I must state a little bit of information in advance of you reading what is to follow.
I have never written anything before. I know this "story" has no structure, it chops and changes etc and rambles at points, but I must add its a slightly padded out version of a dream I had ergo its very inspiration was odd. I know short stories require planning, thoughts about themes etc, none of which I have any experience of, and none of which I have conciously used in the following text, but should I be made aware that maybe there is something I can work upon deep inside, an ability to write (with work and training needed) then good. I would never begin a Physics degree if I had no ability for maths. What I am hoping for is an opinion from which I can make decisions based on. If this was Science, based on the ramblings below, would it be wise to begin study of the subject or is it a game that cant be won, where only ignorance of my lack of inate ability fuels me forward?
I sat with my back against the wall and threw the screaming alarms up one by one in an arc behind me into the blunt darkness that hung between the door frame, and sat there listening to the screams of each one diminishing the further away they got in that typical Doppler fashion, like cars rushing off into the distance. The last one was launched and before the wailing it made had even dropped to a comfortable level the scream began. Deep guttural rage. Tempestuous breath screaming over the bile slathered and stress taught sinews. The sound was like a fire, its heat being like its rage, growing exponentially hotter and more furious until it reached a Thermite like burning white heat of rage. Eventually the scream reached its peak, a level of such full and relentless sound that for a short but seemingly timeless moment I wasn’t sure that there was any sound at all just a universal standard hum. As the scream subsided the sounds of existence bled back in and it was then, having something to compare to the deafening silence previously, I was truly aware of the enormity of feeling contained and expressed through them waves in the air.
I really should run. Pushing my back against the wall where I was leaning I propelled myself forward. My legs still being bent in a crouch position were cramped and didn’t respond as quickly as my brain would have liked. My top half moved forward whilst the bottom just stayed pinned to the floor in the previous position. Toppling over now, like a rough and hunched organic representation of a teapot, my face dropped toward the floor. With some type of feline type agility I managed in this fraction of a second to swing my body around causing me to land on my back. Looking up I saw it leave the room. Moving viciously and darkly at an inconsistent speed - fast, slowly and all speeds in between seemingly at once – it descended the first step. I scrabbled crab like on my back having seen the unnatural speed by which it reached the stairs. Flipping myself over I waited for a fraction of a second in sprinters starters pose before the thought of having that behind me un-observed spurned me to move, and fast. I moved my legs and willed all the energy I could to them. I was running smoothly and straight ahead now, out of the door and into the wide open space of the warehouse. I could feel my legs hot and aching from pumping them repeatedly into the dry grey dust covering the concrete floor. As I neared the centre of the warehouse floor the point under the skylight where the ceiling was highest I ventured a look behind me. Slowing to a fast jog I spun my head quickly, yet with caution and glanced behind me at the small rough and jagged hole serving as a door frame through which I had run. No sign of him. Him? Why did I think him? Thinking about it I wasn’t entirely sure why I was running, what I was running from? As these thoughts seeped and trickled up through my mind I slowed my pace unconsciously to a brisk walk and eventually stopped standing there with a pensive look upon my face. Standing in the warm column of yellow light provided by the above sky-light dust hung in the air all around while a few motes drifted with a lazy and dreamlike quality, like creatures found at the ocean depths.
My mind is fuzzy; the warm light seemed to be drawing me in to it. Warm, secure, safe. This would have been a successful, an amazingly successful, snare trap had I not already been cogitating about my current situation. Why was I here? Why was I running? Looking out of my illuminated pillar of light in the centre of the warehouse, looking back at the way I had came everything was bathed in a golden hue, like soft focus in an old style movie. A perfect visage. A perfect exemplar of a rotted dilapidated warehouse complete with broken wall. As I said I could have stayed here forever had my thoughts not been so personalized, so focused on me. I, the I, wanted to know, wanted to be free and individual, separate from the unification with the existence of everything in this moment. This light was bathing my thoughts in soft sweet comforting blankets I couldn’t think clearly and I wanted to. What in the name of Jebus was occurring.
