View Full Version : The Planet Walk
Hello Forum Friends (and Happy Easter, those of you who 'do' Easter; everyone else: Happy Season, Whatever it May Be for You!)
A little while ago I began posting a narrative to this forum with a very slow, near-absent plot, which was meant to start to make sense over time and slot in with some other work I'd done (some of which also appeared on here). This met with fierce opprobrium from one member here, and I was so taken aback I thought I'm probably in the wrong place with this kind of thing. So I paused that story and stopped posting anything for a few weeks because I don't really want to (nor do I want to have to) argue about or defend my writing, I'm just happy to share it in case anybody finds anything in it that speaks to them. Still, I was travelling for a bit, and now looking back at that little episode I reckon I may well have overreacted, it was, after all, just one reader who simply didn't like what I'd written.
So what I'm about to start posting now comes with a BIG CAVEAT: The Planet Walk is really not so much of a story as an exploration. Like The Snowflake Collector (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?82625-The-Snowflake-Collector), The Ice King (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?85296-The-Ice-King), Pyromania (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?84566-Pyromania), and the half-abandoned, half-stalled Revival (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?86149-Revival) referred to above, it forms part of an ongoing experimental online publishing project called EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net), but unlike The Snowflake Collector, for example, which is a 'proper' traditionally structured story with a central character and a beginning, a middle and an end, The Planet Walk has none of these.
So: I offer it here in the spirit of sharing and communion. It may not be your cup of tea. If that's the case, fair enough. Just hit the back button or some other link and stop reading it. You may find it hard going, fair enough. If you relish a bit of a challenge, you might just like to persevere, but if you don't: there's another story by someone else just a click away. If it raises any questions or if you have any comments that are in some way or other constructive, or if you find a spelling mistake (you may and will find some unusual, as in hitherto 'non-existent' vocabulary...) – I welcome your communication. But if it causes you pain: please don't feel obliged to read on. Just shut the computer and pick up a good book.
That said: if it is your cup of tea, or a taste you think you could (or could wish to try in parts to) acquire: enjoy...
LOVE & PEACE
FREI
i whirl within the wherefores of my wonder
still coming at me are the shooting stars, the comets, the debris
celestial collisions
i am at home here, though my longing knows no boundaries now no aim, knows no
deliverance from thought, from search for meaning
would my soul took over
would my skin shirked not the touch, would i felt this fear of losing were not real, this
holding on, this
need for explanations, this
reluctance
ever to surrender to what is: what is this if not ice not gas not water and not energy, what is
the reason reason holds me
holds me in or back, then back from what, back where, back to what end?
is there an end?
there’s no beginning, then how is there
reason?
I sit on the edge of the solar system, invisible. I’m known to exist, but nobody sees me. I think I see them, from a distance. Through a haze. I can't be sure. Twinkles, here and there, allover really: wondrous.
I have, inadvertently, become a god. This is both puzzling and absurd: those powers they invest in me are merely mythical. I am not even drawn to water, not as other people are. Some see the sea and jump right in. I don’t. I am content to sit there, pondering. Until the time comes. Until I’m ready. Until I feel the need. Until curiosity gets the better of me. Or temptation. Or just the wanting to have been in the water before going home. Not so much the desire to be in the water as the desire to not not have been in the water at all. For a moment. Or two. With the lover, the dolphins, the mermaids, the waves and the fishes. The other gods. The propensity to ponder. It may be an affliction; but why not. ‘Why not?’ seems to be the overriding question. Is it a question?
I walk from my planet towards the sun through the snow, falling, falling. I love the snow falling on my face as I look up at the sky at the space at the universe the aboveness and the aroundness of it all, and the path ahead is white and clear and there’s no-one about. Of course not, I’m alone. Alone on the edge of the universe. A pang of love, a moment of pain. Love for whom? Pain for what? A special one now, this time, really? A sense of myself, now, really? Or of the idea of myself. Of The Concept. The Unreality. I like my reality right now, I can deal with it, I can live up to it, make sense of it, or so I tell myself, knowing it not to be true, not entirely. I walk, steadily – not fast, not slow – along the path of the planets thinking myself Neptune. I am not a planet. I am not a god. I am not a myth. I feel millions of miles away from the allness of it all but I'm about to dissolve into it and this thrills me. Is that a lonely path I walk or is it just deserted. Because it's late. Because it’s out of season. Because it normally is, around now. Is it too late? This turns into a portentous question all of a sudden. Am I too far along the path, do I circle too slowly; but we know, we know, we are not planets, we are not rivers, we are barely human. We are human. So bare though, so vulnerable, so thoughtful, so cautious, so hesitant, so barely capable. So barely willing to survive. Yet surviving. Thriving, even, yet, against the odds. So gentle. So soft. So curly, the hair. So even the teeth. So tender the lips. So lovely the legs. So quirkily satin the belly button. So elegant the fingers. So delicate the eyelashes. So warm, so warm the chest. So fleeting, so insubstantial as I walk under fir trees and the snow they are clothed in, so bare, so wrapped up in my delusion, my reading the signs that aren’t there, my wanting it all to be and to mean something. Wanting it all. To mean. Something.
