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niggle's parish
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christopher@30seconds.org
Oh boy, here he goes again...ranting and raving. Yeah. Going off so to speak. The deep end.
Perhaps it's all the recent rain filtering through the elm branches. Perhaps it's the recent close calls with distant friends. Perhaps it's the shiny, new, clean decanter of gin, but I've gone and hit the bookshelves.
This week:
"It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all around the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out..."
Oh isn't that how all things start? Little leaves in the wind. But they never stay that way for long. Everything has to grow, take in a surrounding, an element. Take a shape of its own until one loses complete control of an idea. It can move into obsession at this point.
Oh, yes, quite easily done.
Long nights become mixed with the hours of the day that follows and soon there is no break at all anymore. No separation. Only the patterns that develop in an individuals head. Patterns longing to rip free of their prison. They demand time. They knock at your temples. They block your hearing and your compassion. They pull you deep inside yourself and there...you will stay.
Fueled by coffee, you can't walk to clear the head. It doesn't work anymore...everything is part of that one, small, leaf. And so you stare at walls that aren't really walls at all anymore but visions shot out of you with the flash, tick, and unpredictability of an 8mm projector spooled with a reel of rotten, dry film.
Eventually you will kill the thing that spawned itself in that brilliant flash of understanding. You will overexpose it and it will become something else. You will write it into a character who will take it away from you. You will place the wrong chord in the right place and all will vanish...poof!
I'm foolish? Try me.
Try it.
Try to close you eyes and not see it.
Try to have just the leaf. One leaf only.
I dare you.
goodnight 6.9.98