“Snap yourself to!” “I cant.” Surely by virtue of this thought you can, Cogito Ergo Sum man, come on!
I moved my leg and arm like a drunkard or some kind of ketamine freak lost in the deep chemical crevasses of the self; slowly but with poignant intention. I moved further out of the ring of light bathing me from above. I focused my eyes on the wall in front of me. The image of moss covered walls, deep green, the colour embodying life itself in a damp fuzzy carpet lining the floor and bottom of the wall. Water dripping and trickling chaotically down the wall on to the soft mattress of vegetation below. I couldn’t identify its source. I felt myself getting closer and closer to this image and finally felt myself almost rip free of whatever was holding me.
Panting now standing up with my face to the ground and hands on my head. I looked up to the area from which I had run originally just in time to see it enter the jagged rip in the wall which I had just a few short moments ago run through. It had changed form, or more exactly it had condensed into a form, gathered the present façade around itself, cloaking that mass of hideous nothingness. I did question how I was so sure this was the thing I had been running from when now it looked like an old man and not whatever it was previously.
It stepped toward me and I instantly matched the movement in reverse and stepped backwards.
“There is no reason to be alarmed my friend” The words fell out of his mouth like dead and decayed things.
“Where am I? who are you? What’s happening?”
“The simple answer is that you are where you were and that what is happening could be considered a lesson. As to who I am that will require a little more…metaphor”
The voice trailed out of the mouth slowly and gave the impression that speed, volume, and overall delivery were not priorities, in much the same way that running fast is not a priority for a creature lost and thirsty in a desert.
The “man” was very short, just up to the height of my chest and it, or he, was hunched over and wrapped in a ragged rotten blanket or sheet. The foul and stale smell being produced by this frail and slight “old man” was overpowering. It smelt of corruption and an ancient age gone putrid, it seemed to be flowing in freely in great gluts from the deep jagged wrinkles that made up his face. He looked as though his face were made of cracked and shattered dusty grey plaster. Full of deep crevasses and shadows which cast curious shapes across his face when light from the skylight hit him at certain angles.
Due to this interplay of shadow occurring over its face I couldn’t quite get a full focus on the image. It seemed to be shifting, moving and melting, and reforming again. The sight brought to mind a mass of insects –cockroaches and spiders – all slithering and crawling over each other in some twisted race with no finish line. The words, stale and hot came again.
“There is no reason to be alarmed my friend. Do not let my image scare you. This is but one of the ways that I can be perceived. It is much to my annoyance that humans such as yourself seem so inclined to see…well whatever it is that you are seeing, and take offence from it. I have met many types of beings and it seems only to be your kind that find the forces of nature so alarming”
“The forces of nature?” The words surprised me, partly because they betrayed nothing of the instinctual fear residing inside my thudding, heaving chest, and secondly because I wasn’t aware I was going to speak before I heard the words aloud so plainly.
“Yes. I am the embodiment of the world, the forces which act and move the stuff of existence. I have many names by different peoples but it doesn’t matter what my title is. As far as you are concerned I am king of all things. Every particle, molecule, amino acid and piece of you belongs to me. Without me you wouldn’t be what you are now or become what you are yet to be. In a sense I am you. No in fact let me rephrase that, you in many ways are me.
“How is that?”