I take pictures of the snow so I can send them to him though I don’t even know if he wants to look at the snow through my lens through my eyes through the synapses in my brain that miss him, but I know he has never seen snow for real and I want to show it to him. His mind is not here any more than is his body. What of his soul? It sits right in me. He would love the snow, I know, if he saw it for real. If he were with me now. If we were insubstantial now in the snow together, seeping into the ground. I know these things. I now know them all and they all make sense and they will come to pass and it all just needs time to arrange itself now. I want to be sure. I missed Uranus on my journey, I realise, as I get to Saturn, wondering why that took so long, and I don’t mind. There’s an irony in this, but it is not a metaphor, not even a pun. Not a sign. It's a coincidence. Sometimes you just miss a planet, that’s all.
I’d decided to surrender, to go with the flow, just to be. I’m calm at the thought, now, at ease. I feel a greater certainty than ever before, but I’m not sure about what. Just about. And I know I don’t need to investigate this, I don’t need to probe. I don’t need to understand, because I already know.
I don’t want to be the one any more who longs. I don’t want to be the one any more who pines and freezes. The one made of ice. And rocks. Enveloped in abundant gases. Who errs on the side of reason, out of sight, out of mind, out of being. I want to thaw and to melt and to meld with the one and to bloom and to lose myself in the all and to be.
And so I walk on, sunward.
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
NikolaiI
04-18-2017, 11:15 AM
It is great - thank you for sharing!
A salt doll went to measure the depth of the ocean..
There are two kinds of beings - frozen and unfrozen. :)
NikolaiI
04-18-2017, 11:21 AM
Most of Vera Pavlova's comments about poetry apply for me, too.
Your writing is appreciated.
Your writing is appreciated.
Thank you so much, Nikolai, this is most generous of you, and kind!
All the very best
I shall return to Saturn. I'll not ignore it, not have passed it, unawed by its majesty. Unwondered by its spheres. Unswayed. It sways me, Saturn; but not now. Now I am drawn on further, down – not down, across – the path: the gravitation is too strong, its presence too immense, I must succumb to Jupiter. For a moment. For a while. For an eternity that lasts a fraction of a thought. For a whirl of a gas storm. For a communion. With Callisto. Io, Ganymede. Europa. These friends I have not met. These habitations. These absorptions. Thoughts. Sensations. My body, more than my spirit, attracts them and they me. We enter each other’s orbits, and dance. Moons they may be, mere satellites to a planet all of their own, but I enjoy them, their company, their zest, their life. Their juvenation. I visit them, they me. We journey not together, we relish the here. The nowness of it all. It is not mere. Have I not longed so long to be in the now?
This here is good, I like it, though it will not, doesn’t have to, last. The mightiness that overshadows us encumbers us not: we are not oblivious, but we don’t care: choose not to be intimidated by this massiveness, this bold inelegance. The world right now, that world that is not this world and that is this world still though we may never wish it so, it bears great force, great danger, anger too. But not for us. We delicate ourselves out of its artless rage. We are not like that. Are not of it. It not of us.
I no longer feel the need to explain myself and I no longer long for the need to be free. I am free, now, having got this far, and I relish that freedom more than I treasure my life. I am not Jupiter, nor ever want to be. That bulk, that pompousness. That body of hot air covered in cold. That implacability. That dehumanising fervour. And yet, these satellites, seductive with their charm. I’m glad I came here. Happy to have paused. I’ve long abandoned the idea of destination. These are sojourns on a celestial perambulation. How privileged I am. How powerful. How small. Here, seeing Jupiter be big, be brash though not beguiling, I believe my time has come. This is not new, I’d thought on one or two occasions once or twice before I felt the tug above my wings but here I realise my strength is not outwith. You may be one and a half score septillion times the size of me, but you are no match to my mind. You have the mass; the sun has all the power: I have the intellect. To survive. To discern. To accommodate myself in this universe, or any other. To thrive.
I launder my library of references by adding experience. The hunger to live. The need to swallow. The acceptance of millions of potentialities in one go. The taste and the texture. A slither of hope, of forbearing of premonition. A spark of the imagination. A tenderness, returned. And wanted. Handsomenesses. No warriors, these, no battle axe ire, no strategy and no plan. No tactics. No goal. A glorious swim in the sea, a pool of tadpoles of random configurations, a swirl in the mind of the gods. Ye gods. Ye godlinesses. Ye buds of brimming boisterousness. Ye flowers and sparks. Ye spermly waggers of tails. Ye lusciousnesses. Ye beetrootjuiceredvoluptuousness. Ye inspiration.
