Parched Metaphysics [incomplete]

He entered a room. It looked like a meat locker with slabs of hanging frozen meat. Some of the dangling pieces made noise. They were not incomprehensible noises. Closer, he heard a female voice, speaking English with a nordic accent he could not place.

She pointed to her chest with both her free arms.

"Nice, very nice," she said, caressing her chest.

"They're tightly bound," a distant, shadowy voice tells him. Everything but her arms and head appeared to be tightly bound in what he assumed to be gauze.

"Tight," she responded to the voice. "Yah, tight, tight yah, yah." Her hands moved upward to her crotch; her right hand forcefully cupped the area. "Tight again, yah."

He gazed disinterestedly. She tried to smile. She tried to put him at ease. She tried to please.

"You like?" she giggled. "You like tight?"

Her voice resonated a sweet, erotic innocence; her wide untamed eyes betrayed an ingenuous mania concealed by skin and gauze. He ignored her and forged ahead through the series of dangling parcels. At close quarters, from a cursory glance, he could tell that some were asleep, hands defiantly crossed onto their chests. Others were completely immobile, their cold blue lips gave off not the slightest hint of life. A few, like the girl, brimmed with exuberance, overcome with energy - or maybe simply desire and hunger - threatening to burst the constraints that contained it.

"Come here," the shadowy voice commanded. It took him a moment to grasp where the voice came from. He waded through the misty, cool, nearly ubiquitous, fog filling the room. After traveling ten paces toward the presumable source of the voice - he made a habit of counting paces while exploring strange spaces, he saw the outline of a figure, dangling - perhaps floating - from a chain attached to the floor. It dangled - or floated - by its neck, feet facing skyward. The body was straight, perfectly perpendicular to the ground. Unlike the others, its arms, if it had arms, were not free.

"Come closer, I won't bite, unlike Helga there," the voice, now produced a cleaner, crisper sound. At closer proximity, the voice sounded familiar.

"Helga?" he asked, although he knew full well whom the voice referred to.

"Yes, she is tight, as she claim. But all who have dared to venture to that terrain have yet to return," the voice faded with every passing word into silence. It remained silent.

--

Misdirected passion led him to this room. His initial impression was as follows: there must be a reason these figures are here. He presumed these were domesticated brutes: sociopaths, accountants, retired pitchmen, lawyers, politicians, and debutantes. If freed, each would inflict untold horror on others. Collectively, they would annihilate humanity en masse. This was the reason, he believed. This was the reason why Helga, blessed with the elegant, flawless visage of a beauty queen dangled like a piece of butchered flesh. Justice cannot be without reason, nor reason without justice. He continually tried to convince himself of this.

He stared at the still shadowy figure, ostensible source of the enigmatic voice. He peered back and could see only a distant outline of Helga. He imagined she was licking her lips with a perverse formality, cupping her bounded breasts, letting out tiny, polite, lascivious moans.

"Words are truth," the voice continued. "Action, in its truest sense, is merely a series of accidents - haphazard, stupid, and without direction."

He knew the voice. He was certain now.

"Then again, isn't that how you have reached this point, Franz?"

He stood motionless, petrified by the sudden revelation. The voice, however, continued prodigiously.

"Impatience permits an inquisitive eye no more than a cursory glance at life. A reality of images, of supposed beauty and boundless enthusiasm, vibrant and unbounded, overwhelms the senses. The sensual transcends the senses. Physical, empirical, sensual beauty - this is what is fixated upon. Smooth, unblemished, perfect, abundant: an image is invested with all improbable aspirations - absolute unity cobbled from the infinitesimal fragments of salvation, immortality, and acclaim."

"Images, inviting images, erect icons, titans, and gods before the unseeing eyes of mere mortals. Alas, images lie; icons are mirages, distracting from the parched desertscape of sensory reality. Accursed recognition, hollow shallow glory - these manufactures of our natural egotism and shared insecurity."

The voice went silent, again. He walked five paces closer for a clearer look. But as he approached, the figure became increasingly pixellated.

"The image lies. Stand down, its useless to proceed any further." He heeded its reproach and retreated five paces. Helga's tiny moans grew louder in his mind. He imagined her tightness was a distraction by design. He cleared his mind, recalling a mantra the familiar voice once taught him, "Concentrate, concentrate, my dear old friend, concentrate..."

---

In prior times and a past life, he filled his days with activity. He was at a lost when idle; felt incomplete and profane. Every morning he would read the paper cover to cover, have a bagel - plain, no cheese, and mull over the current events on an early jog. Recurring sights blurred by as he ran his nine minute mile, three times, twenty seven minutes and he would be home; three minutes to strip and he'll be in the shower - under thirty minutes all told. The morning shower gave rise to mediative thoughts; profound musings, dripped in languor and which demanded patient attention, ended abruptly when the water ceased and he stepped in front of the mirror.

