When The Time Comes
A longer read
The air had stopped what felt like an age ago, we were figures in formaldehyde, my damp clammy skin, the moisture clinging in the airless air making every step a giant leap into space, a wade through water up to the waist.
Everything was noisy, an incessant hum of traffic inside my head, gnawing away, drove after fuckin’ drove of car engines, overheating and sweltering hot. You could poach an egg on my skin if you really felt the urge to and if you happen to cross my path now with an egg in a basket. In fact, if you crossed my path now you could boil an egg if you like inside my mouth because it would be open so wide with the sheer dumbfounded shock of seeing you, my mouth would have opened so wide that you could climb inside yourself and cook your egg in my saliva and then curl up to shelter and sleep until the night dropped and the coolness came and your dinner went down and you felt strong again, jumping out of my still open mouth and trotted briskly away into the blue night, just another apparition dreamt in my twilight years.
I’m not interested in aesthetics, histrionics or pyrotechnics. Please don’t give me a show or bravado, acting or egotism, don’t give me a shell because shells can be cracked far too easily. Give me the yoke, give me the protein, the stimulation, and the energy from inside you and feed my endless mouthfuls until it’s my time to go.
Sometimes I drift and sometimes I wander. I ask myself when I drift, “Am I wandering?” And when I wander, “Am I actually drifting?” What constitutes which? Do I have any control when I drift, do I have the ability to turn a direction, to go left or go right? When I wander is it with a subconscious objective to get somewhere or am I just drifting? Are my footprints deeper, and more defined when I wander? Can I trace where I’ve been and perhaps where I am going? Could you commission a Government study wasting thousands to work out if there was a pattern in my behaviour, in my wanderings? If they were defined or languid, could you work out my average speed or the ratio of my lefts to my rights, my correct decisions to my wrong decisions? Is it possible to analyse my personality or my ambition, my state of mind through the depths of my shoe print and the space between each stripe in the worn dust? Could you examine the forces of science in your experiment, is it possible to work out if perhaps I could cover a larger land mass if I drifted compared to wandered?
Closed petal daisies fleck white and shocking pink across the ragged meadow.
The sky was so pink that night. Surely that’s not right, the city sky is pink? Yellow streetlights and the black abyss of the empty moon night sky don’t make pink. Yellow and black in my book have always made black again. What’s happened to our ozone that makes the sky in my city pink, pink like the artificial pink of marzipan or the dirty pink of seaside candy floss? The only thing I guess is that at least it sat nicely with the artic blue painted walls in my Georgian flat that I rented in the centre of town for more than the world’s poor earn in all their lifetimes. Fuck the relativity of it all, the here and the there, the us and the them, what I pay for a roof and some nice thick brick walls to house me is obscene. The first greedy money money-grabbing contortionist dumb wit is gonna get it from me in the next life, the anti-Robin Hood taking from the comfortable to give to the rich and making them poor in the transition. In fact, the first person who said, “No way, my goat is worth at least three of your chickens”, is also gonna get it from me too. I’m a firm believer in everything evening itself out, but you do question it sometimes don’t you?
Last night’s sunset was nothing short of awesome, an outrageous feet of nature, a salmon ripped open by a bear, sliced with razor claws and pulled apart with an ice clean fresh mountain river. Flesh was strewn across the sky electrifying the early evening, what did I do to deserve such a spectacle, such a delight sweeping over me and through my Sunday bloody Sunday soon be Monday feelings? When the Monday bloody Monday comes around and I can no longer pull myself from the safe haven of my quilted bed before dawn to suckle from quietness’s nipple, I find myself outside bathing in the pure golden light of sunrise scrubbing away my sloth. I could stand here on the newly re-laid pavement and stretch out my arms in grandeur Messiah fashion claiming both salvation and redemption in the same stirring morning chorus to the passing commuters doing their best to darken the beautiful sight of new life with their cars. Don’t they realise the magnitude of a moment like this, at how it shapes theirs and my day, at how it can pull the corners of their mouths upwards into what was once known as a smile for even the smallest, briefest of moments… don’t make me laugh.
Did you know that your nostrils regulate your feelings? It’s one of life’s yins and yang’s. Nostrils are like the moon and the sun. When the left is flowing freely then you feel awake, alive, active; when the right is open you feel drowsy maybe, a little tired, a bit lethargic. The left is the lunar, and the right is the solar. They change in 45-minute cycles, sun moon, light dark, peace noise.