Ye words.
Saturn calls me back, I know. I’ll have to detour there, a loop. This Jupiter wilfulness cannot last. I feel for Ganymede, I feel for Europa. Ye Kepler-452b. I feel for you too. I feel for my brother who is writing these words in a universe just like ours only different, having acceded that that’s what he’s doing without knowing why. I feel for my coccyx, I feel for you. I feel for you and I sense you are there and I feel strongly for a new love a new warmth a new glow a new smile a new touch of a new hand a new face and new dimples a new tuft of hair and a belly button, a new mind a new generous heart, on the horizon. Where is the horizon, in space, in the orbit of Jupiter, near one of his moons? I baffle myself into submission and accept the reality as it is though I know full well that there is no such thing and there is no such thing as necessity, distance, perspective or pain. There is pain, it is felt, it is lived. Does it have to be, ever? It need not be celebrated quite so. There is no hate, it is an illusion, and there is no anger, it disappears. There is there is there is love.
I like that thought and take comfort in it although I can’t prove it, and I think of my new love on the horizon whom I haven’t yet met. Literally, have not yet met. We know each other, we are in communication, we are getting closer all the time, but the thrill of the unknown persists and we both hold on to it a while longer not because we want to but because we want to believe that we must. So we must. So we do. We’re pragmatic like that, and we have lives to live. So we think, so we hope, so we trust.
I salute Jupiter for all his preposterousness and kiss each of his moons farewell. I’m not sure I need to come back here: this was good, this was fun, this was excellent, while it lasted. But possibly, probably, for me, it has now run its course. I bid thee farewell, most mighty of planets: you have been, I know, quite misunderstood. But don’t worry, my gaseous friend, for so have we all…
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
My mentality makes me leap as close to the sun as I may without being burnt, without floating adrift, without losing my sense of belonging, if not here, if not there, then in the universalness of it all. There is something wondrous about being me, still, at this age, at this point, which is never a point only but always a wave just as much, at this juncture which is never a coming together only but always as much a moving apart, through this phase which is never as much a beginning as it is also an ending only more so which means it just is; there is intemperance, folly, wisdom and wit to be found where there's light and there's the mischief of knowledge: am I really just information?
Here on Mercury where a day lasts a couple of years at least by perception my mind is blasted by solar winds and I take hold of my wand meaning to keep it. The power to lull the awake into sleep, to awaken those lost to slumber, to ease the agony of the dying and to quicken the dead. The quickness, the quirkinesses, the quintessentialness of it all. I race around the sun looking out into space and enjoy the ride more than ever I did before. How come youth arrives at an age when it is all but gone? How come it happens twice? The first time with no experience on the fabric of sensations to handle it well, the second time with said fabric so worn that it feels all but threadbare? Will there be a third instance, maybe a fourth? Is it necessary, possible, even, to count? My braincells refuse to collapse and my curiosity gets the better of me, so I keep carving open new synapses firing new thoughts into a continuum that is already awash with ideas.*
No time, no space, no respite, no rest, no melancholy here, no decay: this iron is liquid is hot is alive with pure energy, not organic, not systemic, not caustic, not quiet, not loud: effervescent in its potentialities. This place may be small but its capacity to astonish is great, nay unlimited, nay infinite and profound. Can lovers be friends? Can pleasures bedevil the heart that has grown to be kind? Can connections be the meaningfulness of it all? The essentiality? The reason? The cause? The spark and the fire but also the balm? Can this toxicity heal as well as inspire? Can this generosity of spirit ask more than questions? What is there beyond the surprise, the delirium, at having recognised I am able to speak? Am I the medium or the message or merely the conduit? Would I mind if I knew, could I know if I cared?
There are now too many possibilities too many strands too many fluctuations and too many rotations, too many rupes that like laugh lines adorn me for me to worry: care I may, yes, and consider; learn I can, and communicate, lend a gentle ear, sometimes, and a generous eye and embrace the love that is not mere emotion but more than instinct is intellect and say yes: I comprehend. Not understand, perhaps, not everything, yet, quite possibly not ever – things move so fast, so all over – but I can take it all in. I can be it all. I can be little and insignificant and still mean the multiverse. That's just what I wanted to sense. There is no mirror here on this planet, Narcissus has settled on Earth and my ego today is not needy, nor never will be, no more: my eccentricity here is at its most extreme, at its most exquisite, most extraordinarily elegant, and I'm comfortable with that too.
I call on my younger self to excuse my inadequacies as I know my older self will be looking across to me now as I am and merely encourage, not chide because I have here now forgiven my older self its preposterousness, its perfection. Its contradiction, in terms. This, for all its unreasonable demeanour is maybe the best position I've ever been. And I've been everywhere, but not yet. Soon this, too, must come to a premature end if it is to last forever, and that's what it is. The caduceus though I shall treasure...
