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.

Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Two. The Glacier and the Jungle.

And Alex was standing at the door, half torn off its hinges. His summer blue eyes were locked on me, transfixed by this wild beast of dark and dreams and nightmares.

Blue cold eyes.
Distant planets in their orbs,
Or satellites in space
Watching everything unseen,
Clutched in place by those
Talon-like eyebrows.
Admiring,
Yet questioning.
Eyes too sharp,
Trained on reading
The blank eternities of space and meaning
That lay between the lines
Of the printed page.

I hated the gall of him. His questioning stare that seemed to lay me bare and dig claws and talons deep into my flesh and pull out my innards in some sort of grotesque pagan ritual sacrifice. The cold neutrality of the hard altar stone. Would just have walked over to him and pummelled his head so hard, all that would be left would be a cracked bone bowl of thick lukewarm porridge.
But those eyes knew too much. And beneath the self-controlled serenity those eyes knew what I was doing. They burnt with the same blue heat of the Bunsen burner and the alpine glacier.

I dropped that ragdoll of a head. Stamped the light out of it with one languid step of my heavy foot and felt the crunching sureness of dislocated teeth and pulverised bones. Reached out for the beer bottle on the table and walked over to Alex, meeting the icy glacier stare of his with the warm fetid swampy jungle of mine.

What followed, as they say, was the history of man.

Remembering Macedonia. Chapter One. The Colosseum of Dirt.

Still remember the day I first met Alex. My eyes were blurred by the sweat dripping off my brow... The warmth of fresh blood as it spilt down the side of my face... The very exuberant vivacity of life and living - sweat and blood. I was chewing my moustache - a thick black caterpillar - my mind locked in contemplation. Locked in my vice of a palm, Fernand-o-whatever-fucker, his head look small, inconspicuous, unimportant. He was knocked out already. But that greasy-with-sweat unimportant head of his posed a very important question - as important as life itself, to take the next breath or not. Bar table or beer bottle?

Chewing moustache, contemplating this vehement question, my eyes - blurred with sweat and blood and life - were scanning the wreckage I had left behind. A dozen broken tables and upturned chairs. Half a dozen or so slumped bodies, with faces blotched an shirts in shreds. Beer bottles lay shattered on the floor, blood mixing freely with alcohol and flowing down in dirty veins of grime. The lighting was dusky and the creaky fans croaked in a cacophony of applause.

I was the Roman gladiator striding over this Colosseum of dirt. I was Jimi-fucking-Hendrix smashing his guitar on the amps. . I was the stench of sweat wafting up in the tropical sun. I was the taste of mud spiked with cashew liquor.
Bucephalus (Bu, as they called me). Ox-headed. Obstinate. Black-maned. I was whatever the fuck you called life.

Grey is bluer than you think

Good morning.

A weeping afternoon.

Not a wisping breath of wind.

The musty smell of tamarind

Trailing airy fingers through

Earth-soiled dew,

Rubber balloons and cigarette ends,

A dime and sixpence,

A few dropped tears,

Listless tingling fears,

Smiles and smirks

Embroidered into a book,

And a pistol in my hand that shook.

It is as simple as buttoning your sleeve.

Even simpler.

Idiot-proof. Sharp. Efficient. And no quivering quavering metallic heart.

One trembling finger

And a six-ounce slug

Explodes the silence in vehement self-conscious defiance

Cuts a straight line through the two inches of air

(A line too straight to be natural

Yet too straight to be man made either-

The lethal has a beauty that is incomprehensibly divine.)

And pounds into soft tissue

Crunching bone

And lodges itself into

Soft electric pulsating

Grey matter.

The body snaps out of synapse.

Acetylcholin.

Resounding echoes in an empty chamber

Of a sound that never registered.

Too quick.

Quicker that hopes and synapse hops.

Hops and barley and beer.

No thought, no regret, no fear.

Red blood. White bone. Grey matter.

The sky is grey.

And old and stale

As moulded out butter toast

With furry rhizophus spreading out black fingers into its very heart.