Try standing on one leg with your arms up in the air, first your left and then your right. See if you discover the urge to fall, to sway unsteady, that your arms come down to right the wrong, to balance the equilibrium. Now try the other leg. See how you feel. More stable, more settled, and buoyant? That’s what it is, isn’t it? Stability in an unstable land, the pushing and a shoving of ignorance. When you’ve had enough put both legs on the floor and put a finger to the nostril, find out which is more fluid, where the breath is a wind that blows freely through the canyons and the deep inner caves of your skull. If it’s the right, did you fall when standing on the right leg? If it’s the left one, did you stutter and sway like a tree in the breeze? Did you feel more content if the left was open, like you could have stayed happily balancing like Nelson for an age? If it was the right did you fall the moment your free leg was raised, the shudder of the internal earthquake erupting and dispelling any grandeur plans of ease and stillness?
I don’t know the answer, it’s just an experiment to play on yourselves rather than the ones you play on small rodents and fluffy rabbits with cute tails and pipettes of shower gel in their glazed frightened eyes. The one thing that I do know for sure though, is that if you find one of your nostrils stays open continually, then death is imminent.
How long does it take to cook your evening meal? Two minutes in the microwave with Quikcook Rice®? Three minutes in the saucepan with Plastubber Pasta Shapes©? 45 minutes in the oven once you’ve removed the clear protective covering of the heat-proof tray? An hour chopping and stir-frying vegetables in your delicately crafted organic homemade sauce? Three hours slow cooking the beef joint in the furnace, boiling the potatoes and peas and carving the meat from the fat?
How long does it take you to eat what you consume… five minutes, ten, twenty, an hour,? Making its way inside your temple-like body that you worship, chewing to soft pulp the tasty morsels that slide snake-like down your tubes into the intestine and filter through the inner universe serving and feeding your sun and your oceans and your ozone layers and trees and fields and flowers. Digesting the food until it finds its way out again, meat seventy hours, fruit twelve, veg twenty-six, water three, Devon clotted cream toffees ninety-six. All popping out and fertilising the soil and the earth, mixing with the rains and the sun’s energies to warm and feed and nurture the seed dropped much like yourselves, developing the young into the mid-life spread and the culling, vibrant lush green beans, succulent ripe juicy apples, healthy content fattened cattle, that grew over a summer or so, harvested and packaged and sold to you to eat and consume without even a moments acknowledgement and satisfaction of Adam and Eve and evolution. Now tell me where time exists and how. Which is the more important to you now, the chewing and the scoffing and the full belly or the growing and the elements? You are what you eat you see, you eat what you are.
I feel melancholy sometimes, childlike almost and innocent.
The night brought amazing stars drawing pictures, so many… one bred another and another until the sky was white instead of black, telling stories in braille. I traced the Plough with my index finger, Orion’s Belt with my forefinger, the Bear with my ring finger and the Nike swoosh with my little. I played with the brush of the stars and drew calligraphy for you, sending you messages from afar saying that I loved you. Astrological smoke signals from one continent to another, heart beating like a tribal drum boom boom boom. Carry me home I sang out loud with lungs swollen, full of life and passion and tenderness. I traced a picture of you and named it Muse so wherever I was, wherever I wasn’t, I could get its baring and inspiration, and in return. I could give you comfort and a hug and tell you that you are beautiful.
I play with my hair maybe because I am bored. How can I be bored out here, with an air of eternity compared to the nine-to-five you’re competing in now? Where night and day are irrelevant, my body clock is all that matters and all I listen to, tick tock tick tock tick tock, feel like waking feel like sleeping feel like eating feel like shitting feel like walking feel like resting, knowing exactly where I’m going know exactly where I’ve been know what I’m gonna do to wash away my thoughts.
If only people were open and bright, like parks.