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
Danik 2016
06-12-2017, 11:35 PM
Neptune is traveling through the solar system and visiting other planets but in fact it seems that he is diving deeper and deeper into himself.
I like the inovative language.
Venus troubles me. I come here reluctantly; so bright. So mystifying, so inscrutable. So tenebrous, as well, beneath that gleaming skin. Moist. Overwhelming, warm; so uninhabitable, at least for me. And still I feel I ought to spend some time here. Wherefore, I know not. For the experience? For the completion of my being? For the expansion, yet, of my horizon? – These planets travel far and yet not wide, except they do. They are – we all are – on a forward motion we don't notice. Venus knows. This is a body that's imbued with universal wisdom, which it can't express. We move in spirals, not ellipses, our sun drags us with her, and whenever we feel we've been here before, we have, but we're a little further down our path: it's not the direction of our nose that we travel in, it is the direction of our pate. We have no eyes there, at the top of our head, we have only a string that pulls us, and still we resist.
Here on Venus, everything feels strange; the smells, the flavours, the embrace. The fuzzinesses and the softness, they unsettle me. Long before I become comfortable I become complacent, and that will not do. I start to wander, restless. I think I am getting ready to settle in some sort of way, but settledness entails a great deal of immobility. I like the rest of motion. I need to be alone. Not all the time, but enough. Venus asks me too many questions. It's not that I can't find any answers, these answers can mostly be found, but the effort is out of proportion. The thinking that normally invigorates me tires me out, here. The obviousnesses, the courtship; the irrationalities, the repetitions.
At the time there was no myth and no meaning. The time being the beginning, the beginning being the origin, the origin being unknown. I suddenly feel alert, a little, and happier to exist, mainly because of this old realisation that I can't, I just can't expect myself to make sense of it all. Any of it, really, it's just there. Annoying as it may be. I take a step back and I look at my thoughts as they spread out before me and find them unsatisfactory. The thinking I'm doing is inelegant, crude; it will not suffice. Nor is it poetic. And thinking without poetry is like love without mathematics. It has no substance, no structure, no special tingle of satisfaction, no meaning. It is like sex in a haze of drunkenness with someone you don't fancy. I'm becoming self-referential and it irks me.
Womanhood. Much like aliens, women don't so much scare me as baffle. I've hardly ever thought this through, but there comes a time. And a place. I seriously doubt that now is that time or this that place, but when or where will it ever be, and does it matter? I contend myself mostly with knowing that there are things I can't know and go where my curiosity takes me, which is not normally here. Nor abnormally. I'm out of my depth, out of my comfort, out of my pond. The mountains, the seas and the rivers, the streams. The landscape and the disorientation. There are too many things happening all at once to get a handle on any of them and there is also the new mix the new blend the new fusion. That both thrills and frightens me, a little. Not because I dread the loss of myself but because I really like my delineations as much as I like my inbetweennesses and my blurrages; the overlappedisation of our existence, I like it. Entropy.
I hear a warm soothing voice that is not in my head and it is not in my memory; it is not my mother, my sister, my wife. (I have no wife, by the way, that was an unnecessary witticism of moderate charm and no consequence.) The voice comes from the ground and from the cloud that envelops the ground and from the all about the sphere that I have wrapped my body around, and it says that there are no mysteries and there must be no pain. She's trying to reassure me, I'm not sure she succeeds, but her sentiment is benign. I feel her hand on my back on my neck on my thigh and the touch is tender and real. I recall once upon a time being deeply at ease in this presence and as deeply afraid of it too. What embraces you can ensnare you, what holds you may crush you, what loves you will kill you, what desires you own you. What owns you is you. And you thought you knew who you were.
Did I? Maybe a couple of aeons ago; it is possible, then, when I did not yet exist, that I was really quite sure of myself. I had an arrogant streak, not mean, not cocky, but aloof. My journey humbles me. I sense I'm getting closer to the truth, and like everyone else I know that there is no such thing. The energy that we are. The quantum states. The potentialities. The particles and the waves. Of course I am Venus as much as Venus is me: we share the constituent parts, and yet: I don't belong here. It's sometimes good to know where you belong, and also good to know where you definitely don't. There's nothing definite, ever, and anything can and does change, and you never say never and all that goes with it, and in any case there is only so much existing you can expect to do at one time, but by the time your energy dissolves and changes its form, time ceases too and you are quite literally reborn, only not in the way that you thought you didn't want to think about, or were taught, or wanted to believe to be nonsense. From one state to another. These states are all within us contained. The energy that you are is your matter your body your molecules your thoughts your emotion your wants and your needs (always, they come as a pair, you knew that already), your shades and your textures, and when they go they don't go they are simply reconfigured because energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed. I shall not miss myself when I go for I am always around. So are you, so is Venus. So are the superclusters of our sistergods.
