Friday, July 20, 2007

two things..

in (rather schizophrenic) response, as t'were, to my last two blogs, there are a couple 'o things I would like to expline. (Yes, I did intend to write "expline", 'cause if you read it aloud you sound like Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Dolittle). Firstly, it has occured to me that I gave no explanation for Noah (haha) and probably should, as it looks rather out of place :P basically, by two biotches (Rell & Shosie) and I went on a prep. course for an English paper we might me taking next year, & after two days of talks etc. at this rainforest thingy nearby us we were asked to create some form of creative writing relating to said rainforest; Noah is the rather odd fairytale-esque result of my mind when set free to frolick in a humid atmosphere which made me look like some kind of wild bush woman as it does due to the lunacy of my hair. It was considerably amusing. You are permitted to laugh at my misfortune..

so there's your explanation for Noah (to an extent haha). Now for thing nombre two; on re-reading some of my writing, I have encountered the fact that I utilise some considerably superfluous sounding language which may appear superficially to point to some sort of arrogance or snobbery on my part which I must strongly refute, as there is most certainly no causal connection between the two. The reason I often write in a manner which even I will admit may justifiably be described as "like a knob" (quoting only my own paraniod psyche, by the by) is that I quite genuinely just like using words which sound interesting and fit better than others in the context.

Why do I so often find myself explaining & excusing myself for things that I haven't been critcised about? Ah, the various complexes within this complex mind. I'll figure myself out someday I'm sure haha..

have a loverly eventide! (tide being the operative word if you're anywhere near here!)


jo


xxx

on fear

The world, I don’t need to remind you, can be a scary scary place. I mean really. And we all see it, every day; there’s the horror movie of knowing that there are people out there who want to hurt our country for their beliefs, there’s the pressure of the importance of our own capacities, there’s the often constant fear of losing the things we hold closest, the overwhelming, and consequently massively irresponsibly ignored, fear of our effect on the world we live in on a foundational level; the list is colossal. And from this it goes right down to the microcosm of sudden attacks of irrationally intense fear about what we should or shouldn’t wear, or how we look (although that could just be me). What I want to know is how something which (although it can work for good occasionally and in moderation) is largely a negative and damaging emotional influence on us has become so innate a part of human nature. It’s a torturous question to ask yourself because, nervous-laughably, the answer is a considerably frightening one. Now, I do often emphasize my own ignorance, & I will do so here also-any knowledge that I have is acquired from my puny sixteen years of experience (a period of time which has unfortunately not yet proven sufficient to rid me of the urge to put “and a half!” after my age, I might add. After all, I am nearly seventeen. Hahaha. Back to business..), and, although I reckon I’ve spent these first years observing and thinking with considerable fervor (I love that word), I can and will not be so arrogant as to hold any conclusions which I come to as some kind of high fact. They’re works in progress and so attack all you want; that’s what life is for to me at the moment-learning. There it is again! Now I’m covering my back out of fear that post-posting I will be caught unprepared for some kind of moral duel! And here lies my, as usual irritatingly long-time-coming, point. I think that perhaps our fear isn’t as irrational as we consider it to be on an intellectual or moral level; I think we are scared because in creating a society where even our celebrities, supposedly the people we admire and love most (after all we made them famous) are relentlessly criticized and attacked for their appearance among other things, and I’m talking world level problems here, we have built something scary. A society with a fear pandemic, born from some other disorder-so what creates fear? When I last visited my Grandma she gave me some books, one of which was Louise L. Hay’s “You Can Heal Your Life”, a work which explores the author’s belief that anything, including severe and otherwise allegedly incurable illnesses, can be solved by a change in thought patterns. In reading the book, I picked up on Hay’s evident suggestion that what really terrifies a human being is a lack of feelings of trust and love. This concept comes through in her diagnoses & “new thought patterns” and, although I remain unconvinced about her theory’s accuracy on a large scale, I can see the logic in the correlations she makes: if fear can, as I believe from experience it can, be placated by love and a feeling of safety, then it follows coherently that the cause of it must be the awareness of a lack of love and/or trustworthiness in a person’s emotional, political, social, work; life, environment. And here again lies the reason this is a difficult issue to take on-that is one scary answer, because it essentially points to the difficult to refute or swallow conclusion that our society hugely lacks in something as fundamental and, frankly, important, as love. So there you have it-my point at last-I think that we’re scared because we don’t make eachother feel safe in the way that we should and I believe (hope) used to. So, instead of worrying our frightened little souls about it, I would hope that if you take anything from this it is to consider a) trying to change the things that scare you about our society, and b) trying to help yourself and others to feel like this world is and can be a safe, loving place. Good god I’m a hippie.