Do you believe in karma, the universal laws of cause and effect? It’s a great big song of call and response, a slave chant to an internal bliss, a lullaby to peaceful sleep at night, no restless tossing and turning and vivid dreams. What you reap is what you sow, you are the farmer I have been told, plant the seed today and your flower will come tomorrow. If you water and nurture and talk to the budding egg of life then lucid silk petals will appear fragrant in your palms. If you neglect and disdain your seedling, fowl-smelling disease will form and spread, one day catching you unawares like a common cold in the night. If you throw a small pebble into a dawn-still lake the ripples will emanate until they peter out before reaching the shore. If you throw in a boulder the waves will flood outwards until they catch the boundaries bouncing back to rock your boat unsettling you. If you whisper a poem in your lover’s ear, they will smile like a bird at the first glaze of sunrise, if you shout a repulsive lie they will hurt and cry like an orphan. It’s all about waves, sound waves, electrical waves, so why not thought waves, you send out bad waves you get bad waves back.
I play with my hair just above the ear, the matted strands feeling like carved wood, like creepers, branches, roots, feeling their way along a trunk moulding, shaping and growing. If I sit here long enough, they will entwine their selves around by head and bones. I would become a lost temple deep in the jungle that was my civilisation, my mental state a trance-like statue of virtue and love radiating understanding and knowledge. For what is there to know other than just being and breathing and feeling the elements? What I don’t know, I don’t need to know. How can I miss something that to me does not exist? I could sit here for eternity, or I could sit here for a day with the same outcome if I let myself. I could die this very second, or I could die in a thousand years and come up with the same answers to the same questions. Come on, ask me a question and I’ll tell you the answer. I’ve learnt as I’ve gone along, not just in this life but in previous. Don’t ask what or where or who I was because I was just me, the same as I am now and the same as I was then when I first hatched from my mother’s belly and my father’s arms, sometimes showering me with love, sometimes banishing me away so that I fended for myself in whatever environment I was thrust upon. That was why I was so little afraid to step out of the door and come here, into this furnace, this abyss, the arid landscape of the modern world we all live in. I learnt to surf the waves of life, listen to the currents and the melodies of situations and scenarios. Let yourself go on the thermals of everyday life, what comes along will come along. I remember once when I was walking feeling just for a split second a true sense of peace and tranquillity, like I was both invincible and venerable at the same time, an intensely magnified state of humbleness and freedom. I had no ties, no burdens no need for a thought process just for that moment. And now three years after it appeared and went again in the same breath I can call it back again at will, that same feeling, though externally rather than internally, more a memory than a return to salvation. That’s what I said to myself at the time, walking is salvation. I could remember the quietness of the desert at will also. I could before I returned here, another reason why I was unafraid to venture out from wood and stone to sand and sky. The unequal sound of silence carried on the breeze.
I needed to put it all together, test my will and wares in the last furlong of life’s gameshow and theme park. I used to walk down the street, seeing myself as if I were in a film, like I was in slow motion and you were normal speed, I would view you as celluloid observations where I was the cameraman, and you were the extras.
I had this wicker rocking chair once. I knew the roll of the chair and I trusted its movement and motions. I used to sit in it and listen to music, from punk rock to jazz and I would rock back and forwards in whatever emotion I felt. After a while, I would find that I would always reach the same point of equilibrium, the same back the same forward, like the underlying current of the music was the same. The ancient sound of Om is, apparently, the sound of the Universe. One tone made up of 8 sections that can transform into any sound wave present and past. What you see within the structure of a symphony, a tune, a note, the echo is always the same. It’s a vibration rather than a melody. Are we all one?
There is something going on, things shifting like plates beneath the ground, making me feel sick. My head is like a jumble sale with nothing to sell.
Rain stirred up the air like smelling salts. Huge droplets of water splattered the earth, exploding into tiny king’s crowns, large drops dividing into small drops allowing the rain to cover a wider circumference with its unexpected splendour. The sun’s rays painting a thousand rainbows, each spear of water a kaleidoscope of colour as the light caught it in mid-flight. The sound was incredible. The only noise I had heard previously had been my footsteps, my own breath and that of the desert, whipping up dust with a sudden swoosh of activity. The silence broken with such an intensity I covered my ears to abate the noise. I soon drenched in seconds, standing looking upward, hands on head, then hands and arms outstretched upward in holy thanks. I said prayers and thank you’s to any Rain God that was listening. I cupped my hands and scooped warm rainwater into my parched mouth dribbling over cracked lips. My shirt and cotton trousers became my skin, moulding their fibres against my shrunken torso and legs, the contours of body and muscle wrapped as tight as a cigar. I hadn’t been out in a storm, a torrent of water for twenty years or more and the feeling was exhilarating. My skin tingled, the pores opened and breathed and lapped up the moisture. Tiny tongues reached out and pulled the water towards their wells of excitement, they became dromedaries soaking up all they could get and store. I untied the caps of the water bottles and filled them to the brim. I took off my shirt and tied it around my neck so my body could become a sponge. My shirt, an animal skin water bottle collecting as much liquid as it could, dripping behind me like a cloak.
