Saturday, July 15, 2006

The Rhythm of Pain


This river flows besides me

This bridge across the river… which I see beyond the horizon

the bridge I want to cross… wish I could cross it

The sun shines right in front of me… I wish I could turn my back to it

but this hole in my chest…

… and the bullet inside it

Like pain, death follows a cycle. The Death Cycle. Somewhat similar to the water cycle that we studied in school. Water evaporates. Gasses rise. Then clouds become. Condensation. And the free flow of the power of nature. Pain does the same to you. I ll refer to pain as death hereafter because:

1.I don’t see much difference between the metabolism behind the two.

2.after a certain intensity, both give the same sensations.

Death makes a droplet out of you and makes you a part of this whole gas-water-gas-water-gas never ending vicious cycle of concurrent loss and gain of ideological and physiological structures. One moment I feel an intense energy inside me. I feel like a pressure cooker. Like the whistle on the pressure cooker which functions to remove the extra pressure from the apparatus so as to keep it going, I feel my fingers performing the same task for me…letting out some bits and pieces of that pressure, the minimum amount which needs to be released to keep me going straight into the second round. They (my fingers) shiver with the outflow of pressure. The intensity makes them pain…but who cares, there are more important things to be worried about. Then my nails get active. They move towards my other body parts, very subtly, not letting me know what they are up to. The pressure releases. I hear the whistle…and I see blood. The whistle did its job. The blood (or the pressure) has been let out. My ears go numb and my bloody nails come to rest. The evaporation has happened. I feel the weight going away. I feel less heavy.

But its worse.

Because when the whistle is still, you don’t know what’s happening or perhaps what is about to happen. All you know is that something is cooking inside. When the clouds are up high in the sky, you don’t know what’s happening inside them. But the cloud knows. Perhaps. The pressure cooker knows. Perhaps. Or at least it can feel what is happening inside. I feel the turmoil dieing. But the thought of it is there to remain. Here comes the pain…stage 1 to stage 2 is basically a shift from the physical to the metaphysical. Death has various avenues to explore. It was the body and the bloody nails in the first case. It’s the ability to think and the ideological backbone of the whole existence that are the front this time. Stillness takes over. The dark power of silence takes over. I feel that I am completely in my senses, the next moment I realize that I was not in my senses the very last moment…only to realize the very next moment that even in that moment of realization, I was not in my senses. The house of cards falls over and over again. I sit still there. I want to destroy. I want to act. I want to put my bloody fingernails to work again… and destroy anything and everything within arms reach. But I cant…the hands wont move. They wont move because perhaps I want them to move, but I am not being able to move them. The brain is not sending signals to the hand…it has better things to do. And the worst part is that I know all this is happening. Water again. The pressure cooker is again picking pace. The clouds are getting dark and heavy. Its time to empty the cooker and consume the preparation…and get over with it. End. Or a new beginning? Remember, its not an act. It’s a cycle…The Death Cycle.

You’ve got to die over and over again.

The river keeps flowing.

The bridge I cant cross.

This hole in my chest and the bullet inside it…