“Well let me firstly ask you,” he whispered blowing that crypt like cobwebbed air into my face, “Would you consider yourself to be the particles you consist of? No? You feel in some way that you are, but that there is something greater than the sum of the parts, the whole is somehow distinct from the rest. Well let me tell you my friend all those things that you consider to be you are actually my doing. Without me you would be just as you were at the beginning when IT was formed. To you I am your father guiding your growth, and to you I am your murderer, breaking apart this temporary construct which you consider to be you, and yet further still I am your step mother creating your form once again as I see fit. Essentially I am everything. For example; your thoughts consist of changes in your physical makeup, each one pushes the moment forward and changes what there was previously into something new, the moment changes, and that change is a forward one, change is inherent to time – Entropy – things move forward. One could say then on this view that thoughts are change, and since I am change then your thoughts are my thoughts. I suppose the only difference is that, as mentioned, you humans are the only beings that consider yourselves to be whatever these electro-chemical changes say at that moment. Almost like “A” turning into “B” and then “C” and then saying I am “C” disregarding the fact that “C” isn’t it’s nature, the flux and change is; its foolish. You look at a physical mass – my domain once again may I add - that you know was not always like it is – it was smaller at one point, younger, it was less damaged, it is getting older, wrinklier etc - and yet you see it as You, proof of the fact that you are here and real, a permanent fixture of the universe that has and always will be. Well my friend I am here to tell you that you are not. Your thoughts are my thoughts yet you - and please don’t misunderstand me it is far from just you personally – have this uncanny ability to mask yourself from the evidence. You shroud yourself from my thoughts and consider them yours. You deny that you are a part of this universe connected in everyway to everything and just focus on the me, me, me. Do you really think that there is a distance between yourself and, well that wall for instance? That gap is not a vacuum, it is filled with air, and if I am not mistaken you, that big physical mass I was talking about is made up of much of the same stuff. In fact you and that air, in fact everything, even the wall itself, were all made at the same point from the same melting pot from the same ingredient so to speak. Your body itself is testament to this connection to the world. You are much the same consistency of water as the planet Earth is. Life in your planet began in the ocean and so your young show this primordial connection when floating in the amniotic fluid of the womb. Your very cells seem to have a life of their own separate from you, each following its little path whether that is following a glucose gradient or fixing things from the external environment. Your very cells most basic of functions contain other living things; the Mitochondria. You are that and you are this.”
It ceased making noises outwardly and I was aware of a rustling like old dried newspapers or ripped plastic bags caught in the upturned skeletal hand of a tree flapping in a breeze. It was breathing in. I was almost certain.
The smell and general image was still as physically and mentally repugnant but now I fully was intrigued, not only by the metaphysical and philosophical diatribe flowing forth from this offensive thing, but by the entire situation. Only through this speech, whilst trying to hold on to the bile which naturally wanted to rise up in response to the putrid flowing river of air and the dead particles like dust which surfed and sailed on it, did I realize that everything that had occurred I had just accepted without question.
Obviously picking up on this thought the thing – it could no longer be called a man as its shape had shifted now into a billowing mass of, seemingly, organic matter – stopped. I could tell it was looking straight at me.
“Yes a dream”
“Wow” I said with a relief in my voice which the body and mind couldn’t fully commit to yet.
“You are asleep in a way but still enough of you is open and awake for this message to be heard and understood,” it croaked
“What message, and why?”
“You don’t recall the beginning and therefore neither do I, it was never fully formed in your mind, but the throwing of the alarms behind you was the cue. Whatever you were doing and whatever got you into that position it was the malice and intentional purpose to interrupt, annoy and fly the flag for an illusion, the very illusion which I have alluded to that has drawn me forth. Most others only encounter me fully at times of searching deeply, yet others often see my limbs and actions upon things when scientifically analyzing, but like the blind men and the elephant they know only part of what they touch, they are unawares of what the whole is like. It is curious to me that you should have got my attention rather than the other way around. How this has occurred I have yet to know”
During this I had now found myself relaxed almost fully. The tension and anxiety of before had slipped away with the realization that this was only a construct of my mind, I couldn’t possibly be hurt by myself.
“So what is the point? I mean even if you, or I as it seems to me now, give me this message then surely I had known it before and secondly why would I give this any more credence than I would any other oddball dream” That’s it, I thought. Give him some stick. This is my world and I am the boss.