One day I saw a figure in the distance, it wasn’t a trick of the light I’m sure. It was there for all to see, except there wasn’t anyone else about but me. I caught the figure out the corner of my eye at first, I’m so used to seeing nothing move out here that it both startled and frightened me. it walked along the horizon for maybe three seconds and then was gone, faded into obscurity and myth. I’m sure it was there, I can place my fingers apart to measure the distance it had travelled and then disappeared. To where? Into my imagination? My staring pupils? The distance, that vibrated and swelled? The horizon that pulsed like a rope flicked between two ends, two people, two poles, a flick of the wrist, a wave made, a beating heart, a life support pulse, a thought wave, that yes, I had seen someone else out here. How much would that affect me, psychologically, knowing that I was not alone? Would I regret not going after them, not just starting to walk in their direction, trying to catch them up, talk to them, look in their eyes and see my reflection in the pools of water of another human being? But I didn’t, I stayed where I was and just stared, not for long, and then I turned and continued in the direction I’d been heading, away from the form, the footsteps, the connections.
If the hair is supposed to clean itself with its own natural oils after three months, how come you’ve never seen a vagrant with flowing shiny locks?
It’s about space and being in control. It’s about the actual volume of space compared to your concept of its volume. Claustrophobia doesn’t exist in a physical form, it’s another illusion, an optical one like the vase and the faces. There is no space, I mean what is space, absence? Space is nothing, right? if there is nothing between us there is space. If you want more space do you mean you want more nothing? Do you see what I’m getting at? The distance of space doesn’t exist, it’s a concept, a km away is actually not. There is no distance between you and a loved one, the sky is the limit because there is none. I thought of space once, and being apart, and actually it wasn’t the space bit that was the problem, it was my senses, it was my sight and my smell and my touch. I longed to see and to smell and to touch that person, that beautiful person, but there wasn’t any distance because there was no distance. The illusion was by body and mind, working together to acknowledge a connection. The body and mind wanted something physical, they wanted the hardest, heaviest, fullest thing they could find. They wanted confirmation in black and white of what they knew and how things worked for them. To them, it was about chemistry and biology, not physics and philosophy. They hadn’t read the Tao Te Ching or The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, they had read the tabloid press and trash novels. To them, it was all shapes and colour, all sugar and spice and all things nice. They hadn’t walked out into the wild and felt the presence of nature, they weren’t in awe of the fiery amber red of autumn other than it was a nice colour. To them, the pink blossoms of spring were just that, pink blossoms, not the birth of a nation. To them north, south, east, west were directions, not illusions. Stand in a direction and turn, go on, does that direction change? you’re still pointing away, aren’t you? Sure the view has changed but you’re still the weather vein, still the arrow. We’ve made north up. Go east, what happens when you get all the way round the earth, still going east are you? What happened to west, did you miss it? It’s on the map isn’t it, so where did it go? Gone, just time the space in between you and me. See, I’m a conjurer, I make things disappear. For my next trick, I’ll be gone and all you’ll have is these words and if you just look for the physical, the chemical, the biological, well, they’ll be empty words won’t they.
Pebbles from the sea, tossed and turned and smoothed. We were all jagged once, now we are smooth to the touch and shining.
All my thoughts have bare feet. They are real and uncovered. They are fine warm sand and dew-wet grass, they are tarmac and gravel, wood floor and carpet, they are your feet on mine, and I threaded, through the eye of a needle an idea, that if it worked would be astounding. Imagine that whatever is going to happen in your life you can see already. Not by predictions or palm reading or astrology or Krishna’s palm leaf readers. But in another way. By what goes on around you, by street names and book titles, by songs and music. By symbolism of actions and situations. By birds and by animals. What happens if you look back over your life when, say, you reached 30 or 40 and what was happening now you could map out by what had gone before? That your partner was a character in a book that you had read when you were a teen. That your relationship ending could be predicted by one plant living and an identical one perishing. What if everything you did, read, walked, wore, listened to, looked at, what if by all of it, you were painting by numbers your future. I did. And I placed together the hours and days and weeks ahead, I threw balls backwards in time and they bounced off things and landed in the future when they should come to lay. I shouted at the walls and got an echo back that disappeared out of sight at the date of the birth of my child. I walked through parks and listened to bird song and predicted deaths in the family. I know where I’m going and the paths to take by looking at the stones to step on. I watch, I observe, a write the future that has already happened.
