Thursday 29 March 2012

Seven Wishes V

Then I was a mommy and you were a daddy…

Then I was a bunny and you were a grasphopper…

Then I was a bandit and you had to catch me…

Then I was a fireman and had to save you from an all devouring hellish fire…

Then you were the Uncaused One, the Almighty King of Kings, and I was your most cherished creation…

Then I was a guard in a death camp and I had to separate the people…

Then I was a prison without inmates, a play without actors, a song without notes, a forest without trees, a poem without words, a…

Monday 26 March 2012

Seven Wishes IV

He was a perfect stranger, a complete unknown. An apparition on the streets… occasionally seen on timid corners, conversing with bizarre types. A man sitting alone in dusky corners in destitute cafes, silently writing in eccentric hand. Some say he was a treacherous madman from uncharted provenance, others rumoured of a brilliant holy man. He had no alias… he was an alibi. He was a sailor who stood on deck at night, whistling strange songs from his homeland… some say he had killed a man in the Northern territories. He was a sentence where every word and position had a meaning… he was a language that was heavily mortgaged. The nameless actor had brought the house to unstoppable tears; when they searched for him in his dressing room, he was gone. He was a desert sunset (again).

Thursday 22 March 2012

Seven Wishes III

To be… a Masked Avenger, wreaking havoc on our foes, letting slip the dogs of war. Smile as the cruciation commences, scratching our cruel red beard. Then, laying low in the desert with a fretless banjo and a nest of rattle snakes. Singing ‘O velveteen moon, shining pearly light on a drunken whore…’ The perfect savage barbarism, acted out in psychopathic cool, plagued by laughter and insomnia. (Who will sing the praise of Evil?) Let’s escape, over the wall, behind our glasses. ‘Plush Rabbit, your punishment has been suspended, in the light of your great merits for the case.’

Friday 16 March 2012

Seven Wishes II

To be… a creaking fence & a painless shed. A revolutionary pamphlet, defaced by moustaches. The fly, trapped in amber, then a fish deep in the ice. An unarmed smile, worn by an atoll. White Shadows, chased by tequila. A small group of people. An honest man.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Seven Wishes I

To be... a summer hat in a park in Volterra. A mysterious, unplayable instrument. A fearless monogram. A skilfully drawn knee on blue paper. Ancient patinated bronze values. The reflection of a tower in a river. A very slow ship.

Monday 12 March 2012

Remote

It can take many shapes & forms. No one knows what to expect. We had grown familiar with the wild, extraverted lamentations, the brooding, the self-cursing and laying cities to ashes... This last way however, is the worst by far: a complete retrieval into faraway nothingness. 
 
Bleak reclusiveness had come again… And I have institutionalised myself. I needed to. I had to keep it out… all the filth & ugliness of the world, the aping, the egotism, the baseness, chaos, noise, the whole human stench… To nullify it… both in the world and in myself. The contrast between the Ideal and the daily Practice became too big. Insufferably! I had to not be at the places where I did not belong. And stop being a part of something I could not be a part of. I became a monk, wandering alone in a godforsaken cloister. Averting his eyes from people who aren’t even there.  
Conflict grew of course. It stopped me talking... writing. The human scale would have to be reinstated in my world first for words could grow back. I had to make everything simpler. Smaller. Truer. Stripped of humbug, of synthetic components.

I got back into the cave. Thinking… of colours, shapes and atom numbers. Not of reasons, values or objectives… Oh, to be an animal, pacing through his cage, waiting on nothing. Or better: a non-living object. Just standing on the mantle and go tic-toc, tic-toc... Ha!, hardly! Then to wrap my mind around the declining Universe and be of dreams… silence… visions. Staring at the reflections on a shiny, black, wooden table.
I got away for days on my bicycle. I pruned the trees in my parents’ garden. Read old stories of Russian peasants, dressed in rags, red faced drunk and violent. I transported myself into that world and into myself. Remote... Looking for silence. One with the stains on the ceiling...

Thursday 8 March 2012

Doodles II

History & Biological Evolution is written by Winners. Defeated Civilisations and their Ethos and ‘bad’ (unsuccessful) Evolutionary Designs get lost in the dust… That’s the way it goes. There are no right & wrong.

That said, and hopping on a happier foot: news has reached me (thank you, kind Brother A) that with a previous post, the attached pictures were invisible, and replaced by a big red cross. This was not the case on every computer though: on my own, they were perfectly okay; but on others not. Therefore, on popular demand, I’ll try to post some loose ones.




Wednesday 7 March 2012

Monoliners

What’s the Status?

I have no problem with any religion, as long as it doesn't involve complicated handshakes

On the market of Love, as well as on that of Employment, I play Hard to Get; so far, the yield of this strategy can only be characterized as humble


Nine o'clock and all's we-hell!!!

In my country, there's a saying


Ice on my windows, sunshine in my house

Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov : )


uhn-yoo-zhoo-uhl

Act normal

And Martijn was his name-o

I am the Theory of Nothing


Long Story Short

All People I know are Strangers

Tuesday 6 March 2012

The Rubberplant

(and Other Office Doodles)

Warning to reader: a
ll characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, especially the 'I' character.
Some weeks ago, I went for my Final Trip to the office where I was no longer welcome. The classic case: I had to clear out my desk, in the traditional cardboard box, complete with the carefully acted out tragic rituals. Back home, I threw the box in a corner of the room and chose to forget about it. A box filled with painful happy memories and trampled good intentions. Shite & Onions! The bastard box from the bloody office just stood there, gently beating like Poe’s tell-tale heart. However, today I toughed it out and opened the goddamn box to rummage through it. It was mostly junk and office riffraff. You know what I’m talking about, the usual shit: bled-to-death pens, crayons, notes, pictures with smiling co-workers standing around a cake, a garden gnome snow dome, large plastic beetles, water guns, a Viewmaster...
Amongst the refuse, I found some of the sketch books I had been drawing in now & then. Just to spice up my lunch breaks and ward off the worst fits of despair and boredom. Most drawings are from the middle period of my time at the place. After the first excitement had worn off and before the great Spells of Resentment had set in, when my eternal repulsion of aesthetic falsity became too great to draw at all. I could no longer fight against the visual trap: of people looking solely with their eyes, not with their hearts. This was most conspicuous at a place like that of course: an advertisement agency, where there is no place for the heart at all. And content, poetry and integrity are dirty words. So let’s say most drawings are from 2003 2007. Three books, 200 drawings each. Today, I photographed (in poor quality) a few, not really trying to illustrate a timeline, or themes, or to pin up a story board of 'years at some office' or any corny crap like that. No, just to bring back some of the good things. But if one wants to, he or she can get all that from this. Just look with your heart.
All drawings available in higher resolution (same poor photographic quality though) by e-mail.


Friday 2 March 2012

A Rose by Another Name

They asked me why I wrote in English. I couldn’t say. One never knows… I like to put on this costume, perhaps that’s the reason. To turn into someone else. A pantomime villain with a villain moustache, cape and hollow laughter. Or a stoic peasant leaning on his spade, watching his leaping goats. Perhaps a damsel in distress, an exotic dancer, a negro delta blues picker, spy, whore, pirate, king… Ancient, burlesque, crazy, angry, clownish… or all at once. It’s dangerous. Therefore, it’s nice. However, at times, I don’t like the straight jacket it represents. Then I want to flap my arms and howl with frustrated rage. Get back to my own planet, if there is such a thing. Maybe I don’t like to write in a foreign language at all. Perhaps I shouldn’t. One gets tired.