I am much happier now than I was before I came here. I knew I would be, I doubted it not. But now, much as I sense the draw of the earth that is so near and so familiar and so welcoming too, I must surely go on a detour and find me a distant adventure. Home beckons, but I have to explore...
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
Danik 2016
08-11-2017, 03:52 PM
Hi Frei,
I think Mercury and Venus are more characteristic than the other ones, but I´m still puzzled about some issues.
Why does Neptune regard the earth as his home? Is he a human disguised as a planet or a planet with human feelings and a human identity?
What is the aim of his space travels? Self-knowledge, space-knowledge or both?
Hi Frei,
I think Mercury and Venus are more characteristic than the other ones, but I´m still puzzled about some issues.
Why does Neptune regard the earth as his home? Is he a human disguised as a planet or a planet with human feelings and a human identity?
What is the aim of his space travels? Self-knowledge, space-knowledge or both?
Thanks Danik! – Yes, I noticed that, quite understandably, you interpreted the narrator to be Neptune: that's not the case. The narrator, 'I' (and really, therefore, me), identifies with Neptune at the beginning and describes himself in terms of this distant, invisible, in a way quite isolated, planet, and then decides to go on a walk through the solar system to find out more about himself and really to reassure himself that he isn't just Neptune, he has, or in one way or another relates to, 'qualities' of all the planets, though these are of course by necessity both cultural and personal, and therefore subjective. It's like going on a walk to clear your head and ponder your existence, putting it in context of what you find, and it's inspired, incidentally, by a 'Planet Walk' that exists in the mountains near Laax, Switzerland, where someone has placed tiny scale models of the planets along a path, spaced out also to scale, to give you an idea of how far away from each other and from the sun they really are (most visual representations of the solar system can't do that, because the distances are so vast).
Danik 2016
08-12-2017, 08:17 AM
Sorry, Frei. Yes, I thought that the Narrator was Neptune, visiting the other planets of the solar system.
The astronomical landscape with it´s suggestion of misterious and seemingly lonely othernesses is really fascinating. Because of one of my favorite threads in this site, Astronomy,created by Dreamvowen, I started to read some articles. The stellar world known to us is expanding at an amazing fast pace. The solar system that seemed so big and far away is somehow becoming close and homely with the new discoveries.
I wander to the place I know least and for a while I maybe like best, in a way; as an idea, as a thought, as a concept: the abstract liking of something from which you are distant, the fascination with unfamiliarity; the lure of the other; the stranger, the comfort, the awe. The steady roll on an invisible plane, the cool electric hue. The very slow seasons. Even the unwitting humour, lame though it is. It is a laconic planet I find here, unruffled, smooth and cyan. The awayness of it all, as at the end of despair. A well-neighboured distance; bookended, escorted by giants: significant in its own right but overlooked, overshadowed and, for no fault of its own, just not taken seriously: why would that be me?
There is no life here, but there is otherness and that in itself is exciting. It feeds my curiosity: to go a step further, to move beyond. To tumble on a different axis, to fall upwards; float frozen but not still, to sense a different kind of heat on a newly defined horizon. I expect to be alone here, but I’m surrounded by character: here, in the outskirts, in the slow moving cold, there are others like me: how did we all get here? What projected us into this orbit, so far away, it would seem, from the soul, so within?
These layers, these clouds, these rocks and these crystals, these rings, this ice and these moons, this magnetotail. They are not, perhaps, home, but they are a meaning all in themselves and they are somewhere, beautiful. True.
For quite some time I enjoy this quirkiness and become part of it, willingly, coolly; I relish the arms length attention I get. Nobody knows me here or cares who I am, but my aloofness my look and my languid demeanour are being noted. My hair the peroxide silver of this unbreathable atmosphere and my clothes the black of the all that surrounds me. If you know where I am you can find me and find me foreign and alien too.
Yet after a while I miss the simplicity of warmth. Not that I know what that means, but it means that I’m out in the cold and I want to come back now, closer to home, closer to the sun, closer to people who don’t understand me, closer to something I vaguely remember as love. This strangeness leaves me estranged from myself, and enjoying it now seems an effort. Soon, I know, I will have to let go, and I realise now that I’m not living my life in chronological order. That puzzles me for a moment until it occurs to me that time too is down to perception and there will come a time when it’ll all simply meld into one, as it must.
Entropy.
Out here I thought I felt a sense of freedom until that sense became quite oppressive. That, too, was a surprise. And so I let go. Slowly, at first and then readier, more. This is not for me, after all, this agreeable spectacle, this isolation: it could quite easily turn into a habit, a mannerism, a cliche, a role.