In and out in under five - a motto he rarely contravened, except on those lonesome occasions of involuntary arousal, which took some time to alleviate. Onanism provided occasion for prolonged thought. The mind emptied as his motor activity proceeded according to instinct and automatism. He would close his eyes to seek a complete image of existence. A random draw of ephemera streamed through him and into oblivion. As he approached alleviation, the images attained a startling clarity, intensifying a fear stirring beneath a well regimented life: an awareness that time is death unfolding without direction, without purpose, and without end. On occasion, when the fear struck him most potently, he would kneel down and watch the water, spiraling near the drain, carry off his spilled seed towards the sewer. The sight solidified a paradoxical neurosis. It made him feel at once a profound power and a miserable impotence. The spiraling stream of squandered sugars and proteins served as reminder of his power over life - its creation and cessation. But the sight of an infinitesimal series of possibilities now rendered impossible laid bare the fragility and insignificance of his own being - life, the most unlikely of impossibilities. These two paradoxical thoughts would often visit him, taking a brief, intense sojourn from the unconscious into waking life.

These thoughts passed away and quickly as they came and the activities of routine continued unabated with the precision of a metronome. But they would recur, coincidentally when primal desires overflowing its bounds and demanding, at least in his case, a most routine conclusion. After his morning shower followed brushing his teeth, shaving, and applying deodorant...

Imperiled [rubbished]

Trapped between serenity and tumult, a thought came to mind. It was a thought of my own. I thought it to be superior, for it came from me...

Imperiled between waking and slumber, a series of images flash onto your mind('s eye). They cannot be deciphered. They're slippery instances, racing through a beguiled imaginary space.

Imperiled between waking and rebirth, a series of images flash onto a mind. They're foreign, novel, and implacable. They're from a forgotten past. They're about a non-existent future. Trapped between reality and higher reality, the non-existent future emboldens a most vile affectation: hope, eternal hope.

Imperiled between slumber and ecstatic artifice, a series of images rush past him. They melt and give way to forms - abstract and unknowable lines and obstructions. The flash of images appear as imagined pasts, deprived of material, floating in fanciful ether. Suspended, they project fatal futures - fatal inescapable futures - in timespace undone.

Imperiled between a calm river and raging rapids, a series of images slowly roll by. He feels oppressed by them. They're images he cannot recall, but which are no less haunting. There's an old man slouched, seated on a rocking chair. An infant comes into view, partly obscured by darkness, cackling uncontrollably. The old man slumps off his throne and onto dry cracked earth. The infant's laughter ascends from innocence to mania with every rising decibel. The infant turns to meet his eyes. He averts his gaze, aware, without having to gaze into them, the eyes of true evil are now upon him.

He turns and walks away - the distant laughter grows with every step. An expansive meadow comes into view. In the distance stands two malformed trees, standing far apart. He walks toward them. As he approaches, he notices a tiny river running between the two. The deafening laughter goes silent upon his arrival to the river. It is narrow and immature. He sees the purple tributaries, five in all, scattered along it. On the furthermost tributaries sit flutists playing identical wooden instruments. On the most immediate tributary sits a young girl. The girl sings. Her soaring voice rises from the tributary up to the deformed branches hanging above the river. They sway to her voice, straighten up, and stretch toward the sky. The branches point sharply upward. He looks up to see the eyes he tried to avoid. Loud ever present cackling silences the flutes and the girl. A torrent of crimson pour down. The river widens. It devours its tributaries and the musicians. He takes flight. But it is of no use, the relentless downpour gains strength. Knee-deep, he struggles to move. The liquid rises past his waist, above his neck...

Submerged, he remembers something someone told him, "Evil lurks beneath innocuous surfaces." Sinking, a wide, anxious, stretch of uncertainty separates him from sanity. Sanity, lucid reality, spirals from sight, fades beyond earshot, and he enters the waiting dark depths. "Concentrate, concentrate, old friend...concentrate," a voice from his past echoes inside his skull, which begins to succumb to unbearable bodily forces. "Concentrate, concentrate, old chap..."

Not yet, it wasn't time quite yet. Not yet. Time stopped, went in and out. It was out of joint and then not. The spiraling figure, suspended in darkness, dared to look up at a sliver of blinding brightness. The torrent halted. The surrounding liquid began to solidify and excreted him skyward. From his peripheral view, he caught a glimpse of the sky. The eyes were still there. But something changed; everything was silent. The laughter was gone. In place of the boundless mania that he had imagined overflowed from the eyes, he thought they may now be calm and a tad perturbed. He was nevertheless unwilling to gaze upwards. The time was not right; it was out of joint and, just as quickly, not. Gravity, forgotten gravity, tugged on him and he returned. He landed and tumbled on dry dusty earth. The tumultuous torrent, the trees, the river and its tributaries, the girl and the flutists; they vanished.

