Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Three. Alexander McIntyre and the Question of Life.

Alexander McIntyre was the Buddha. I never doubted it for a moment. Knew it the moment I met him - those eyes locked in the perpetual state of oneness with the whole of being. Buddha's parinirvana. Alex was what the Buddha had achieved through his death. Knowledge. Wisdom. Cosmic bliss.

Alex had read every book, every line, written or thought by man. He never read to know more. He knew everything there was to know the moment he was born. He was nestled in the womb of the cosmos and weaned at the teats of the Milky Way.
He read to ascertain; to confirm the legitimacy of the anguished self-expression of troubled humanity. Every drop of ink ever spilt were merely drops of Alex's volatile blood, blotted up in paper before they vanished, were absorbed back into this cosmos of meaning. He was the illegitimate gran'dad of all human thought.

Alex was also the happiest and most self-content soul I ever met. His ears were tuned to picking up the resonant thrills of music of a windswept rainy night or a car screeching to a crash (door-frame shattering, windscreen imploding, et al). And when you looked into his eyes, you could hear the very veritable symphony of the Universe, from the drop of a pin to the birth of a star, playing blaring out loud like a cranked up transistor. He never had reason to be bored.

All the same, despite his self-restrained calmness, the Buddha understood the unassailable logic of life.
The world is full of sorrows.
Desires are the main cause of sorrows.
Sorrows can be ended by killing desires.
Desires can be killed by unravelling the illusory nature of the cosmos by following the Eight-fold Path.
Undesiring life. Life not to be spent attaching itself to ephemeral motives working towards illusory desires. A blind man grasping for a wisp of smoke.
The only reality of life lay within yourself. The twitch of a muscle, the salty sweat on your bare chest, the blood throbbing at your temple. And the undeniable reality of pain. And the irredeemable fact that our blood is alloyed with iron, and it is all so easy to rust over.

So, Alex and I lay countless nights, on concrete drainpipes and railway sleepers, breathing in the collective stench of humanity curdling the air, as we stared out into the sky connecting the stars. We did not need to speak. He drew the lines on the dark backdrop of the deep blue night sky, and the stars danced before the our eyes inebriated with hash and cheap country liquor. The stars recognized us by face. We, too, were two hapless beings shackled down on Earth by something as vainly unseeable and untraceable as gravity. Gravity... very grave indeed.

It was through this orchestra of the night sky, where I learnt about of Rembrandt and Plato, the Summer Solstice and the tapir, that I met the brightest star in the night sky. She was called Mac, Macedonia.