On Geography and Books

I've been thinking about it for the last couple days. I let the idea sit and I've come back to take a closer look. Well, what could I do without it?My reading history, I mean. I look back upon it and I can't help but notice the motley medley that lays there. A colorful collection or recollection that strangely enough works like a live structure. Oh, but if I stand beside it I can isolate it through the emotional load I attached every reading. Yes, my emotional geography of books, a tender let-go to the beauty of words and the excitement I exuded whenever there was a wow moment happening. I've had my good times and my rough times with books; but they were always there. 

I was a rebellious teenager, despised being one but couldn't let go of that faithful companion that shed light on my utmost aggravating dilemmas. I'm not going to say books answered all my whys or this-cannot-simply-bes but I had a lighthouse in the darkness and I thus I tried to find my way out of the cave, for I just recalled Plato. Any pretense down, books cannot replace reality, but offer an alternative explanation to the painful silences of the world. Don't forget that in front of the most terrifying experiences - love and death - man is mostly silent. And silence hurts. 

So I turn to words, beautifully carved words, nicely arranged in horizontal, parallel lines, in pages that follow one another like in a chase. Oh, but what a fair chase, they begin the chase when my fingers turn them, stir them from that wise stillness to come back to life and impact the human eye. What an odd relationship. You pass them by as if crossing fields of gold and poppy and green and blue and red and black and white. Always at a loss for what they have in store for me. For I know we keep an exclusive relationship, they will share an unique experience with me. I have my own kaleidoscope that I can always go back on. Oh, but there we go: I see hanging shapes, intertwining pages, words that break in whimsical dance of the meaning beyond meaning. I feel like almost landing in a surreal painting and the canvass is me. My books are relentless, they take the time to converse, to exchange lines and I find quite it astonishing to exist under such unusual circumstances. 

"Did you think we were going to settle for seclusion?"

"We're silent only outside humans. Inside them, we're alive and you'll hear our voice"

Scattered Thoughts

***

In their frail grace, greysh trees lean their bare arms towards the sky almost in a painfully silent prayer.

***

Late autumn leaves reminisce of past affections, as they lazily sway and peacefully take their seat on the resigned barren ground.

***
And a train passes by the train I was in and a sense of security took over me. I felt shielded against the outside world. Silly to think, but I almost felt the comfort and the innocent joy of playing hide-and-seek except that I was making no visible effort to hide and there was nobody there trying to find me. But I played pretend for that fraction of the moment.

***
A truely odd episode. Like a maddening tossing of a coin. Always wishing the coin hadn't been flipped. And the afterwards confusion and regret of challenging fate.

***

To Blink or Not to Blink?

Needless to say, I'm a flawed being. I've got into this cruel habit of going back on my own saying. I pick a phrase or a slice of conversation that I then start to dissect. It is an almost involuntary act, introspection just happens; more like the blink of an eye. Oh, that "thank you" I dropped at the station when I got my ticket. Was I smiling?What did the ticket person think of my "thank you"?

It seems like our most logic-based asset - the mind - has its winding illogical ways of selecting the element to be subject to analysis. The trivial has an irresistible charm to me. I can't help but wonder why I choose go back on certain phrases that I already uttered and that I can no longer alter. Maybe the answer lies in the sweet stillness of the fleeting moment, a repeated moment, a moment I try to grasp and release from the clutches of routine, a routine that threatens to wipe away the spark of the moment; a special warm glare that envelopes a routine-like fragment of the day and that I refuse to let go of. That delicate gust of wind and the mild caress upon my face...will I still find its magic years to come? That is one of the many apparently insipid reasons why I go back on my sayings. 

I randomly go back on phrases or words to uncover what I could, should have said differently; how my conscience isolated the moment so as to strip it of its thick cover to reach the essential core, the meaning of it and my corresponding feeling. Therefore, my endeavor is not a qualitative one, but it is a quest seeking to discover the different, the alterity. I'm tormented by this unforgiving god of alterity. If there's any authority of the kind. Should it be otherwise, a new instance has just been put into place. There! My whole concern about "different" is maybe just a regular care to determine possible variations in language, to shed light on that particular twist of phrase that sits comfortably in a shadowy recess of emotional chamber, for I'm emotional when I utter words. And emotion surrounds words like a tender mist, it changes their glow; emotion sets the tone for the perfect word carving. And emotion can be transient and volatile and hard to isolate in words. It takes that tiny bit of time when your eyelashes bow in a flash, in a blink, to freeze the emotion and transport it into what humans refer to as "words". Or maybe let it go to waste instead.