I'd wanted to write a post by now.
I've seen a few suitable thoughts, floating by in this goldfish bowl known as my mind. One today was a small, mostly black, guppy shaped thing with the colours and shapes of bamboo and cherry-blossom hinting and glinting in its scales. Delightful, at first glance. A little one, it nonetheless had a big name and was entitled "Haiku as you name it is not Haiku but Senryu".
A fussy, darting little creature, it really was doing its best to appear interesting and original, but once it realised it had caught my attention, proceeded to pull out a soapbox and placard, at last revealing it's self righteous, neo-political agenda. Not so much a subtext then as a printed text, on the aforementioned placard, along the lines of 'Names are special so get your facts straight'.
Hmm. It did have a point, but had only reached my attention at all through its tenacious and opportunistic parading of itself at the front of the bowl, made possible only by the fact that all my other fish were and are spaced out on beta blockers and blood thinners. The combination is like laughing gas to them and many beautiful, plump, rainbow coloured fish-shaped notions are floating past in an especially floaty kind of a way, but which I mean with no discernible purpose or destination (other than to have a good time and to go with the flow).
I honestly think I saw my sense of humour heading towards the surface with an anti-oxygen mask and a lilo under one fin, off to try dangerous sports, it seems, whilst the first flush of these new medications makes thinking 'outside of the bowl' particularly easy.
The thing is, I see one of these amazing creatures in front of me, ready to be painted into a blog post and have its existence shared, and normally that's all that it takes. Well, that and the spark of an idea, because under normal circumstances a spark of something is necessary to momentarily light up the bowl and illuminate that which is trying to be obvious.
I went and had a clean out didn't I.
I don't think the waters will ever be clean and plain - how boring and disappointing that would be. 'Seeing' the subconscious, the superconscious or the other levels of whatever there might be, would no longer be a matter of conjecture (or hope) based on a fleeting, subjective experience. Rather, the experience would be as plain as seeing, feeling and parading a supermarket trolley from the rack outside of whichever supermarket you wish.
There's a thought. I wonder how many spiritual mysteries and revelations (whoever gets them and however much credence they award them) will one day turn out to be empty spiritual shopping trolleys dumped in the car park of the mind and having at least one wonky wheel that wants to veer off sideways, that type of rust unique to shopping carts that never quite looks like it was made by rain (urine perhaps, or a night in a pond or puddle, but somehow not rain), and, as a final indignity, somebody's used chewing gum badly hidden just underneath the handle.
See this is my problem. The waters of my mind, having had a clean out, are currently rainbow muted and shockingly, breathtakingly beautiful, and I find I am as spaced as my thoughts. Me and the fishes, we're off watching the pretty lights and keep losing out train of thought. Choo-choo; oh no, wrong trains.
Yes I do appreciate that technically the clean out was concentrated on my arteries. Nonetheless, I went into freefall panic. I had a heart attack, for crying out loud, at 4.30 in the morning, from rest, and for no good reason other than genetics, nicotine and the fact that life just isn't fair.
When this poor bloody junior doctor (nice fella, actually) had to give me all the pre-op warnings like (by memory) statistically 1 in 600 angiograms will go horribly wrong and result in stroke, open heart surgery or other little inconveniences like death; when he looked at my stunned face (I was still in denial about being remotely unfit, see) and tried to help by volunteering that they had never had an angio go wrong at Eastbourne, well I guess he wasn't expecting my cynical little brain to think that they must be overdue, in that case, for their one in one thousand and that if my life could go this effing horribly wrong it might not have finished messing me about yet.
In other words I convinced myself that if anyone's angio was going to go wrong, it was mine, on account of how Murphy's Law was dealing with me so far. I went to my angio completely mentally prepared to be wide awake, strapped to a table, watching the X-ray screens as the wedged a catheter up my erm, artery, only to see something essential get punctured or explode or stick two metaphorical fingers up at me and gently cease to function; on screen, on purpose.
Is that a bit of a head fuck? (Pardon terminology).
Yeah, I thought so too. But hey, life (or my body) was already taking the piss more than I ever imagined possible, so why the heck not.
So, not a brush with death as such (although they knocked me out during the second angio so anythings possible!), but at least a solid confrontation, of quite some duration, with the expectation of death; the sensation of being tied to a trolley and unable to do anything but observe as I was wheeled off in the wrong direction. Some might relate that to a spiritual enema. It certainly sweeps away the emotional detritus and lets in new light, but I guess whether or not it counts as an enema depends on where you keep your goldfish bowl.