The young man at a soiree (it was that more than that it was a party a dinner or just a drinks) who’d looked at me and said: ‘are you for real?’ That’s when I knew I was in danger of becoming a caricature of myself. And Uranus could be my place no more. I like this now, this clarity, this resolution. This immense relief too, not to have to be defined by weirdness forever. Strange, yes, curious, always, different, maybe (then ‘different’ to what?), but not impenetrable and not obscure. Not even, in that sense, mysterious, really: there are so very few mysteries in the universe, apart from the multiverse of all possible universes itself, and that, too, is only a matter of consciousness and the cumulative number of braincells firing at it: one day it will just be another reality too. Like blossoms, like spring. Like the awakening, too.
I’m getting better at this, being me. This walk seems to be doing wonders…
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus – your friendly moons’ names sound like characters to me, in a pastoral play. Even Titan and Iapetus; they have been overthrown, dwell in the pantheon no longer: neighbours now, living downstairs, or, to wave at, across the street. Your rings, though no more mysterious now than you, are elegant still; and you are inviting too. Against thy will, methinks; like the old rustic who grumbles at first and enjoys the thought of himself as forbidding but turns out to be really at heart rather congenial.
I am at the stage now where I feel there are fewer surprises. Fewer certainties too, and fewer woes. Fewer intransigencies and fewer instances of despair. That can only, I sense, be a good thing. Journeying has put me at ease with myself. I feel millions of miles still away from where I envisage that I should be, but this seems natural now, and of little concern. The hereness and thereness of it all: the potentialities of the potential. The meta nomenclature of the id. The closer I get to being myself, the more I disperse myself across the quanta of energy: thought. Insubstantive meanderings that then turn out to make sense after all. At some point, at some level, in some way. Not conscious, perhaps, but innocuous, calm.
I sit down on one of these rings and let my legs dangle in the brook of what looks like a void from afar that surrounds it, and my toes tingle at the excitement of being and wriggle with a childlike and clean and unjaded joy: they haven’t walked as far yet by far as it seems, they have merely meandered. Over the meadows of this spacescape, this English garden, this Ermitage. I feel my thin body, pale and slender but resilient and robust, as it was back then, when I was a boy. It never preoccupied itself with itself. The etherealness of it all, the curiousness. And always, always the wonder. Nobody joins me, yet, and maybe nobody ever will now, and it saddens me not, I am free.
From where I perch on my borrowed bank, my legs suspended, my hand – the left one – playing with marbles, the molecules, the droplets, the pebbles and the whists of yellow-blue algae that get trapped in my fingers, cool and gentle, soft and strong, my eyes, inclined toward what lies below and therefore what also above, my face reflected (reminiscent, perhaps, after all, of Narcissus, though he, I know, does not belong here any more than he does on Mercury) my lips catch my attention and for a fleeting moment I wish me a one for them to be kissed. The longing, the curiosity, still, and the awe.
I am on the brink, I realise, and at this point, sooner or later, there does come the point where you have to decide. Do you jump, assuming that you will fly, or don’t you, fearing that you might drown. Why do I do this from here, and not where I started? Have I conspired with circumstances to manoeuvre myself onto the fence of a planet whose patron is the god of the farmer of all things to finally return to the George in me and embrace him as much as release him in exactly the same gesture, at exactly the same time, for exactly the same reasons and to exactly the same end? It wouldn’t surprise me. Hardly anything would. The universe finds a way, of that I have long been certain, and whatever happens next is bound to happen, just as what happened before was in its own languid way quite inevitable. All the querulousnesses of adversaries (they were friends in disguise), all the insurmountablenesses of obstacles, varied and frequent and each in its own right unreasonable, from here, from this tholin perspective, rotating at speed, and wobbly, a little bit drunk on the juices of life, but steady and safe in myself now – as far as there even exist such notions as ‘steadiness’, ‘safety’ and ‘self’ – look irrelevant now and benign. My right hand that has been holding on to the ice, to the carbon, the substance, such as there was, in a vain grip on something the brain interpreted as ‘reality’, still, after only another decade or so of faint hesitation, lets go, and, much as expected, I sink not, and nor do I soar: I float, once again, now earthwards, I’m sure.
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
Danik 2016
11-11-2017, 01:38 PM
Hi, Sebastian,
I see "Planet Walk" is progressing. I´m adding a link about some of more recent articles of the "Astronomy" thread. Some of the more recent researches focus on the interaction between celestial bodies and their consequences. Maybe that might interest you:
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?80444-Astronomy/page89
Thanks Danik – that is of great interest to me!
All the very best, Sebastian.
I knew this would happen. I knew I could stay this, but not forever, I knew I would have to confront it, I knew I would not get away with staying away: I’m on my way home. The fact that I entertain a notion of ‘home’ is in itself a symptom of growing up, surely. Growing in. Growing through. Through the crises, the awaynesses of it all, the doubts and the fear.
