Tales and Journeys

Why ever do we care, when all the castles we build, fall down eventually? Perhaps the point isn’t a happy ending, but a memorable adventure.

Life isn’t fair. Life hurts, stings, cripples. Life is a bitch and you can’t deny it. All our fights will be in vain, all effort will be erased, all will fall back to mercilessness. Cold logic is the way of it all, and cynicism is the way to accept it. There is no other option.

So goes the words of a dead man.

So what if resistance is futile? So what if there can never be a paradise on earth? So what if good things don’t last? At least they’re good while they do. It’s not the end result that matters, but what happened underway.

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Machinae Supremacy’s latest album rocks my ears and brains and loudspeakers and makes me want to dance.

The album tells me this: There’s always something to fight for. If you lack concrete things to devote your attention to (which a lot of us do, I daresay), then fight to remove that very fact! Fights in this sense are always fights for better days. Yet we look upon today’s human society, and we acknowledge that we’ve got everything and even that is not enough. This depresses us and makes us believe that there are no “better days”. So we forget and ignore that insistant feeling we have inside, the promise of wonder and happiness. We think things can’t improve, and so there is nothing to fight for. That’s when we need to fight to reactivate that wondrous feeling, fight to start believing again, fight to create something to fight for.

And somewhere across that line we might come to realize that the fight itself is the whole point.

The past holds all of our dearest memories. But beware of forgetting yourself. This post is about finding the courage to stand on your own feet, as the result of your past, instead of looking to it as all that is good and gone.

For many years, perhaps since my birth and until some years ago, I had a very grim outlook on change. Change means an ending of something you’ve been a part of. Change means letting go of something old and heading into an uncertain and scary future. And if you look into it the wrong way, like I was good at, change is melancholy. However small a change, change is death itself. Change means that the world and life gradually parts from you, and leaves you alone.

That detachment doesn’t hurt just superficially, it lashes out to your very soul. It is a pure form of loneliness, and it has a beauty, as most emotions do. In reasonable quanta, it’s an important part of life. It should be accessed sometimes, I think, for the same reason that we need to preserve machinery. But loneliness is a brittle bridge over chasms, and shouldn’t be taken lightly or made a habit out of.

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The world is full of possibilities, of treasures and pitfalls. I implore you to forget the latter and aim for the former, or you might find yourself going in the wrong direction altogether.

So many possibilities. So many worlds. So many futures.

Which will I live? What have I got to choose from? Is the choice even mine?

How many joys have I forsaken already, what happiness have I excluded?

And if I were born in another time? Or on another planet, or in another universe altogether?

Believe it or not, this kind of thinking actually makes me feel very secure. I suppose it is because it removes my worries about the life I actually lead, it takes focus away from here and now. I am a dreamer. At least, I was, once. Not too long ago. I haven’t dreamt all that much the past year. But I want to dream again. For without dreams, there is only here and now, and currently that’s not all that exciting and adventurous.

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Magic does so definitely exist in this world. It’s just a matter of definition and perspective.

I remember when magic was a day-to-day business for me. I’m talking about my childhood, of course. Sure, you could say that whatever magic I imagined was just that; imagination. It never existed, I was only fooling myself. But then I’d just shake my head, because that’s not the point. I still know magic.

Because the real magic is the moment itself, when magic and wonder really does seem real. Magic is when you can actually picture a world where heroes always win, where deceases and accidents don’t exist. Magic is when you really feel like there’s something more out there, something wondrous and curious and impossible. And magic is when the real world allows wondrous things of other worlds to happen here, too.

The last kind will happen only if you believe it can. If you don’t, the same might still happen, but you will discard it at coincidence, and your world will forever be boring.

I really look forward to the day I’ll be able to make magic happen for someone else.

This post tells about the need to have a safe home to come home to, the insecurity of not having one, and what you need to make one.

I’m not content right now. I’ve got this vague feeling like something needs fixing, something that’s gone wrong somewhere but that nobody’s noticed. It’s like the world used to be run properly, but then we all started neglecting it to stress over less important matters instead, and now we’ve all forgotten how it was and how it used to be run. I feel I should do something, I feel I should take control and make things work again, show people that the happiness of the past can return not only in our minds.

