Wednesday, July 09, 2014

The island


I took the big jump and I dove inside. I landed on what seemed to be an island. I was on a white sand beach, blue crystally water waves making sweet love to the land. In and out, in and out they went. The light was bright in the sky, shining of an almost synthetic glow. As I looked up in the sky, I saw that it was moving and changing constantly. I started seing images passing, and the images became scenes from movies. The sky appeared as a giant technicolor screen on which were playing all the movies, books, and information I gathered through my life. After a while I got up on my feet, and I started walking.


I arrived at a theatre like place. Actors were acting a play. I sat and listened to them. They all seemed to have a diferent speech to give, depending on their moods and the hat of the day. Mostly they acted just as selfish as any human. They wanted more power. They wanted their images painted, they wanted songs and more incense. Each one of them wanted total devotion. "Give yourself only to me. I will make all the pain go away" each one of them said. I understood that they were all gods.
They were just another old movie, a distraction amongst many, a moment of rest only, like a football game. The gods were dead, static, they needed attention, but they could give attention to themselves only. They were memories that disappeared a long time ago. Dead a long long time ago already, like the shadow of stars in the skies. A momenteraly lapse of reason, whish you were here. They were ghosts actors, stuck in a rut, waiting for the next screen play to arrive, incapable of writing their own play. They were pure ego, me me me, cries the child.


I had more of the island to discover, I let the ghosts behind me, and kept on walking.
After going through a green and lush jungle of tropical plants and rainbow colored flowers, I arrived to a volcano. I sat there for I do not know how long and watched the seasons passing as the volcano spat red fiery blobs of melted rocks. Hot, dry, humid, cold, temperate, the weather passed to the rythmics of sunrises and sunsets. In the jungle, I heard roars and sounds from some wild animals, some chasing and eating others, that is the dance of life. A constant feast it is.
After the volcano I passed a hill, and climbed it. On top of the hill, a bunch of people were sitting around chanting and repeating gibberish: "om, all is one, awake awake, all is om". Behind each of them I saw a wire that went to a large machine. Following the wire, I saw a giant mechanic parot that kept on repeating the same thing over and over again. "kill your ego. Let go. Desire is suffering. Kill your ego. Let go." Like a broken record, it biped the same song again and again. Aparently, all I had to do was to kill myself and all suffering would go away. Was the machine suicidal? What type of dumb ass programers could program such a silly machine I wondered.
I let the mechanical parot to it's 101 programming, and I decided that  I'd die when I'd die, my time was not now. I was stuck in this human body, I might as well learn what I had to learn from living in it. The body I lived in, was made of strange impulses, I had to learn to live with it.


On the way, under a banyan tree, I saw a strange form. I came closer and saw the head of an old man on the ground. He had long hair matted in locks that turned into the roots of the tree. His legs were floating on top of his head in a crossed position. On the ground, next to the head, was his arms. All the parts of his body were detached from each other. Each arm was drawing doodles on the other. As soon as a drawing was finished, the drawing disapeared, and the arm started a new drawing. I sat and we spoke. As we spoke, his mouth was sucking on a flower, and smoke came out of his ears. He explained that he was doing yoga.  He said that we had to unite all, and to do this I had to kill the mind. "women are just for sex. No relations. Women are just for sex. No relations." he kept on repeating. And the arms kept on drawing and drawing. At some point, the hand drew a flower in the air. The old man told me  that it was for me, so I took it and put it in my hair. Once again, all I had to do was to kill myself. But, the image of the giant parot robot came in my mind. quack quack quack it quacked. On the forehead of the man there was a red dot. I came closer and put my finger on the dot. As soon as I did this, the old man disapeared in a puff of smoke.


I sat there for a while. I understood that the island was my emotional world, alive and organic, in constant evolution. The bees flying from flowers to flowers were various loves, the volcano was my anger and sex drive. The leaves moving with the wind, the organic plants, the colors, oh the colors so many colors, all were my body. The technicolor sky was my mind, where I projected all my dreams. The ghosts were memories and the robots were my habits. I am still not sure of who the old man drawing on himself was, maybe an old friend I met once upon a time. A man who thought that women are only for sex, a man who never wanted relations, a man who lived alone always. All are parts of me, each part it's own island and I love them all, the good, the bad and the ugly.


I thought of all the artists that try to put this on paper,canvas, music, revolutions wars and dances, each alone on their own emotional island. How courageous or maybe how mad they were to attempt to fix this constant movement of life into an instant. The horor movies, the fluffy paintings, all the forms and diferent representation of what lives in each of us: all art forms being symbolic representations of our inner world. Our emotional world was made up of all the life forms on the island. Birth, life, death, growth, survival, pain and pleasure all was there in a pristine microverse. I could stay there for ever, away from the world if I wanted to. Like a Robinso Crusoe stuck on an island, I could built a hut, smoke flowers, become a ghost player, or a parot. But like Crusoe, I had to go. So, I came back outside.


All I had left from the journey was the flower in my hair. The flower became part me, and it needed love and caring. So I learned to be a gardener, and started watering myself. I grew a few spikes, just in case.
The island was always there, and I could dive in whenever I wanted to. I liked going there sometimes, taking a dip in the crystaly water, sitting and singing with the parots, watching the gods play, listening to the volcano and watching the many flowers bloom. The old man was always there drawing and drawing and we talked in between his "women are only for sex. no relation. no relation" mantras. Nothing ever changed in the island, until one day... landing on the sand, I saw footsteps where there was never any but mine. It was my landing spot, and I knew my own footsteps. Someone else had walked around the island. I went to the old man, to ask him if he had seen anything. But him too had disapeared. In his place was the same flower as he had one day given me. I picked it up and went for a tour of the island. Nothing was changd, but Something was happening to me and I did not know what. I came back to the painting studio, a bit scared. Maybe my inner world was falling apart? What was happening to me? I put the old man's flower in a vase and sat looking at it. Weeks passed, monthes passed. And then one day I got a mail: "it's time to meet my friend." I did not know what time it was nor who my friend was. I picked up the brushes and kept on painting with the flower sitting there staring at me in the studio. "it's time. friend." echoing in my mind. I knew a new journey was about to begin, and I took my time enjoying the sound of the wind in the leaves before I made up my mind...

To be continued...
Pictures from various trips in India Goa, and Thailand.

1 comment:

Anjali said...

Ohoh!... I really love your world Manue! And i enjoy to know it more and more each time you reveal it little by little. Wish this friend meeting time will be fortunate! In my own Inner Island, some footprints were left by you :) Boom Shankar!