Black fingers.

Nerves of thought.

The wind is a faint reminder

Of a long forgotten secret.

Of words that made me smile.

Laugh. Cry. Fear. Long. Wish. Love. Yawn.

Feel.

The mould smells of the past.

Thick, sweet and balmy.

Like sweaty palms.

Warms me up.

The moment has passed.

The grey is blue.

Bluer than it seems.

The gun clangs on the floor as frail fingers let go.

Sweaty and warm.

Good evening.

Bad night.

Contemplations on Trance Music

The tones play on.
Muted melancholy.
The residual silence
Of some 140 beats per minute
Trying to
Shape the air into comprehension.
The beats were meaningless.
Some abstraction.
Craving to make sense
To seem significant
In the ensuing and preceding silence.
I was listening
To those
140 momentary spasms
Of silence.
Silence chopped violently into pieces.
Those 140 tiny moments
That paused with pulsating energy.
Like a heart.
Holding back to pump life
Down the veins.
The track peaks.
The violence is shudderingly real.
And once it breaks...
Oh bliss.
My heart falls back to its lazy rhythm.
The turntable is melting into haziness.

Gundrop silence.

The wooden stock was gleaned smooth. Smoothened out by the many sweaty arms against which it had leaned while its sight zoned in on its target. It was worn out. But AK's never get too worn out. The wooden stock. The cold steel muzzle. Its weight so delicately balanced by the bulk of the magazine. It felt right.

He could feel blood surging up his temples. Hear it foot-tap to the rhythm of his heart. And he remembered her face. Her delicately arched eyebrows. And her eyes which held that ocean of truth.

He could hear them come. The footsteps crunching in the gravel. The courtyard. The sun blared in through the window with a vicious violence. Sharp shadows. Sharper footfalls. He held the rifle. The magazine clicked into place. It felt right.

He could hear his deep breaths. Feel his chest heaving. And yet so silent. The gravel crunching in the courtyard. And he remembered her face. Her peach skin so soft beneath his fingers. Her cheeks turning cherry pink with his touch.

He clicked off the safety. Leaned out of the window. Arms resting on the rough grainy windowsill. The weight of the gun. The sunlight streaking, turning his eyebrows gold as he trained his eyes down the sight. Pulled trigger. TISSHHK. A puff of smoke. And a body fell limb in the courtyard. Pulled back the safety. Eyes trained again. It felt right.

Sweat trickling down his brow. Legs cramped. He sees the flare as a gunshot is fired. A volley of bullets. The windowsill splinters. The windowpane bursts into sharp bits of sunshine.

Her face... Her lips curled into that half-amused smile.

No more heartbeats. No deep breaths. No sweat down his brow.

Gundrop silence.

Soft

I walked through the rubble
And pick up a feather.
Light, soft, fragile -
An instrument of flight dropped.
It seems misplaced.
Lying gingerly, half-willingly,
Waiting to float away
With the slightest of persuasion,
While all around it
My world lies in static destruction.
The feather is too white
In the middle of the grey
As the sun shines down on it
Painfully.
I ma standing on
Crumbled walls,
Reinforced concrete blown to powder
By explosions whiter than the sun,
Charred bricks,
Splintered window frames,
Bent girders, Twisted ambitions,
Broken dreams.
I stand atop vanity
And vainly, I hold
The vane and ponder:
How the feather stayed so light
Unburdened by longings
And desires.
How it stayed so soft
When it had been dropped behind
So ignobly, so ungratefully.
How it stayed so fragile
When around it
Metal and stone blew as dust.
Dust.
But the feather is
Lying on its back.
No dust blows into its eyes.
Its eyes are turned up,
And all it sees
Is a clear blue sky
Caressed by smooth white clouds.

The silent sound of a raindrop trickling down the window

The rain had stopped. For a while, now. And a single raindrop stood poised to take a dive down the windowpane. Patience. A moment of timeless silence... As it waits wordlessly, straining thought and gaining force. It is accumulating mass, gathering together at that spot of captured illumination. Reflection, refraction and internal reflection. Held together by something someone named surface tension.