But things seem so different now, so much more complicated. Complication has tainted my mind, and ignorance has become a habit. I can see it happening and I work against it, but I cannot help but be carried away by the huge current. I knew once that there were refuges on top of the water, many of them. Refuges built on happiness, joy and friendship, built by those who share it, who know it and who can give it. Those refuges still exist, in new forms, for others, but I shy away from them. I do not feel at home in them. I visit sometimes and it inspires me greatly, for a while, but overall I’ve become an outsider.

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Looking beyond the world of information, I discover that there rules a relativism in the world of feelings. This post sees the art in our unique perspectives on all that happens around us.

Look at an object close to you. Pick it up, examine it. What do you see?

And what more do you see?

What does the object mean to you, beyond its mere shape and surface? Our heads don’t know the world when we are born. We gradually learn how to understand it, how to chop it into pieces our psyche can comprehend. So how is it you really interpret the object; what tools are used, and what is the object decoded into, in your head? And your heart?

Okay, so it’s not always that easy to know. But you do have a special decoding process. It’s unique to you, and it’s been fine-tuned throughout your whole life. And it’s in no way limited to individual objects. We all live in the same physical world, but to each of us, everything means something else than to everyone else. So when we think of what the world is, the decoded version is all we know, and that’s what we think the world is. That is not a correct image of what the physical world truly is, but it’s not fiction either, so what is it exactly?

It’s your world.

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Every time I go outside, I sense a different unique mood in the world, the nature, around me. And every time the weather changes, this mood also changes radically. The variety is so remarkable that I couldn’t possibly predict how it’s like before I go out.

Today it’s been windy with a few scattered showers, otherwise sunny. Wind of these proportions are rare here in Oslo. Any wind at all is rare here. It felt reminiscent of home in many ways. And when I finally went out to get some groceries, countless old feelings rushed through my head. The sound of the wind, the humid smell and feel of the air, the changing light from small clouds blocking the sun and countless other impressions pulled strings in my brain that led way back, and all sorts of related feelings and half-memories popped up. I felt feelings I’d felt during similar weather back in my childhood, and I could picture it, but all pictures were general and possibly even generated in my head, and not specific memories.

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We’re living in a world where information is power, where art is commercial and everything is analyzed based on its usefulness to our mundane purposes. Here, a weary mind remembers the falseness of this and tries to look for more.

What is grass to you? What about your room? Christmas? A bottle of water?

If all your answers are equally logic and explainable, if you were able to define them all, you might want to hear me out.

Sometimes I wonder.. what if the things I treasure — fantasy and its beauty — will some day mean nothing to me? What if I will one day picture a dark, enigmatic castle in front of a magnificent stormy sky full of roaring dragons and fire.. and feel nothing? It could happen, such things do happen to many people. They lose the magic, the touch, for a while at least. Fact is, even the most wonderful image you can ever imagine, is nothing at all without the feeling that comes with it, a feeling that is not part of the image but of your mind. The magic of the image. But what the heck is the magic, and why can’t we keep it?

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Sometimes, if feels as if one’s attitude converges towards cynicism. There’s always someone able to thwart your hopes with due right. But what if there is a seperation between fact and feeling, and what if cynicism is just one of many emotional perspectives?

A large part of the world has gone blind. Cynical. Bitter. Cold and depressed. There are a whole lot of people who concider themselves to be “honest” or “truthful”, and all they know and tell is misery. All of the things that are wrong in the world – suffering, selfishness, abuse, brutality and corruption. I sense we’re in a pessimistic period where noone trusts their own governments. I wouldn’t say it’s bad to be critical, but it’s funny how we’re never happy with it and how we always see the bad sides of all actions taken by the controlling forces.
Many people have a perception of the world as a rotten apple, full of corruption and only negative sides.

It’s so strange that we never wonder WHY we think so. Why are we unhappy with the world? It’s because we imagine what would be better and we want it to be that way. Most humans on the face of this planet wants the world to be a better place. Doesn’t that mean, symbolically, that we have a core of goodness?

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