escape the confines of your fate / don't be a prisoner in someone else's scheme / leave behind and bury what is dead / relief wrapped inside a goodbye / it’s not getting better than this / it's ending one minute at a time / time for putting garbage in its place / quit treading water / get down to rise
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Mental diversion. Escape from the banality, iterations, and rigors of daily life.
Emancipation. An attempt to figure a different reality. To not be a locust in the swarm. Exiled. Forced to innovate, to exist as and by doing so, further defining yourself. To not be impervious to reason.
No matter how regressive hopes and dreams may be, they carry an impetus for a radical change. The seed for a new and more rewarding order. Self-suppression versus self-expansion. Many have given up and arranged themselves. Loners remind them of their cowardice. Charm-free little Jonahs stuck in a bloated whale of mediocrity portraying subcultures as a safe haven. Ostracism keeps them in line.
Sweet, shamefaced smiles perpetrating the charade. Watching the action through binoculars. Each layer of protection adding vulnerability. Minnows swimming in union with a perfected choreography. Wasting time. Depriving yourself of time. Thinking about what so-and-so is doing, and why. Straying away from the close watch on your own directing mind. Exiled. Anyone who has escaped will not be dragged into the world of retreats again – pulled and shoved by artificial appetites, craving self-forgetting. Effortlessly rendered compliant. Refusing to join the witch-hunt makes you the witch. Endless longing, muted instincts, thoughtlessness and laughable priorities.
The Catholic interpretation of wrongdoing and repentance. Yawning gulf of going over the past, over and over. Routinely pre-engineering the forgiveness-seeking stage. Way before the original infraction, sometimes even before its commission.
Fastidious distaste. Willful act of negligence from which absolution is sought down the track. A triage center with never ending bleeding. An urge to fight the death inside yourself. Swiftly moving into mea culpa mode. A river in endless flow. Scarcely anything stands still. Amid this you need to learn tolerance until all things have forgotten you. The nature of the whole has nothing outside of itself. All is as thinking makes it so and a change of place will never go hand in hand with a change of mind.
Nature’s propensity for balance is overrated. Things are forever tipping one way or another. Hypocrite or whore, you have been assigned nothing but a fleeting and brief moment. Jerking to the puppet-strings of selfish impulse. Puppets dangling on their strings. Cut the strings. Stand straight. Do refuse to be held straight. Solipsism and the hope for an early release. Slipping this bodily sheath. No way but out. “Out”?
How prosaic will it be for you?
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The song “No Way But Out” was written as a reminder, an on-going wake-up call.
Naïve and almost romantic in its approach, it has the underlying element of disgust and polemic as the foundation of it. I still think that is important. The last year of the second millennium was a century leap year. Fin de siècle. The world was supposed to end. Unfortunately the world was not ending, just revolving a bit slower. Events in my personal life leading up to the second millennium served as motivation to give in to an insatiable wanderlust. Dissatisfied with the feeling of being captured in a world dominated by vast impersonal forces. Then a great gaping hole was blasted out of my world, which complimented the palpable sense of loss that had laid claim to my life much earlier on. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The grapefruit-like, mossy taste of betrayal in the back of the roof of my mouth. Sometimes beneath bravado there is nothing but self-loathing, fear, and regret. Apportioning blame. The urge to waste breath, cursing the things I could neither predict nor control. It all comes down to gambling – good luck, bad luck – the house always wins. No way but out. Life is brief and largely out of control. “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s light one more.”
Into the unknown. Although I did not have the foggiest bit of a direction, the important bit was to go. No way but out. 6 years later I found myself camping near Uluru, the ancient red monolith. Heat hitting you like burning wall at day, cold at night. There is something humbling about lying in swag in the outback of Australia. The epitome of “out.” Witnessing the sun’s incoming rays reflect in yet to be defined colours at day and watching the majestically naked clarity of the sky at night – the signs of the zodiac as the celestial coordinate system, the galaxies of the milky way, the Crux indifferent to Galileo Galilei’s awe. Rock paintings providing insight into an ancient way of life. The depictions and legends of the mysterious night-dwelling Quinkan spirits. A view unchanged for millennia. Breaking free from the laws of decay as it moves at light speed away from its own future. Time becomes relative, yet still it remains everyone’s master. Ducunt volentam fata, nolentem trahunt. Subsumed into the reason of the whole. Rise.
