Thursday, November 26, 2009

Time - to fly

All the things I wanted to say,
I forgot,
there is nothing else on my mind
except, here, now...
or the small fragment of my consciousness that is in slight contact with it...

...

As my consciousness grows, new landscapes setting in, my voice grows, thoughts are inflated by the wind of granular experiences, none of which I can understand completely, but that mesmerize me with their inscrutable beauty.
It is, for instance, mesmerizing to me how different my desires are from most people. I want to be a “gardien d’immeuble” in Paris. Something that most people would absolutely despise and abhor. Most Portuguese that were doing this job are coming home, to their families and friends, and their familiar landscapes. Most want proximity, acceptance, and, most of all, they want a world where they can feel “at home”, where they can trust their neighbors, be admired and even envied, be safe and cozy.
This is a job that pays very little, where you have to clean up, deal with the garbage, and, worst of all, stay away from your friends and family and live in a country which, for me, is being torn apart by the confrontation between the new and the antique, the French and all the immigrants, and a general lack of true values instead of the representation of old traditions. Nevertheless it is a place of very hospitable and civilized persons. Most of all, it is a place where there is *time*:
Time to breath,
time to have pleasure,
time to make love all night and most of the day,
time to see movies,
time to read,
time to write,
time to see the world around us,
and meditate about it.
Time to think, to reflect, to simply see
what’s around.
In modern society, by the contrary, you have all these luxuries and reputation, and, nevertheless, you have got no time for anything. You wake up and there it is: time to go to work. And then you work all day, counting each second, employing each second to some “useful” activity, which generally has nothing to do with you. You eat on a schedule, you go to the bathroom on a schedule, you arrive on a schedule. And then, then you watch tv. You watch tv to try to relax, you watch tv to try to justify this way of living, to live with yourself.
News tell you how bad the world is around you, that you are lucky to have this kind of life. Soap series give you the life that you could not have at home. You live other’s problems, other’s love affairs, other’s talk with their children and spouses, and you go to bed with a feeling of ample satisfaction. You have lived, you have worked, you have felt hard experiences brought on by tv. And tomorrow is another day. Possibly even a glorious day. If only there was no alarm clock!
And then you go, until the end of the week, when you finally have time to be with your family, to see nature once again, to have time, time to do nothing... but even that is on a schedule, and on Sunday afternoon’s you already feel that time is running out, and that tomorrow, tomorrow, you’ll be back on the dungeons of the alarm clock.
We live for our children: they are happy! And we sustain their free lives, their games, their parties. We get back at them with school and homework. But in general they are happy enough so that we may think that our life as a purpose, because we are sustaining theirs. And their time will come, when they will have to support the weight of building a family of their own.
Except many of them wont. You may call it selfishness, I call it like of suicide tendencies. Why should you want to destroy your life. It is so short, so fragile, so precious. You have this time that has been given to you. You don’t know for how long, you don’t know why (yes, I know we may *believe* in all kinds of awkward explanations, but we don’t *know* it), you don’t know what for. What you do know is that you have an *opportunity*, in each moment, to do something with that moment. You can be free (whatever that means), you can mold that moment like a piece of art and say: this is what I do with this moment.
So, even if you want to have kids, would you want them to live like machines in a machine world? Pieces of corporations, consumers, voters, to be bought and sold and carried around by other pieces of this big human society. Would you like to raise children so that they can be one more ant in this vast system?
I don’t. I would like to raise children if they could be happy. But this human world only provides luxuries, addictions, illusions of grandeur. So I skip that task and I try to enjoy the best of times in this lunacy.
To nationalists I offer my laugh. To religious fanatics I also offer my laugh. And I also laugh to those enslaved by riches, by compromises with nothing, nothing at all. I laugh and I pity in both measures, and, in a third equal measure, I admire and rejoice. For all these people, blind and bonded as they are, to their illusions, are growing and dancing in a beautiful and magical world, of which they are a beautiful and magical and mysterious part.
I love the king as a I’d love a snail, or a reptile trying to catch his lunch. I love the trees just I love the mothers who daily give their lives for their childs. I love the football player, the star, as much as I love a beautiful rock which distinguishes from the others by its exquisite colors, texture and weight.
Humanity is part of the cosmos. As a man I can only eat my wife. I cannot eat a rock. I could not sustain myself only out of water, I will not live for centuries like trees, or billions of years like some stars. But I am not only a man. I am a man who is alive. I can see. And the colors that I see are bounded by humanity. They came all the way from the stars of different galaxies to illuminate my night. I am no more than a man, but, in my mind, I can see much more of the cosmos, I can imagine what it is like to be a tree, a tortoise, a mouse, a penguin, a rock orbiting a distant star, an ice crystal in the rings of Saturn, a liquid rock in Earth’s core, a moving mass in Jupiter’s immense atmosphere / Ocean.
My human body is just a vehicle for the trips of my soul.

Oh yes, I want that cheap job that nobody wants in Paris.
Because there, there it will be the launch pad for the dreams of my soul. There, in a quiet cubicle, I will build by Tardis, a vast world where the only limits will be the limits of my human mind and heart.
I want to fly in this spaceship, in this timeship, which most men call a body.