jo


xxx

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Noah

It’s funny how things repeat themselves. Events cross over, re-occur, the same mistakes peer over horizons so often it’s surreal. But what most people don’t realize (mainly adults) is that the recurrence of similar events is far wider than just the same governments making the same mistakes and causing the same problems on Earth; heroes and coincidence thread through parallel worlds as well as different ages and tap on shoulders and whisper in ears and used to remind people how to think properly. Unfortunately, however, in general people have stopped listening now. You’ve probably heard a tale like this before, these issues probably sound familiar, but sometimes grown ups need to be tricked into realizing things. They’re a little slow like that. Maybe after you’ve heard Noah’s story, you’ll end up a different sort of grown up, the sort of grown up that listens.
There was a world not too far from our own once, just up a little and to the left. The people with the telescopes didn’t see it, because they look with their eyes closed, but it was there. This world, called Liberos, was spherical like ours & had a government. Just the one, for the entire place. It hadn’t always been that way, but at some point someone decided that it would be a good idea. This government was run by four men with beards called Man, Man, Man & Man. There were some specific laws, but most fell under the one “high law”- “obey the four”. Everyone followed it, although they weren’t really sure why.
One of the first of the “lower laws” which the four made when they came into power was that all things that were “wrong” would be destroyed. One of these things was the color green. I don’t really know why the color green was considered evil, but it was, and so every forest, every tree, every blade of grass, was wrenched from the loving hands of the ground & destroyed. Concrete replaced earth. The whole of Liberos was grey and hard, except for one, sacred grove at the very summit of the world, which the four had decided to spare as a reminder to the citizens of the lowly things they had helped the Liberosi to rise above. And (I suspect as was the four’s intention), with the emerald sea departed any mind sets desirous of a freer life, leaving a nation of either lobotomized blind followers or potential rebels oppressed into submission. Gradually the numbers of underground free thinkers shrunk, and most resolved to conform. But the saddest thing of all was that they lost something important; the aching feeling that they used to have when they thought about the green that used to surround them. That faded.
But what the four didn’t know was that the ache wasn’t so easily erased; the green wasn’t gone without a fight. It was furious! And quite rightly so. It was inevitable that soon enough citizens would be born with the ache, but they didn’t know that because their ears only hear people who think they are never wrong.
There was a boy of about seventy-five (nearly twelve in our years) who lived in north-west Liberos with his parents, Woman and Woman. His name was Noah, but that wasn’t particularly interesting. In fact, he was fairly ordinary in most ways, except for his eyes. Noah’s eyes were the color of the deepest, densest, most stunningly intense and alive green that he had never seen. He didn’t even know, because there were no mirrored surfaces permitted in Liberos, but that must have been it. There must have been something calling in those cavernous jewels which transferred itself into his soul, because when Noah heard that after the next Great Somnios (an annual ten day long worldwide sleep interlude in Liberos) the four were going to ceremoniously destroy the final forest, he was immensely negatively effected in an inexplicable manner.
Noah loved the final forest, secretly…he had seen photographs of it on posters around the city and, while everyone around him recoiled in disgust, he thought they were unbelievably beautiful. He had tried to tell Woman and Woman about how he was so happy that it had been kept, but they just misunderstood him, presumed he meant so that he could appreciate the “beautiful grey”, as it was called. Or at least he thought they did. He didn’t want the four to decimate the last precious breaths of emerald in his world, and it was all that he could do in the last few weeks before the great rest to try and think of a way to save the crowd of organic pillars from execution.
Whether it was the silent darkness, or the isolation, or whether that last day happened to mark, along with the culmination of his previous frantic contemplations, just the right time for the answer to appear to him, that first hour of the Somnios was when it happened. It suddenly occurred to him what the cause of it all was. He remembered what Woman had once taught him about how for everything that someone does there’s a reason, she called it an “incentive”. And that if you took away that reason, the thing wouldn’t happen any more. And during that first hour, Noah figured out what the four’s incentive was. It was the fluttering, glimmering, golden sleaze that clung to everything it came into contact with like grease. It was money.
It seemed like a wild thing to do; refreshing within the suffocation of his world. “Lunacy” they’d call it, but was it any madder, crazier than how they dealt with things? A consciousness with room to breathe. Sudden outlet. And so out he walked. He didn’t creep; there was no need-no one ever even considered the possibility of deviance by then. And it didn’t take as long as he had anticipated. I suppose when you’re so familiar with something, its so integral, you know where to find it. Good thing the four were so pedantic in meticulously arranging where it was to be kept-ha!-they even had gigantic mustard yellow signs marking them all off, inadvertently leading him on his pilgrimage to save his own existence, his last line of hope, line of battle, only choice. And once it was all gathered (in anything he could utilize as carrying implement), he harnessed one of his world’s natural powers, fire, to eliminate it all.

The flames victory danced around the pathetic papers, decades of suppression finally rightfully released, and within a matter of hours it was a page of the same puny weight in a history book. He felt safe within the elastic of the anarchy which held its breath for the next days. What would everyone do? What would the banks do? What would the four do? In the days that followed he was relinquished a choice-he could travel to the forest and watch the repercussions of his victory from afar, or he could return to his parents, his room, and life, and simply blend in and watch it all explode like fireworks right in front of his eyes – beautiful, shocking, correct. The money was gone; what would they do? His boat, he stayed to watch it sail.


jo


xxx