Surface tension. Waiting to break free from the surface. Or wanting to it to the surface. Tense and quavering, the raindrop stayed. And it let go off the ledge.

There was no explosion. No brute force. No captured momentum bursting into a cannonshot of energy. Silence. And a slow wormlike movement. The raindrop crept down the window.

It urged to go forward. Reach out for the ground in surges. Pushing its forces forward. Hoping to touch gravity. Pulled down by the gravity of its own predicament. It trickled, crawled, halted. Then it thought out.

Strategy. That is always part of reaching the lowermost rung.. the windowsill. And then, it pushed forward. It screeched, and sighed in relief as it carved a space for itself to run through right down the windowpane.

Violence in silence. All violence happens in the deepest of silence. We probably never understood the language.

Bookmark

So here goes...
The page was screaming to be marked. Its bold letters each climbing up a decibel until it reached that unbearable crescendo. The final symphony of pain. And relief. The note slips. The orchestra goes awry. And the stick falls from the conductors hand as he collapses to the ground in the ordeal of cacophonic creation (or was it recreation?!). Freeze... Bookmark...
The letters stare at me. They each pose a question. And they sink their gruesome stare right into my heart, like a thousand silent daggers. Smooth and soft. It doesn't hurt. Just a warmth. Or is it the blood seeping out through my wounds?! Freeze... Bookmark...
I stare at the page. It is innocent. It is silent. But its innocence and silence which poses the most disturbing of questions. You cannot answer to innocence. And you make your own questions up in silence. The words run around my head in dizzying circles. In a whirlpool of thought. Interstellar verbal orbiting. Freeze... Bookmark...
I was scared to mark the page. Condemn it to memory. Afraid i ll remember the page number and the odd tear halfway down the right edge everytime i flip past it. Condemn it to familiarity. Tag it as special. And yet never be sure, whether it was so exceptional after all. Or whether it was a moment's fancy, or a passing glimmer of hopeful fear.
A faint breeze catches the page, and it rustles in mid-air. My fingers still rest on its torn edge. Freeze...
I never use bookmarks. I just remember the page numbers.

The Mutiny of the Mutes

Dunno why it started. Maybe it was bound to happen. All i know was how it did start. And well, that's part of recorded history.
History is very ironic. It only talks about iron and metal slashing through flesh and obliterating bones. And of monuments built by armies fed on iron-rich blood, to be razed down to make more fodder. Man's monumental history of blood, and iron and blood in iron (heamoglobin, as we call it).
Yes, the Mutiny of the Mutes is waiting to happen. History reminds us that it had happened earlier. But then, the Mutes merely learnt to talk, and they weren't Mutes any longer. Became Mutants rather. The Mutant Revolution.
The Mutes talk in the voice of silence. Words cheat their thoughts and feelings. Their war songs have no words and no rhyme. Their thoughts retain their abstract selves of purity. Their weapons do not thunder. Their footsteps don't raise the dead from their sleep, and awaken them with a yawny groan.
The crumbly charred pages of books will litter the streets. Signboards will read themselves out in the language of fire. Rivers of fire will surge out of windows, in a silent symphony of sorts, intoxicated on Molotov cocktails, Dante's Inferno in a vodka bottle. And the soot and the smoke will block out the sun and lead to a cataclysmic episode of global warming, which will then escalate into the worst Ice Age in the history (ah! that had to turn up again..) of the planet. So says Al Gore. And i don't trust him on that.
The Mutiny of the Mutes remains an abstraction. Like their wordless thoughts of purity. it finds life in our silent moments of perpetual violence, when we forget to hear and refuse to talk. Stop... turn back the pages of history... or write a new book. Write of smiles and tears, love and fears. Write why i left those footprints on the beach, to be licked up and washed off by the kinky tongue of an insatiable sea. Nature reflects who we are.
Let us learn to speak.