Not so dark at the moment, then, the waters of my fantasy world/brain currently flash and sparkle constantly like an under-sea version of the Northern Lights and they light up all the little fish, the nooks and crannies, the rocks and plants and it all starts to look like an enchanted forest. I start to see possibilities and ideas and things to record or relate, but then wham, the light itself, rather than the things it falls upon, takes my breath away once again.
I mean wow, it's like a sunset with special effects.
Life, dear friends; (if you don't let it clog up with algae of materialism and other such self deception) life is A1 f***ing beautiful, and interconnected and sparkly and heartwarming and fun. And I'm sorry I haven't answered near half as many of your posts as I've read and I'm sorry I haven't posted.
I've just been too busy being awed at all the amazing little fish, and the lights.........
:-)
9 comments:
A little brush with mortality can make everything so different, can't it? After my husband died, I found I was no longer afraid of anything except wasting time. Time is the only thing we have. I took me a good year to appreciate how beautiful life is, however. You've got a good head start on that one!
Sounds like stimulus overload to me, or acid.
Naaa, I'm kidding you, sounds like, "I've been through hell and survived, and now I'm just glad to be here, appreciative and joyful even."
Take your time and enjoy the colors, the fishes and the light that illuminates your mind. xx
Miss Cellania, she's got it right about time.
Sounds like acid to me, too! Check your prescription.
Dear miss c
I would never dare pretend that my tiny wake up call remotely resembled yours. For a start I've done the 'single parent of (comparatively mildly) traumatised kids' routine. I have no little souls in chaos to bear as loads, no crumbling bridges to cross, no long haul ahead of me. Huge respect to you.
I do feel that the most amazing things in my case are the myriad little 'coincidences'. There are no 'if onlys', as people, items and situations seem to have been slotted into my life with divine timing.
Fineartist - hi hon! Hey at least I broke the writers block by writing about the indecision on what to write about. Hehe.
Steg - sorry mate, I checked, but you did give me a laugh. All these injections in the stomach, a couple of angios and the tablets and I am all bloated and temporarily a good two dress sizes larger at the middle.
I want a baseball cap and a whistle on a ribbon. "Flacc--iiiiiid!!!!"
ROFL!
Where you are sounds amazing and like you should enjoy it for as long as possible. Where you were sounds scary and thank you for sharing. So that I know I am not the only one to have such thoughts!
I loved your prose and am honoured to know your blog is here and to get to read it daily :-D
Welcome back to bloggin with a vengence!
The earthquake here had a similar effect on me, only in my case it had to do with money. I used to worry about money a lot. After the earthquake, I stopped worrying. We had even less than we'd had before - I lost all my jobs except one - but it didn't matter.
Or perhaps it wasn't just money. It was everything. The moment became more important than the long term. LOOK! HERE WE ARE, STILL ALIVE! was just astonishing.
It still is.
But the knowledge that it won't always be so is even more astonishing. It makes every moment something to be savoured.
What an extraordinary gift life is!
You've captured the uncapturable -- or at least you've coaxed the uncapturable to sit still long enough to paint it very well. Nicely done.
You want one brutal criticism?
If you were writing this as an article or as a piece of fiction, I would exchange the "enchanted forest" metaphor for another that's in keeping with the established watery theme.
Now I'm very curious whether or not you're remembering your dreams in this cleaned-out state. Nic withrawal alone is said to bring on very vivid dreams -- I can only imagine what the other factors might produce. Do tell...
LOL Zilla!
Ok consider it an enchanted reef, then.
So, no problem with the spelling mistakes and procreational terminology?
:-)
Procreational terminology -- pffft. As for spelling, as many avid readers will confirm, with the advent of spell-checker, it has become very evident that authors and editors alike are very human spellers -- prone to mistakes like the rest of us. Since spell-checker doesn't understand context or usage, and since editors are very busy having 3 martini lunches, many books and articles are filled with misused homonyms: write, right, rite; to, two, too; their, they're, there; etc. Even brilliant writers aren't necessarily perfect spellers, which is one reason we have editors. It's sad that editors are too lazy to catch what spell-checker misses.
So, no. If there were any words spelled incorrectly, I don't remember noticing, and if I did notice, I didn't give it a second thought.
:-)
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