I stared Pluto in the eye. Not flinching. Not moving. Not speaking. Someone has to stand up to it, it might as well be me. You see, I understand, I understand that it’s nature and nature takes it’s course, it’s evolution, it’s Darwin and Attenborough, it’s duality and life after life after death, but still enough was enough, it was hurting and taking people I loved so I decided to take a stand again evolution, change its course, make it understand compassion like the Buddha does and the Daily Lama writes about in its papers. Nothing happened for a while, except we both stood there, toe to toe, breath to breath, cold and hot so a mist floated between us like dry ice, the chemical reactions of the questioning of nature. We didn’t actually need to say anything, it was a feeling between us. You see, we both knew each other was right. Pluto had taken too much, and I knew it was just doing its job. But jobs can come to an end, and it had to be now. I could feel Pluto retreating, just ever so slightly, not even an inch, not even a movement, but just by a thought in my head. It was backing off because I was bold enough to stare it in the eyes and say, “Enough”. And if I’m honest, although I was brave and determined, I hadn’t expected it to work. Not that I didn’t hold the courage, the erect spine, the steel to do it, I just thought that nature would hold too much resolve and reason. I was earth, fire, air, water and ether. Chi, Ka, Fü, Sui, Kü. And I stood firm because Pluto was only one of these right now and he knew it.
I walked today, yesterday I didn’t, nor the day before, I hadn’t walked for a week. I was tired, very, and frustrated, exhausted in fact. It was both physical and mental, my mind couldn’t take another step, so it didn’t. It stopped so I did too. I let it stop, right there where it wanted to, my mind was in control more than I was. We’d stopped by a river which made me laugh because the river was moving and now I, we, my mind and I wasn’t. What the river and I had in common though was that we were both running. Me away from society infrastructures and systems, and my mind away from me and my wanderings. It was a battle, which was half the battle. My mind was the society, it had been cattle herded into one pen after another, door open door closed, one view to another, one opinion, one landscape, one mind. So we stopped, my mind and me. Now, I know you’re thinking, that it should be me and it, it’s me and I’m in control, and now I’m acting all schizophrenic, shifting the blame from me to my mind but I know who I am and what my mind is not, and that’s part of the reason I’m out here now, why I’ve stopped by this running river because I don’t want to run any more. My legs are tired, my mind is tired, my clothes are threadbare, and holes are appearing. I’ve scraped my knees too much lately and they’re raw like tears after betrayal. I’m fed up with running like you all still are. Now I’ve stopped, now I’m walking wherever I need to go, me and my mind out here alone, sometimes it leads the way, other times I do. It matters not right now because I’ll win, in the end, when the mind gods allow, when the respect is due and the bill is paid, when I can stop the river running in the direction it wants to, into the direction I want it to. But now, now we sit and I dip in my feet, sore and calloused, heels hard like a tough leather belt and for once I have to agree with my mind, it’s nice here. And you see that’s the problem, why the mind wins a lot of the time, all the time, it’s looking for nice things, something to please and stimulate itself, it doesn’t care about karma or the future, the point of all of this, it only cares about gratification.
