinct/emotion/intellect, male/sex/female, attraction/apathy/repulsion, good/neutral/evil, true/doubt/false, pleasure/contentment/pain, love/indifference/hate, master/power/slave, past/present/future, material/ethereal/immaterial, here/movement/there and so on...
A fitting heritage for those to come…. and come… and come….

I sang with the devil again tonight and, like always, he drowned out my feeble chant with a guttural bellow that stirred the dead.
The tune reached a deafening climax before it tumbled into a silent murmur of discontentment.
A splenetic lament for those exiled from the kingdom and condemned to build their own or perish trying to, a dirge of indignation towards a God that had to pay for His vanity.

Then I realized that I was in the company of a friend and not a vile fiend as I was taught to believe.

And there, behind the singing fallen angel, stood my father.
He smiled at me like he had rarely done when still alive. His brow uncharacteristically soft and his glance full of gentle mirth.
He knew what I will soon find out on my own.

"This world was not meant for eyes like ours. They see too much and can tolerate so little of it." I heard him say.
"Behind every idol we see a fraud and behind every word we hear the motive."

"How can I make myself blind to it without losing the magnificence, how do I become deaf to it without losing the song?" I wondered.

"This flesh was not meant for fires like these. It feels too much and the spirit warps in the blaze.' he went on, ignoring my plea.
"The most impressionable materials must be protected from such harsh environments or else they solidify into twisted shapes and lose their beauty and flowing glee."

"How can I find the balance between my blazing senses and my cooling mind, how do I absorb the world without letting it soil me?" I asked.
There was no answer.

Yours truly, from the shores of Styx,
Wanderer


5th Postcard

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Eloisa to Abelard6th Postcard

There can be no more joyous day, for the troubled traveler, than after the long leg of a demanding trek has ended and he focuses his sight upon a new horizon.
The bruises and cicatrices, that mark his hide, are reminders of the road left behind and symbols of struggles to be worn proudly like war medals; each attached, through memory, to a battle that was survived and proof of what was experienced and endured.

There need not be bragging, no verbal testimonial presented, no admission of guilt; the body wears its past like a garment.
Each blemish, each scab, each callous, each fading cut is a visual memorial of individual history and those inner wounds, that cannot be readily perceived, find their way to the surface through glances, smells and movements, through words, postures and mannerisms, through subtle details of action and linguistic particulars.
A mans physical shell is a narration of his past, a moving script of credentials; everything that has touched him has left the stigmata of his perseverance.
It is this that connects the multiplicity of individuations and encompasses them in a singular being, where sometimes who someone is and who someone was bear little resemblance to each other. Two strangers entangled through history by I fine linear strand of time.

In this way my early love for mankind has marked me well.
Such ideals I had, such high hopes, such expectations…such bullshit!
I built podiums to raise them on; trophy cases for the, supposedly, laudable.
The highest of these towers, the most honored throne I reserved for, none other than, women; those mysterious god-like creatures that beardless men find themselves consumed by.
To them I wanted to prove myself and from them I wanted to win my pride.
Such a slave to my instincts I was. Such a victim of my ignorance I was.
And they, such willing feeders off my needs.

Now, these same pedestals remind me of my past naiveté.
They lie shattered within my heart; artifacts of lost innocence.
I've destroyed them all, one by one, vandalized them into smithereens and deconstructed them into oblivion.

Only one I've dared to keep in hiding for all this time; a single tower of hope that has slowly decayed over the years and has caused me much anguish.
There I had dreamed of placing the one I might have bumped into, by chance, out there on the open road. The one that would earn my worship, the one that would live-up to my expectations of human dignity and exhibit the graciousness of spirit and eloquence of presence I would be honored to walk beside and call my own.
Oh, and what gifts I was prepared to give.

I've spent years offering opportunities towards this end, decades risking all for that off chance that she'll appear and make it all worth while.
It has all been for not.
This childish dream burns today in the pyre of experience and with it the last pieces of my youth.
Tonight, when the lights are turned down low and I lay me down to sleep, I will incinerate this temple of romanticism and the ashes I will scatter, as souvenirs of emancipation, across the void.

In its place I will erect something indecipherable.
A castle of obscured decadence, a crystal palace of distorting mirrors where everyone sees what they want to see and all are treated in the way they believe they deserve to be, without any contestation from me.

