Achieving little or nothing; ineffective. A piece of gauze cloth that appears opaque until lit from behind, used as a screen or backdrop; a thing that conceals or obscures something.
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
The mind is a great liberator, but it is also a cage.
In meditation, the skull opens up and beams of intellectual light pour out as if in an ad infinitum planetarium. No geography or architecture is too grand, seemingly.
But in the lower realms of psychology, life-doing and life-planning as it were, the gears and grinds of the whole bloody machine--the clamor and claustrophobia of the cranium--are as crude and temperamental as an antique car.
When one's mind is at synch with outer nature, things open up and are seemingly limitless in scope. If only there were more power, more current, then the knowing of all things could be achieved!
But when one's mind is shoved down by indecision and doubt, into the lower confines of worry and fixation, then one's activity becomes no more profound or able than a beaten tiger limping to and fro inside a barred cage with an insane wax glazing its eyes.
You can feel the pinch, the tight bind: a head-ache that isn't physiological but becomes so by default. Stress winds its way around the mind like a constricting hot metal coil, tightening until surrender emits in the most unseemly and undignified ways. Total impotence and madness rule the moment.
As the bus pulls to the curb, we huddle near the front.
First in line, a freckled giantess woman, whom I've seen for years, pushes a small wired grocery cart. Once strong and capable, she now shakes pitifully and regards her surroundings with an unsteady look in her eyes.
Next is a young boy with strawberry-blonde hair, a cigarette behind his ear and a black plastic garbage bag thrown over his shoulder. I cannot stop looking at the exquisite downy hair on the back of his neck. He has a delicate, almost-feminine prettiness that he seems to be fighting against with an assumed haughty machoism.
Each goes their separate way as we exit the bus and I head on past the park, the dark storm clouds spilling over the west hills and a light spring rain humidifying the air, neither warm nor cold. It is early afternoon, and I have gotten off work earlier than usual.
As I turn onto my street, a sudden wind lifts the delicate white blossoms out of the cherry trees and scatters them across my view like snowflakes.
Everything natural is a surreal green, and the loamy dank funk of botanical birth permeates the air.
A postman works the houses on one side of the street. His solitary presence seems strangely choreographed.
And on my iPod 'The Hours' soundtrack plays. Phillip Glass's phrases churn and repeat, rise and fall, like a stream of smoke caught in an undulating current of air. It fits perfectly the scene, the smell, the nuances around me.
Melancholy yet lush, hopeful yet crushing, the music recalls the tone of the film and implants itself like a soundtrack on the neighborhood scene around me; yet, similarly intimates the cozy envelopments of literature, times of yore when my face was bowed to the open books of romantics and dejected dreamers.
Like polio or scarlet fever, I carry this antiquated chronic condition with me still: taking in the world in terms of acts, themes and scenarios; characters and settings. Everything has a cinematic quality, even my own solitary foibles, and I think this mode of perception must be dead or nearly so.
Who thinks like this anymore? Who sees?
Everything has become so literal and meaningless. Nuance is lost, or exists in vain. Expressions has been stripped down to a neutered simplicity: A plus B equals C.
And this shift in contemporary thinking has engendered a kind of hopelessness within literature and the arts, and has mostly driven me away.
I think, what hope is there? This mode of nuanced perception is surely lost.
But then I consider the utter ego in this: surely I am not the only one. As a minority, I suppose it is my duty to keep this mindset alive, despite how isolated and freakish it makes me feel.