Hego and shego, as long as they are happy, I’m happy, or at least I was until I saw the light coming in from twilight ending, dipping behind the hill covered in pines up in the valleys of the mountains, spraying out the final rays of yet another day of acridness. Somehow that evening the last rays hung in the air like a sparrow hawk, hovering on thermals, waiting. Somehow, they were searchlights illuminating what hadn’t been there before. Somehow this time, instead of twilight fading and darkness zipping up the day and its thoughts, this time twilight glowed like fireflies way into the night. I had caught its wonder in a jar and let it show the day for what it really was, an illusion, thoughts made from other thoughts made from the ego’s insecurities and manic behaviour. The make-up of words, the fancy dress of tribes and tributaries. Everything was ugly because everything was lying. I vomited. I remember that very clearly. I’m not sure if it was a revolution at everything around me or at myself being high-jinxed into this facade, but I’d vomited. Was this what was supposed to happen at a moment of enlightenment? The spewing up of the guts of illusion? I remember waking in the morning wrenched. It had been a shamanic ritual of purging. The inside had become the outside and the twilight had become the insight. When I woke, I was where I’d fallen, first to my knees and then into a foetal position. After so long away, that was it, I was home. I’d smiled before my eyes closed and the light shut the cupboard of its revelations with me inside. I’d curled up, doors closed, cupboard barren at last of empty jars and open packets. For the first time in an age, I wasn’t an item on a supermarket shelf, for the first time in an age I wasn’t even the shelf, holding something up, false packaging and marketed, for the first time in an age I could close my eyes and sleep.
Quite a staggering amount of emotion. An electrical storm. Innards unravelled like Christmas tree lights; each stress lit up for everyone to see.
Trussed up, like a hog on a roast, a turkey thanking giving. That was my mind, but now it’s free. I cut the string before it broke through the skin and dipped itself in red wine. Before it lacerated my morals and conscience. I could feel the butcher of life take me early while I was still trusted to be naked, picked from the cot as the first bind was tied around my tiny little wrist. I cried, they thought I was hungry. I wasn’t. He pulled the twine, the swine, down to my soft baby ankle via my tiny baby waist, once around the mulberry bush and downwards. String in the grip of the fist and pull. I cried some more, and continued to cry from then until yesterday, when after years of trying to break free, years of gnawing away at the constricting cat’s cradle cage of butcher string, my teeth had met and my arms and legs fell apart like a rag dolls’. Circulation flooded in and the current whipped me up into a life of blue sky and twinkling stars. My vision went 360, my toughened skin, and my parted hair grew wild. The brand guidelines were ripped up and free will appeared like Hayley’s comet, blazing through the once ink-black sky illuminating with a fire-burning olive branch of hope.
All you need is un-condition-all love, un-condition-all love is all you need.
How come you can look into a cat’s eyes and see unconditional love looking right back at you and if you try it with another human, you get a faraway look that you know can’t even see the horizon let alone you. It’s the trussed thing. All this emotional baggage, all these conditions and rules and reasons, all these reactions to inactions, all these schedules and diaries, all these notebooks and fodder. Well, if all this can’t look you in the eyes and say I love you unconditionally, I can.
The night brought amazing stars drawing pictures, so many. One bred another and another until the sky was white instead of black, telling stories in braille. I traced the Plough with my index finger, Orion’s Belt with my forefinger, the Bear with my ring finger and the Nike swoosh with my little. I played with the brush of the stars and drew calligraphy for you, sending you messages from afar saying that I loved you, astrological smoke signals from one continent to another, heart beating like a tribal drum boom boom boom, carry me home I sang out loud with lungs swollen, full of life and passion and tenderness. I traced a picture of you and named it Muse so wherever I was, wherever I wasn’t, I could get baring and inspiration, and in return, I could give you comfort and a hug and tell you that you are beautiful. Yes, I know I have said this before.
Sometimes I don’t connect with being human. It’s almost a denial. Based on how disconnected I know my fellow humans are from the world around them. Maybe it’s also the lack of interaction with others, being on our own now, no artistic culture, no conversation. The mind and body cannot help but soften and begin to morph with the surroundings, and in this case, isolated merging with the immediate environment.
It makes you wish humans had done it earlier as a way of salvation. Indigenous peoples were telling us this - go back to the old ways, be with the earth. But it didn’t go far enough, quick enough. And some may say it didn’t actually happen at all. But look, now there is this bonding that has happened naturally, unconscionably, that the world of humans files away from the psyche and merging takes place. You are what you surround yourself with. Your environment. Your peers.
When he Time came, everything changed. Not straight away, not quickly, but definitely.
Catkins fall as mulch and, through the goat wool sky and above the thousand tones of green, the distant smouldered this evening. A blackbird wrestled its way out of the hedge, calling aloud as it fled across to the far trees, singing, “I. Am. Free.” Branches flecked with light, a past half-moon idled into the sky, again.
The credits etc.
Words by Simon McClelland Morris