If they think they should be pissed on and spat at, then that's what I will do.
If they think they should be beaten and stepped on, then that's what I will do.
If they think they should be fucked like the little sluts they judge themselves to be, by night, and then adorned like princesses so that the world is fooled, by day, then that's what I'll do and more.
If they think they deserve the privileges of royalty and the sacrifices reserved for gods, then I'll let them continue in the thinking.
If they believe themselves to be part of the chosen few and the holy gifted, then I'll show them whatever faked reverence I can muster.
If they secretly consider themselves human waste, to be used and thrown away, but insist on maintaining an air of faked pride and decorum to make excuses to themselves, then I'll play along in the farce.
If they think they should be praised and flattered with little justification for it or that they are, at the very least, my equals because they cannot claim to be my superiors, then I'll become a shameless sycophant.

The days of me insisting upon honesty and imposing my own sense of honor upon them are over.
The days of me wanting to embarrass them into realization, are over.

There will be no more resistance from me. No more placing my own ideals about dignity, pride and worthiness upon those that have no understanding of them.
This solitary drifter will allow his natural talents to resurface, once again, and a wily grifter will be resurrected, like a phoenix from the dust.
I am nothing if not ingenious when I can control my impatience.

This new course fills me with clam now.
The old tears of grief resurface as absurd hilarity and I laugh again, with the untroubled glee of a dotard.
Laugh and croon I will, in that eastern ululation, I reproduce so accurately.
Sing those old songs of a land long gone, which capture life's tragic-comic resonance and wail against reality.

And those that hear me will stop and listen, and will find themselves quoting my words and will find themselves seeing through my eyes and noticing the things I showed them so clearly.
Nobody forgets the wanderer when they notice him in passing.

Yours truly, from the paths of possibility,
Wanderer



7th Postcard8th Postcard

What precious moments I've savoured, what instances of sublime near-perfection
I've collected:

I remember…
…Sitting around a dinner table under a starlit summer day with a group of assorted characters sharing food and drink and, united by a common tradition, a moment of rare camaraderie.
One of my companions was strumming a bouzouki, sending notes of twinkling tears into the night, and the rest of us sat there singing songs of grace, tunes of mirth and sorrow, melodies of absolution, embracing each other with both voice and hand, our spirits locked in mutual exoneration.
And the world?
The world was exiled from our moment of merriment and grief; our singing an invisible wall to keep the demons away, a vocal wall of harmonic vibrations casting waves of disturbance through the air.

The evening lamb became our sacrifice to the phantoms of the surrounding darkness and the homemade wine a conductor of inner spirits releasing their energies into the midnight calm; intertwining there, for a moment, above our table in a melodic dance before drifting off into the nothing.

Oh, how I sang that night; my voice rising and falling, twisting and turning, straining against the knot in my throat and my own physical limitations, that held the better part of me concealed.
Tears pooled in my eyes, my heart gushing forth from every pore, my body tingling with the delight of release.
Lost, I was, lost is elation and torment…taking them all with me.

We became one that night; a revelry of the damned, an alliance of the defiant, made courageous by the godly nectar.
And what songs we sang! What poetic curses we let go!

Anthems of resistance, ballads of love and hate, psalms of mourning, nostalgic hymns of remembrance; they became our shared reverence for life, our unified condemnation and we but instruments of the great unknown absolved from all liability.

And we cried…Cried the tears only those that have seen life at its fullest can, that only those that have felt the ecstasy and the horror of it all can appreciate.

And when the songs were done and the night turned into dusk, we parted, strangers once more, but now joined in the memory of our coupling denunciation.

I remember…
…Dancing on a mountain top, frontier, outpost in the middle of nowhere, with only the guard dogs and the surrounding forest as our witnesses.
A band of soldiers, we were, sharing a common duty but also a common fate.
Dressed in dirty torn khakis and seeped in cheap Retsina we danced…danced like Zorbas only knew how, danced with the pneuma of our forefathers guiding our every step, in that manly hands-to-shoulders way, from a time before our birth.

We whirled in the darkness, dipping down low, in a swoop, upon the sacred soil before leaping into the air, as if to set sail upon it, as if to shatter our earthly chains; the body spinning, weaving, and flowing with the rhythms of an Asia Minor that is no more and our ardent breathe sending shocks of heat into the winter air.

We shared a soul, drinking greedily from a common pool and supporting each other in our quest for transcendence.

What were we that night? - Agents for divine hands and will-less minions to the sound of pulsating tempo.
Our bodies were taken over by nameless powers, secret ancient forces connecting us to a long line of descent.
We were one.

