A predatory evening in which tangled thoughts seem to break out into a blog entry. These thoughts are now words, now have a form. Ink on paper. Pixels on a screen. Eternity has a blog entry. Welcome to California.
You are at a tangled wooded place and light is visible in patches. Sense is what you make of it. Feelings are unexpressed, the heart breaks into rapturous song, the mind does not care whether you are in California or Loveland or Tirchurapally. Hallowed be thy name. In the pink of health, blue of your mind, chilled in your heart and bleak in your outlook, you stand in America, the center of America, consumerism ravishing you, smiling all the time to complete strangers, never making headway into talk with anyone, all superfluous things that stay superfluous, mostly a magic light that never diminishes, all the time seeing falling petals that wither away and yet get replaced by morning blooms so fresh that you could faint with their suggestive scents. Frolicking like a baby and dishing out advice like an old man, contradictions seem to be the norm this evening.
Thoughts turn around and greet you like long lost friends.
Like, what happens when you spot your love rushing in thru the front door and, instead of making a headway for your arms, passes right by and out again thru the right door? Not an ideal situation to be in, is it? The mind turns persons into vapor.
As I watch this evening I read Great Expectations, I think, for the fiftieth time since my first reading of the abridged copy in childhood. In California, the sentences take on different meanings. Yet again I am amazed. In this book life’s literary merits are little things, not great plots. Scenes and not ideas. Just as photography seems to dwarf giant things of life, vainly trying to capture the great and the beautiful, into one flashy moment to form a rectangle that was the moment. Speak of trying to capture the moon. My thoughts themselves speak to me of no particular purpose but thank me for staying like I am and always was.
And even Great Expectations falls short of expectations when real life slips you a secret parcel. Estella, the uncrowned heroine of Great Expectations, stands for all unfulfilled desires that haunt humanity, the most painful of which is the extreme yearning of a man for an unreachable woman. The success of the whole endeavour of love which is unfullfillable, doomed from the start, is a plodding exercise in sainthood of unmanageable proportions. All this time you think of the present and the mind refuses to slip back into the tizzy of a plot, and instead slides into a little reverie, disregarding literature even.
You see the golden sunset and marvel at the things that nature gives away without international boundaries.
The whole life seems a sonorous ride.
Everything makes a short song of joy, and while spring seems positively lacking in the air, and the magic of winter seems gone in this understated atmosphere, and the rarified air that you were breathing seems pallid and sunny without purpose, the lack of magic seems natural in this happy atmosphere. Like a stretched out Disneyland filled with shiny happy people, and the atmosphere seems to exist because of the people.
All the time its the rush hour and California seems busy mining gold and not noticing the golden hues of this sunset; and since not finding gold is more of a norm, it is bent on making some of it. Alchemy was a considered a science based on unfounded wisdom which succeeded because it promised the infinite. While gold makers still abound, methods of search have narrowed to more aspiring avenues, and in California the Americans found sure ways to minting money. But I hope the freshness stays. Yet, gold makers themselves turn into base metals, however. Lose a lot of things trying to make a lot of them.
For example, my hair.
A once permanent black now with traces of milky white. Which one is the true color? Age defines the characteristics of many things, not just your hair color. The pink eyed goggles of childhood, the fiery red sunsets you see in your youth, followed by orange hues, blues skies for smooth sailers, and also the occasional cloudy landfills where all desires seem fluff and unreal and unobtainable but in totality all of them mark the rhythm without which you would have done no better or worse than if you had hollow sockets instead of eyes. Real evenings have soft eyes. A kitten stares at you from under the mad orchestra being played all over the world. Its gaze is riveting, but its just a sunset with soft downy eyes.
But I digress about the scheme of things.
Caifornication is essentially an irreversible process, seemingly good, seemingly glorious, pagan, unearthly, ungodly even, but most of all it is yearning for and reaching an end, whatever you define it as. The west ends in California. The west aspires to be California. The sun sets here. At the last stretch of Sunset Strip, LA or Lands End, San Francisco, the country which starts with the torch-bearing statue of Liberty makes its end, a final statement, a glorious 24×7 celebration, a feeling that you have arrived. Beyond this there is nothing to achieve, and the sea stretches out for miles till the land of the rising sun.
The whole of America seems to miss certain important points, especially as the hues of this evening slip away into a darkness of moving lights racing across the freeways. The words of Thoreau are irreplaceable and hence keep on appearing at the ends of all things, such as this blog entry, and still seem contemporary wisdom:
“I do not say that John or Jonathan, that this generation or the next, will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
(Last paragraph taken from the last paragraph of Walden)
