This was hard to write, it's probably the most abstract idea I've ever tried to put on paper. I just tried to illustrate a place I find myself in often and don't completely understand.
My pen starts to fly through my note book, bleeding my rants in smooth black ink. The pen races, fingers flexing and jiving with the letters, but my mind is furious on the gas pedal and has lost the brakes. My hand concedes, my pen exhausted, and I lean back in my seat brooding, brow furrowed, waiting for my mind to wear itself out and come back to me. What is this confounding paradox? That which controls my entire body so often loses control of itself.
Approaching half an hour ago I took my seat and smoothed the clean blank pages in my notebook, and readied my steel parker jotter pen. I was ready for the truth, ready to hear it how it is, ready to get it. Then the lies. Palpable lies as if they had walked in the room through the same door I had, walked up the aisle commandeered the podium and has since been vomiting forth through a puppet words that grate my spine. Every bitter word saturated with illusion and a pseudo wisdom that somehow scratches my throat like an allergic reaction. I ask myself, “What is this that it turns my soul hysterical? Why does my soul panic and run to exhaustion? Where is it running to? Or what is it running from?”
Then I was answered. I was answered by a great deepness whispering low in my ear like a sweet lover. I could feel it breathing on me and calling me inward. I began to intravenously break down into myself like origami on fire. I broke down clear out of the room and onto a shore.
I became a spectator. I could see my soul, my mind and emotions and thoughts, wearing a shroud of my body. He was sitting on the shoreline of an island taunting the breakers of a growing sea and staring the sun down fire for fire. That shoreline and its inner expanses were my flesh. The growing see was His kingdom come, the very breath of God, and the voice from the deep was His living song.
Of myself sitting on the shore I could see his history, a content childhood in the bosom of the island ruptured by a natural wonderment that teased him from the island’s embrace out to the borders of land and sea. Along these borders he first heard the voice from the deep. The deep called out a booming whisper that turned his head and closed his eyes, brought him to his seat, and sparked the fire to face the sun. The arbitrary redundant nature of island life became clear and grew more unbearable daily. The deep awoke in my soul a most fundamental longing with no satisfaction to be found on the island. The deep has beckoned him ever since, and he has yearned for its embrace unceasingly, and for its death and satisfaction with mounting hysteria.
Spontaneously he charges the sea with a burning passion so intense the stars turn and cover their lights with their hands and hide it away in shame. He breaks the breakers and joy raptures with the shock of the cold water. Swimming out beyond sight of his island surrounded by horizon and a giant blue sky he begins to dive. He dives to the deep, reluctantly surfaces for air, and then dives to the deeper. Every dive brings him closer to the deepest. Deeper and deeper until his lungs begin to hemorrhage and his skull starts to creak with the deep bearing down on his body. He rejoices is the crushing pressure of the the songs of the deep, a teasing lullaby on shore has taken on the intensity of a choir with voices as loud as the brightness of the sun and clear as the senses saturated in adrenaline.
He stops diving and begins to float, bobbing with the undulating tides. The waves move him with the rhythm and melody of a song born from the throat of the deep. Contentment finally alights on my soul while lying face up upon the songs of the deep, having dived to exhaustion through the crescendos of the roaring abyss.
It never lasts though; my soul begins to cower in the growing presence of the voice and the promise of death in the deep. If he should stay too long the deep will take him completely. He would never return to his diminishing shores, lifeless from the swim, tossed forth by the breakers onto the sand like a piece of gristle falling from the jowls of a feasting lion. From somewhere tainted in his own dark deep his feet begin to desire the firm resistance of standing on his island. The arbitrary redundancy of island life becomes tantalizing and shamefully attractive. He longs to be dry, to wallow in the familiarity and immediacy of residing on the island. His hands yearn to hold matter, to grasp it and mold it into something else. He craves the satisfaction of wielding something solid, sculpting it into a permanent form that he could step back from and appreciate; a form that he could walk away from only to return later to appreciate it again.
He thrashes the surface of the deep in frustration, only heightening his sense of being wet and suspended. The seas grasp on his form further elucidating his own inability to grasp anything of his own in the deep. Shamefully, angrily he sets out on a desperate defeated swim towards shore. Like countless times before, faithful as the tide rolling in, my soul loses consciousness just in sight of the shore and briefly loses himself to the sea only to have the breakers and efforts of his own longing and desire to survive deliver him tumbling listlessly onto the shore.
My soul awakes cathartic with exhaustion and satisfied with coming yet closer to the deep and disappointed that he never really touched it. Immediately he finds his island smaller, blander, slowly being swallowed by the growing deep. Exuberantly he begins to do. He begins to take with his hands and work. At first harvesting that phantom satisfaction that tormented him at sea, reaping its yield repeatedly, growing less satisfied with each season. The calling of the deep never leaves and slowly files away the longings of the island. The island itself also works towards its own destruction, consistently falling short of satisfying my soul’s deepest yearnings, my yearnings for the deep.
Someday, not far off, the sea will completely overcome my island and the deep will rise up on my shores to consume me. My soul will be helpless to avoid its own death in the crushing deep. The deep will extinguish the sun and take my breath. There will be no island to distract me, and no temporal satisfaction to swim back to. I will have only the deepest to finally attain. The rhythm of the sea will take me, and the song of the deep will consume me and break me. Death will meet me at the deepest and clothe me with rapture and fulfillment. My feet will once and for all stand on a new ground salted with the deadly life of the deep's embrace. My hands will be content. My soul at last will be at rest, serenaded everlasting in the bosom of the deep.