But there was order in the seemingly ebb and flow of ecstasy, a hidden code of meaning in the circling flow and random patterns of our limbs.
There was a symbolic imitation, so different from the thrashing and gyrating of more modern dances with their primitive sexual innuendos and garish vulgarity.
There was a narration of the past that only men can produce.

I remember…
…Waking to a sunbeam splash, her nestled face pouting against my chest, and her warm breath a caressing reminder of an earlier inner heat that engulfed me and pulled me into its vacant depth.

My mind grasped for wakefulness but settled for the groggy half-stare into empty space, where body has yet to be rekindled into animation and just lays there paralysed but perfectly contented, despite of it.

She stirred in her sleep and I felt her breast stroking me with its fullness.

A subtle smile stretched my lips as I dipped down into the memory of her thrashing desire and as the echoes of her earlier yearning groans resurfaced in my mind.

So soft and subtle she was, with a delicious round rump I loved to cup my hands around, and a face of large-eyed femininity that drove me crazy when she bit her lower lip, in that way she did, teasing me into tumescence.

My mind then drifted into the daydreaming serenades of imagination, where fact and fantasy intermingle with the carefree creativity of mayhem and, nourished by the unconscious, concocts circumstances of hidden need.

I cast her as my lead, a naked cherub running from me in a forest of doughy white mist, her muffled laughter egging me on with its promise, the curve of her bouncing buttocks making me gasp in anticipation.
As I reached to grab her, she turned on me pulling me down upon her on the billowing cotton fields and I was snapped away into the memory of our first encounter:

We danced in a smoky crowded St. Denis club both of us uncertain as to what would follow, when chance decided for us. The swaying swarm pushed us against each other shattering the shyness, and there, surrounded by prying eyes we shared a first kiss and then the groping hands of unleashed desire and then…

I remember…
…Riding on a winding road that cut through the Peloponnesian countryside like a wrinkle on a weathered hand.

There was nothing but the sound of the wind in my ears, the tremble of the engine between my legs and red-soiled olive tree orchards against the backdrop of deep cloudless blue running by my eyes.

Along the way I collected lessons from past lives and insights from the geography; the jumble of remembrance becoming a tapestry of mingling instances, where past, present and future become one.

I paid my respects to the Olympian gaming grounds, where men of old attempted to bridge the gap between body and soul and dreamed about harmony and ascendance.
I ran across the arena, where once audiences gathered to pay homage to the best of the best, and wanting to retrace their steps, I strolled upon their walkways and gazed upon their monuments.

Then, the subterranean chasms of Deiros reminded me of the high cost of creation and the easy nonchalance of destruction.
Floating through the tunnels, I saw pillars that took centuries to be created and natural artistry that took millennia of undisturbed persistence to come to be, and yet how easily one could cut away a piece in a moment of brash selfishness.

Then, swimming in the Aegean, by a Byzantium fortress-city, I plunged into the abyss of azure, surrounded by schools of delicate beauty.
The floor plummeted, suddenly into hazy depths where my stare was met with a wall of impenetrable blue that sent a chill down my spine.
I swam there weightless.
Looking into infinity can make a mind go mad.
So I turned from it, wanting to find an object of focus that would quiet my trembling soul, but it beckons me still, that image of the void, it calls to me to come back to it, to dive into its mystery.

Then, promenading along seaside village harbours, restaurants strewn by the water, I hear the tinkling of glassware mingling with the ocean pulse, the feint smells of roasting meat on the salty air and proprietors pleading for my money:
"Please" he says, pointing to a seat, thinking I am but a foreigner here.

I sit, ordering ouzo with the usual accompanying octopus, and I become spellbound by the setting sun, made more beautiful with alcohol streaming through my veins.
She's there, as well, a curious creature wanting things from me but unable to ask for them directly, seeking for safe anchorages in me, but unable to accept the ones I offer, playing those games girls are known for and so good at.
I already know that she will eventually turn on me, wanting to excuse her own inabilities. She will call me the names she calls herself in her head.

For now, I only choose to recall her crumpled visage as I penetrate her, that bite on my arm when she comes, and her sweat drenched hair brushing against my face as she rides me in the night.

The moment is not ruined. There is splendour in an even imperfect circumstance there is beauty in even an ugly situation.
One must learn to cut away the clutter and focus on the sublime. There, within the noise, I can hear the feint resonance of a central hymn, a subtle reverberation of melody.

I remember…to remember.

Yours truly, from the chambers of Mnemosyne,
Wanderer