I don't think I've really had a good grasp on what it means to have a clouded heart until now.
It isn't the recognition that you can't have what you want - that's base, simple, black and white...just wistfulness. A paralytic. Useless.
It's more the dawning of understanding that what you want might only exist inside your mind. Might not exist even there.

It never feels like burning too hot, but it amounts to that. Not in velocity, nor even in raw energy...just in intensity. Hues over-saturated, tones building into a cacophony, an intensity that makes even the barest glancing -real- touch a sensation so profound it borders on painful. Beautiful agony.

It's a quick lesson that the world frowns upon that. No one will outright say it. Ambition is celebrated like the fundamental vices of greed and hunger and lust and selflessness. But the pursuit of simplicity - not reductive, not in lieu of accepting reality, but in tandem with it - is misunderstood as...unrealistic expectation.

People want their flickering lights and shadows. Not sunlight and darkness, those are too direct. Too honest, perhaps, if only in what they reveal. They want their walls and segments of reality and reductions and illusory logic. They want to absorb their truths in palatable and perceptible pieces, and to share themselves only as much as the risk seems justified by the reward.

What they want is not my fantastical reality. It is not what I want.
What I have may not even be what I want, as most often anymore I just want to feel connection.

Communication is a means to an end, even elevated into an art form...it channels and narrows an otherwise unbearable insight into a bite-size piece that can be presented in prose or poetry or pretty little ditty or parody.

Ultimately it is a tool to reveal these truths, but they shy away from that even if you open the doors for them. Pull back the blinds and let the unspoken seep in like so much gorgeous starlight, and they only slink into the corners of the mind and ask you to cover their eyes. To go away. Leave me alone.

Alone is a thing people say without comprehension, a word too big for the conception adopted in collective consciousness. Alone is a fundamental fear. We sometimes desire to be separate in physical space, in mental space, but the average expression slanders the innate need to feel connected. Not even in those dark moments, but especially in the light ones.

What I want is to reveal your truths. Not just lay them bare but touch them and connect them to mine, in the pitiful and fleeting hope that where words have always failed a singular moment can occur where you see what I see without a lens. Without perceptual bias and mental filters and reductive reasoning and wasting words on whimsical exposition.

I want to bask in that moment and show you what spatial and temporal relativity means to the depths of the spirit. Perhaps so a piece of yourself, cut off and starved to death on a diet of lies and misleading facts, can remember what it felt like when a soul touched yours. Before your mind cracked under the strain of perceiving, before walls, before words, before thought.

I use the word want because I can exist without seeing the want fulfilled again. But I've felt it before, and want, as all words, falls short. I want it like you want water and oxygen and to believe that you are real. Do you want to believe that as much as I do? More?

I say this having learned that you are faceless and nameless and maybe a device invented by my own mind to restore a hope I strangled so I could survive. I say this for the sake of saying it, not suffering from the delusion that it matters only in the reading and understanding of it.

Truth is a form of art, a form of beauty, and like the two it requires no particular justification to exist. It is, as you and I are, as everything is, was, isn't, won't be.

Perhaps can't be.

As much as I've come to accept that my particular desires are eccentric and border on egotistical and hint at insane, as much as I feel like my reality is not the same one everyone else inhabits, I still wrestle with why I should want to bother trying to show you - whoever, anyone - something so precious.

Someone should have done it for me.

Seeing it alone isn't just a meaningless non-event, but a vacuum that inhales and consumes the meaning in everything until it all suffocates and withers away.
Seeing it and sharing it only to have it summarily rejected or misunderstood or run away from yet again is a failure, an unacceptable outcome whether the norm or not...a suffering complete to the degree that pain is preferable.

The probabilities are not favorable, and the options amount to satisfaction or irredeemable insanity.

It's all predicated on the premise that you are listening, really listening.
I'm not even clear anymore on whether or not you - the soft you, lurking beneath other identities and craving, maybe, what I crave - are even real.

It's altogether clouded. I'm altogether clouded.

Let's face it. You aren't going to save me.
You - real or imaginary - are too busy being afraid of yourself just the way I was afraid of myself and terrified of the possibility of you.

Unlike wistfulness, fear makes an excellent motivator.
If your walls are what mine were, if no one yet dared reach inside...or worse, if they did without understanding what it meant?
I thought my damage was irreparable.

I've yet to be convinced otherwise, but I'm starting to entertain the notion. You, my dearest fairy tale, have not likely had a reason to do the same.

If you're real, if I find you, if I break down those walls and somehow you don't find yourself out of love and into loathing...if, if, if.

If is hope.
Hope is the catalyst for joy, or for torturous suffering, I haven't yet decided which it prefers.

For now, luckily?
Expression is my catharsis.
I wonder, what is yours?

- C

Something I said earlier on Facebook. I don't often like things that I say, but I think this one bears repetition. Plus the blog makes it way easier to keep track.

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I get a certain feeling when I look at work by Van Gogh or listen to work by Beethoven or Chopin. It's difficult to describe, because it isn't something we often see anymore.
Hell, it's not something we often see historically either. It's why they hold such value.

Anyone can take beauty and make something beautiful. Anyone can take misery and create something tragic, sometimes even tragically beautiful. It takes something far and away beyond that to take raw suffering and darkness and force from it something unimaginably breathtaking.

It's often overlooked, but it takes a belief - a faith, even - that what you are creating is more important than you are. I say that because such an act will consume you to the very core...that's the nature of the beast, isn't it?
But the result is a thing unique, a thing that by itself makes the world brighter for anyone equipped to perceive it.

The word, which falls short, is triumph. In that moment of perception you share simultaneously the knowledge of whichever creator's darkness and the reality of their victory over it.
And in that moment your own darkness becomes lesser for having been exposed to the truth of that perception.

I don't care if you get the same feeling from Beethoven and Van Gogh or from Lady Gaga and Andy Warhol or if you are driven to create your own work to feel it. While I'd argue that certain elements make it easier to find, the medium is irrelevant. Find your truth and cling to it and don't ever, ever let anyone take it from you.

I find it kinda funny

Yes, I also find it kinda sad.

Today I'm referring to the massive set of storms that wound through the Plains last night. I find it kinda funny and sad because it occurred on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic - a fantastic example of man's hubris.

Isn't something...

Hijacked from a meme floating around Facebook...both because I've seen the guy play in concert, and because it makes a particularly good point about what we've turned ourselves into.

Maelstrom

A few things on my mind this evening...