Between Horror and Terror I stand on the Seat of the Gods and I feel me a warrior. Hah! Who would have thought that I could answer the call. Hold my head high and keep my gaze straight and look upon Earth in the distance and say: I salute thee, Mother, and I charge thee to welcome me back. “Be a Man” he said, and I knew what he meant. No controversy, no hesitation, no confusion and no offence. This rust coloured dust, this thin-skinned robustness. This unflappable sense of the just. Of the righteous. Of the direct, of the cause and the anger. The Anger. The wrath.
The outrageousness of it all. There’s nothing twee about it, nothing humorous, fun, camp, harmless or charming. Ere I lose my sense of proportion I shall steel my spine to this ire. Stupidity, wantonness, cruelty and fear. The stubborn ignorance of greed. The tyrants, the egomaniacal butchers and keepers of slaves. They are an outrage. One as destructive, as unenlightened and as inhumane as the other. There the slaughter of innocents, the imposition of rule; the indoctrination, the violence, the cult. Here the wilful deception, the making of unholy myths, the falsing of facts, the aggrandisations and the buffoonness; the rhetoric, the gestures, the meaningless phrases, the orange, the hair.
The beateous soul in my sinuous body wishes it were not so, but "nature is war," and until I dissolve into the particle waves and the unnamed insubstantiality of connexion I have to make a stand and be counted. Too long, maybe, have I tried to avoid this. Too long shied away. Too long have I hovered above ground thinking it all – the dirt, the blood, the grit (that word I never, ever, liked or was even willing to use), the bone and the marrow, the shıt, the severed limbs, the crushed skulls and the unwanted guts spilling into the mud, the jealous, the mean, the preoccupied with survival – thinking them and it all quite beneath me. It is, of course, quite beneath me, under my feet: will I or no, I trample the trodden no less than the soldiers who scavenge the field, I only know how to behave. Politeness. There is virtue in civil conduct and in a refusal to simply succumb, but form on its own now won’t function. Sad, sincerely, but so.
The scorn. To be put in this position. To not be released. To have to respond. To be set against something so real. So unavoidably ugly. In this land of the alien. On this inhospitable neighbour. My sense of humanity and what I want it to mean here is challenged, de-ranged. I am out of joint but not out of scope. These forces can not be contained, perhaps, but they can be conquered. With spirit, with wisdom, with core. With arguments? No. With reason? Not likely. With strength (not with force) and with purpose. But it is still a war. There are battles that need to be won.
I survey the Plane of Utopia and pronounce this my moment of muster. Here of all places. This desert has nothing that I want to own except my presence, and that is now no longer negotiable. There comes the instance when you know that all else is mist. The haze doesn’t clear yet, in the distance, but I do sense the bridge. This tying together of thoughts with the elements that are also in me, lest I ignore them. The substance that I fashion to my own design. Titanium and graphene. If there be materiality, let it be exquisite, sophisticated and strong.
There is no feebleness in wanting good.
There is no harm in seeking softness. No despair in keeping faith.
There is no shame in hope, no loss of self in selfless love.
Embracing all of it, being it and sending the signal. I take me a clue from the lingering trojans and inwardly smile, even laugh. Haha! Now is the time to go forth. I have no fear and no loathing and nothing to prove. Less, still, have I to lose. I have quite left me behind my despair. I see me one coming towards me whom I may yet be willing to join, or he me, and if that be so then so much the better, there is a lion yet to the eagle, but it is not the content, and not the end, it is but a chance to make some things completer, and I’m sure now of the simplest of things: I am.
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
And so, back. Down. To Earth. Where I belong? This, my home? This desert wilderness of beauty and voluptuousness, this abundance of colour, vegetation, insects and beasts; these cities, these people, these civilisations? This art, these quantities of stuff and rubbish; these tears, these cruelties, these abominations? This joy? These excellences, these wonders? These tastes, these smells, these flavours, these sensualities, these sweet transgressions, these experiences? This catharsis? This messiness, these quarrelsome foibles; these imperfections, these obstacles? And this weather? This air that I breathe, this need to do so; these urges, this hunger, this thirst for immersion, this drowning, these rocks on the road, these symbols, these signs? These abstractions? These metaphors, this poetry, this song and dance? That we make? About what? This love.
Everything suddenly feels disconcertingly real again, and I'm not sure I like it. I'm sure I don't dislike it, not as such, but I find these certainties confusing. These obligations to respond. These figures of speech, these formulations. These competitions for superlatives. These hyperboles. These headlines, these star-ratings, these ceremonies, these awards. These absurdities. These traumas of rejection or attraction, of interpretation of behaviour of looks and of glances, these whispered words, these games I refuse to play. These rules. These obediences, these categories, these schedules, these expectations. These parochial wordlinesses. This world.
