I am weary with my empty sorrows.

  • Saturday, November 30, 2019
  • 0

Many rivers to cross

But I can't seem to find my way over

Wandering I am lost as I travel along

The white cliffs of Dover
(Jimmy Cliff)

I am wading through the flood planes of my emotional landscape, holding onto people with a singular desperation. When we wander through the maze with our bearings lost and disorientated by the lunatic noises in our souls and bouncing off the endless walls and the corners with their sharp edges we will do anything and grab onto whatever we can to save us. The smallest and most insignificant things become emotional life rafts that we cling to and construct ships of hope in our hearts to sail into safe harbours that are only ever illusions.
While I have been lost in this maze for eternity now, groping around in the gloom for the self destruct button I promised myself that there were places in my soul that I would never go, yet here I am, failed by my chemical band aids and my own inadequacy beginning to arrive at the banks of the Rubicon that I said I would never cross. I am weary with my empty sorrows.
When I woke up this morning my windows were filled by a thick and freezing fog. Visibility was poor and the trees were no more than dark suggestions in a vague future. They were ominous and the loom of their shapes held no promises of hope or redemption. I believe that this is what it is to arrive at the Rubicon, there is the terror of the unknowable dressed in a death shroud and there is a terrible form of excitement too that compels us forward even while our lizard brain is shrieking at us to flee. There is a Zulu word for this - Asijiki meaning no turning back. Once we take that first step into those waters swollen by the pain and emptiness of life we are committed. Our choices narrow down to just two options, swim across and find out what lies beyond the water and the mist or remain forever rooted in this place, the cold mud sucking at our ankles and trapped in prisons that we have made for ourselves often with the help of others. We fool ourselves that we are living but we are not.
Does this make sense?
I have tried Ubuntu, the African concept that states that we are who we are because of who we are together and I have tried to be a builder of humanity believing that the more we love the more we facilitate the reincarnation of creativity which is one of the great foundations of hope in the world. I twist words into circular shapes trying to persuade myself that this is the truth but I find that I have failed on all counts.
So the Rubicon is all that I have left and I am standing trembling upon it's bank peering forward although I know that I am blind. 
Someone give me the light please or at least take my fucking hand. That is all it will take.
I've been thinking about the artist Vincent Van Gogh, that mad passionate genius. I think that he saw the birds held against the sky by a capricious god, their breasts pierced by the cold wind and made small by the woods full of riotous colour like paint slashed onto the canvas with brush strokes like scalpels. He saw the vast skies filled with the false light of dead stars in roiling circles and flowers dying in a vase as a metaphor.
I think it was all to much for him and he tried to communicate his distress and pain through his art. He found that the world was deaf so he sliced off his ear as a final plea toward heaven. Only the abyss answered back and I think the loneliness of that answer provided a perfect spark of clarity that pushed him over the edge.
I no longer have any answers either. I have tried to find them, fuck I've tried. Now I am empty, everything is empty. All I can do is hope that there is truth in the parable of the mustard seed or I find my own spark of clarity.





No comments :

Post a Comment