It chuckles. Each sound it seems is composed of the screams of all the people ever lost at sea.
“My breath, my aura, my very proximity is laden with seed which finds root in the most fertile ground of ignorance. You are a field which I must raze, raze or cultivate depending on your view – at my level the distinction is pointless - with whatever tools I have at my disposal. When you awake and what I have sown begins to spring forth into the sunlight of reason, conscious reason, you will know that this is more than it seems to you now. Remember I know what you are thinking. Although you won’t understand until later, possibly, I am responsible for those thoughts, they are mine”
“So how comes then,” I began in my most “smart arse better than thou voice, “if these thoughts are yours why this conversation, why plant seeds? If you are me and visa versa then why don’t I know all of what you allege to know, huh”
More chuckling creaks out of the retreating rot.
I am left alone. No longer in the warehouse but the aloneness that one has first thing in morning, half awake and half asleep. Just black and thoughts.
A noise. Another noise… another, again. Noise, noise, noise…tick, tick, tick.
The raw sense impressions from the world begin to be processed as the brain switches on and the world begins to take shape. I am aware of the clock, the damn thing is too loud. I tell myself this every night I go to sleep certain that it will prevent me from ever falling asleep, and every morning, oblivious to the evidence to the contrary of the night previously, I swear I will do something about it. No one can live with a clock that bloody loud.
I should be getting up. I spent a moment or two trying to delay the inevitable feeling of leaving the cocoon of warmth that was my covers and facing the billowing cold reality of the room. Facing and feeling the room and leaving your covers is the ultimate reminder of the day showing your body - therefore your mind - that you do not live in your own world, the world you want, but that you exist in another one - an alien cold and uncaring one that could never give you the warmth and comfort that you would demand from your own. Each morning is like being ripped from the womb. Like a newborn screaming and barely understanding anything other than a natural aversion the sudden sensory assault we face the uncertain. Unlike the newborn who have to get adjusted to this state of affairs the hard way at least we can rely on Tea and Coffee to help soften the blow and ease us in to everything.
Still half an hour later the reboot of the systems is not complete. The processing abilities which usually I take so much pride in are embarrassingly slow. MP3 player on and book in hand my brain takes notice of neither. I look at the shapes on the page and they cease to be words (something that I instantly recognize seeing the signified of rather than the signifier) just odd shapes which, looking at the curves of the P and H and S that I think I can see history in. My mind moves on to the development of our alphabet. Is the alphabet itself indebted to Indo Aryan peoples or is that just the spoken word? Sort of wish I had learnt Latin. My thoughts confusedly rumble on like this for the duration of my journey, a rolling mist the contents of which are hidden from view, a Pandora’s’ box all my own which I have filled and furnished throughout my life with things yet the inside of it is still as unknown and shocking as the mind of an unknown person or madman may be.
Instinct tells me that I have reached my station and I battle towards the grey and grimey doors to push myself out into the compressed flow of biological matter streaming out of the carriage. I look at some of the flowing stuff I am moving with and see that I can now make out individuals from the whole. They all look like people. People in their various forms, shapes and sizes heading much like myself towards, what seems in present circumstances to be, some type of heavenly ascension. We move as one jittering inconsistent mass through hot cramped tunnels feeling like ants until suddenly we feel the breath of freedom coolly blow on our faces. All heads look up to the source and in front of us is the escalator, the top of which is blurred and obscured by the bright light of the morning sun bursting through the exit.
Now with the heavenly light above and cool refreshing air blowing down from it the mass of flesh and muscle covered human skeletons now begin to change from their oneness that the tunnel had forced upon them into a series of individuals. My observations of this transition have counted at least 4 different persons that at this point any of these organisms can take to distinguish themselves from what was previously. This oneness into 4 only lasts as long as it takes to get to the top of the escalators, after that the rules change and get more complicated...
Blessings of peace and equanimity from the Heart Chakra.