This world perplexes, awes and bewilders me. Here I am, stunned to find myself on it, in it, part of it, and I am momentarily paralysed. This will not last, I feel sure, though why I should feel so I don't know. For a long time now I have felt like wading through treacle, slowly, cumbersomely, glued to the ground by a sticky morass that would not let go. There is no escape from gravity in this place, except perhaps on aerial silks and skis. The former are not for me, the latter very much so. I think me on the mountain gliding down the glorious white with the Alps in the distance and the molecules in my lungs, and I know what it is to be free. That I know; that, I can relate to. Everything else does not quite make sense. Which is strange: I've been learning and trying to understand, but it still is mostly as alien to me as the planets from which I've returned, richer in mind yet not much the wiser. At the end of the day there is always the here and now to make something of, and now that I'm here, I might as well make the most of it. Thus I tell myself, over again.
'Most' meaning 'best': meaning all I can do. What could that possibly be? If I allow my youth up to say about eighteen, nineteen — why not twenty-one: if I allow that to be my formative phase that doesn't yet count as my adult existence, then I'm now halfway at least through what my adult existence can reasonably be expected to be: I can still look forward, but as much can I, must I, look back. That frightens the hell out of me. That I'm here on Earth, effectively halfway through – way over, if you're counting from birth – feeling pretty much as I felt right at the beginning, and not having made any impact at all. Not having really moved from the spot. Not having done more than tried, but without ever really succeeding, to take flight. Does that mean it's too late? Is it ever, can it ever be simply too late? But for what? For some sort of attainment, of what? Of acclaim, recognition, notoriety, 'fame'? Or just even of love? Can love be attained?
"Be not afraid of moving slowly, be only afraid of standing still." I want to know what the soul is. At a quantum physics level: the science, the understandable, perceptible, conceptualisable part of existence that is not material, not intelligent, not rational, not emotional; intangible, insubstantial but essential and real. A Quantum Philosophy. I want to know what that is. That part of me that I can't see when I look in the mirror and that I can't choose one of my names to put an identity to, that I can't express in words – and if I write another million or ten – that I sense is forming and taking shape (without shape, of course), that is there and that others, some others, recognise in an instant (others, of course, never will): that is what interests me, makes me curious to go further, encourages me, yet to delve.
And so I take my cue, once again, and affirm: I'm here now. I might as well make the most of it. Whatever that turns out to be: it probably really doesn't matter at all, but for my soul – if nothing else – it's better to sense me alive than just there, more joyful than to reject, to embrace; more gracious to receive what is given with thanks; and wiser to change what I can, but leave for someone else and another time what I can't; more courageous to take the challenge, than to say no; more human, altogether, after all, to say 'yes'.
From EDEN by FREI (http://EDENbyFREI.net)
Hello Friends
I don't mean to hog the forum, but hard on the heels of The Ice King, The Planet Walk has now also come out as a handsome small paperback in the EDEN miniatures series: these are several short stories and texts from EDEN by FREI (https://edenbyfrei.net/), an ongoing online publishing project where they both first appeared. The idea is to make these pieces of writing available for people who enjoy a physical book as much as the words, so they're a compact six by four inch format, generously laid out for a comfortable read, and one can mostly be yours for less than five dollars.
You'll find The Planet Walk on Amazon here (http://amzn.to/2tYql9S), or if you want to support your local bookstore, you can also order it through them with ISBN 978-1-64255-369-7.
9875
And of course, as always, if you just want to read the story you can continue to do so here or over at EDEN by FREI (https://edenbyfrei.net/).
Thanks & Enjoy
FREI
Hello Friends
For those of you who liked The Planet Walk, I've now also released this as an eBook.
You can, of course, continue to read this 'poetic perambulation' here for free, but if you'd like to have it as a neat reflowable ePub on your Nook, Kobo, iPad or otherwise compatible device, in a tidied up and in the process somewhat improved edition, then head over to https://www.books2read.com/theplanetwalk where you have choice of digital stores, including, as it happens, also Scribd.
(I would gladly update the entries on this forum too, to bring the text up to date, but that is sadly no longer possible. If you do want to read the updated version, but don't have three dollars to spare, or have them to spare but don't want to spend them on this, you can also always still read it where it originally came from, at http://EDENbyFREI.net )
Thanks for your continued interest and great support!
FREI
And for those of you who prefer to read your short stories on a Kindle, The Planet Walk is now also available on Kindle here (https://amzn.to/2G2DcJ5).
Thanks & Enjoy
FREI
Hello Friends
For those of you who enjoyed The Planet Walk and would like to own it as a handsome, compact paperback (or give it to someone as a present!) – Amazon are currently running a promotional discount on it, which means you can get hold of a copy for an amazingly modest $2.35. (Amazon set their own prices – I have no control over this – and they do so very dynamically, so things may change any time, but the information is certainly correct as I'm posting this.)
Have a look here, if you're interested: http://amzn.to/2tYql9S
Thanks & Enjoy
FREI
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