Monday, 8 September 2014

Sometimes it seems

that the only way to keep depression at bay is to attend a clown performance.
But clowns are never merely happy, they are always also sad, and sometimes your feeling of sadness is too deep and the clowns don't really do anything for you in the sense of cheering you up. Well, ok, you might chuckle (Emilie, I remember to chuckle and not giggle) every now and then, or experience a momentary lapse of reason in which you forget your woes, but in the end you come out of the theatre sort of empty, with a deep reverberating void (or hurt, or sadness, or... I don't really know what it is) somewhere deep inside your soul (and no, it has nothing to do with the performance).
So you stroll down the old Roman road and find yourself in an old crusader's church, which is rather unusual for the town you live in (I mean the church is unusual for the town you live in and it is also unusual for you to find yourself in a church in the town you live in).
And just as you are trying to get your head round these surprising facts you realise a spaceship is trying to land inside the church and you just stand there, mesmerised, gazing at the spaceship, wondering if they have come to fill your void or take away your pain (it is really surprising how self-absorbed one can be at a moment like this) .... But they don't.... They just hover there, gazing back at you, totally oblivious as to what is going on inside your head. After a while you realise you have been involuntarily involved in a staring competition. Minutes pass, maybe hours, days, weeks, months, years or maybe even lifetimes. You no longer know how long it has been. You are tired. Tired of staring, tired of standing, tired of yourself... Suddenly the spaceship is sucked into your big void and for a micro-second you are content, because you have just realised that this void of yours has a name.
But now the church is empty. You step out and find yourself in a magic garden.
 It is the middle of the night and time has stopped. Shiny, colourful and bright watering cans are hovering over the bushes bathing them in white light. They never stop. Hovering. Watering. You splash some white light across your face. It keeps you awake, but also makes you notice that parts of your beard have turned grey. It sure has been a long day. Your mind tries to recapture the day. You try to remember what is was like when you woke up.The morning seems so long ago and far away that the brain just sends a G291 system error, and after a quick shower in the white light you step out of the enclosed garden and into a dark closed space.
It is a small, dark space and yet an  entire galaxy of red dwarfs and electric blue wormholes are confined within it. You step onto the Einstein-Rosen bridge, look into the deep, black (but for the flickering explosions  of blue light) abyss below and suddenly you are looking up at something that seems so similar and yet so different you just can't put your finger on it. You slowly count the trillions of red dwarfs, and as you gaze at each one, you feel what an uneventful existence they lead. On the way you alternate between crossing Einstein-Rosen bridges and sliding through wormholes. Finally you have counted all the red dwarfs, crossed all the bridges (and burnt some of them), crawled or sledged through each wormhole and entered all the data into a spreadsheet. You know your day's work has been done, so you decide to jump on the bridge and catch a wormhole so that you can have a quick drink with a friend from the past.
 You fall head first into his Paris studio, but he does not flinch when you tumble across the floor and the room overflows with body parts, cameras, negatives, captured images and memories that spill throughout the room. Once you pick up your body parts and pull yourself together you look at the man at work, deeply engulfed in his thoughts, observing the rays of light spreading across his studio and you immediately know it is 1921 and that he is onto something important, so you just pat him on his back gently, whisper an almost silent hi man, climb back onto the bridge and catch the last wormhole going in the morningbound direction.

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