He sat there for a moment, looking at the large inexplicable orange shadows casted onto the ground. There was nothing around and he stared shadows, which shifted according to winds. He concentrated and focused, but the shapes and forms made no sense to his eyes. They were without origin or logic and were mere distractions for his weary state of mind. Soon he grew bored and got on his feet.

He watched the dry soil shift below his feet. With steely and resolute eyes, he was determined to will a lush virgin sprout from the parched ground. He wanted to create. "Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate, my dear friend..." The soil just continued to blow away and swirl in an aimless fashion - but no sprout, no virgin birth. Gazing with loathsome, resentful eyes at the increasingly cracked soil, he could still sense they were still looking at him and his impotent desolation. The very thought of eyes, cackling in silent delight, stoked his anger. But, not yet, he couldn't yet. He couldn't look up, not quite yet. "Don't look up. Don't look up." Resolute and unflinching, he continued to futilely will life from dead dirt. "Concentrate, concentrate...you bastard..."

Fixated, he fixated on a murky remembrance, a wispy outline, suspended in space. It may have been a bloodied infant, enveloped in fire. He heard nothing but laughter, his own.

Projected onto the back of his muddied mind was a single image. It was an image of his inevitable death: a figure slouched, almost supine, onto a divan. Trapped between an irretrievable past and unattainable future lies an ineluctable fate. In order to be, in order to exist, one evolves both as body and mind. But natural fragility dictates that eventual decay is both unavoidable and cruelly abrupt. Insufferable are the chambers of the mind that house intimate, tender, memories. They house pleasant remembrances - those comfortable instants that anesthetize the decline. They also house regrets about an incomplete life. They house silent disaffection.

At the end, a life appears incomplete, leaves one longing for now impossible fates. At the end, all - including death - remains unalterable and the person, the body and mind, feels a most profound, if not primordial, impotence.

He awakens to the infant child's plaintive cry. It wants mother. But mother's gone. Mother dangles lifelessly in the backyard. He holds it in his arms. He looks into its tearful eyes. "Swear," he heard an inopportune whisper. "Swear..."


He holds the child. The crying stops and the child is placed back into its crib. He looks out into the yard, spends a ponderous moment focused on the dangling body. Soon, he no longer can bear the sight and shifts his gaze upwards toward the empty starless night sky. Alone, alone again with accursed thoughts. Alone, alone to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate...

Quarter past seven

Sunrise,

infinite sadness awakened him.

He glared at the alarm. It failed to go off, again.

Evolved,

humanity evolved involved three strips of bacon, egg whites, instant oatmeal, and a cup of generic coffee. Humanity devolved, well, was all over the morning paper's front page.

"Work,

you work to get paid,

get paid to get laid" -

He silently recited his mantra in front of the mirror while brushing his teeth. He grabbed at the floss to finish, but, oddly, there was no more. Since he had never flossed until then, its absence struck him as odd. He reached for the mouthwash - it would make due.

Getting dressed, getting ready, he checked his timepiece - quarter past seven; the bus would arrive in seven minutes. He rechecked his lunch, deemed it to be rather scarce and dropped an apple into the nylon bag. Satisfied with his planned midday nutritional intake, he headed for the bus stop and checked his watch - a force of habit. It read: quarter past seven. He panicked. Did it malfunction??? Did he miss his bus??? More importantly, was he going to be late??? He paced frantically, until he saw an elderly lady walk towards the stop.

"Hello madam, would you happen to have the time?"

"Quarter past seven," she replied, showing him the face of her wristwatch.

[...]

Control...

Control, concentration, calm, care;

Get control...concentrate, old friend...sputter away with courage...let the stream carry you to oblivion, concentrate with concern...control is futile, fortuna has your balls in a vice....stream to oblivion...sweet sexy stream of oblivion....without care to soothe, where mice moo, and cows gnaws on giant blocks of gouda - SACRILEGE!

Control...control control...concentrate on careful concentrations...dig in, set up, its a long way til the bottom, babe....careful, careful, now calmly, slip out of it, slink them to your heels, there you go, careful, careful, caress - concentrate, concentrate, concentrate....CONCENTRATE!

Care, with crack. Care with cruelty - cruel, criminal, care. Meticulous, inexorably so. The tiniest fleck opens a conscious stream into nullitude. Cruel, cruel, care...

Calm....calm....calm....control is gone....calm, cool cowering calm, croons a diddy - "CONCENTRATE! CONCENTRATE! CONCENTRATE!"

Concentrate, old friend; concentrate.