Remote

It can take many shapes & forms. No one knows what to expect. We had grown familiar with the wild, extraverted lamentations, the brooding, the self-cursing and laying cities to ashes... This last way however, is the worst by far: a complete retrieval into faraway nothingness. 
 

Bleak reclusiveness had come again… And I have institutionalised myself. I needed to. I had to keep it out… all the filth & ugliness of the world, the aping, the egotism, the baseness, chaos, noise, the whole human stench… To nullify it… both in the world and in myself. The contrast between the Ideal and the daily Practice became too big. Insufferably! I had to not be at the places where I did not belong. And stop being a part of something I could not be a part of. I became a monk, wandering alone in a godforsaken cloister. Averting his eyes from people who aren’t even there.  

Conflict grew of course. It stopped me talking... writing. The human scale would have to be reinstated in my world first for words could grow back. I had to make everything simpler. Smaller. Truer. Stripped of humbug, of synthetic components.

I got back into the cave. Thinking… of colours, shapes and atom numbers. Not of reasons, values or objectives… Oh, to be an animal, pacing through his cage, waiting on nothing. Or better: a non-living object. Just standing on the mantle and go tic-toc, tic-toc... Ha!, hardly! Then to wrap my mind around the declining Universe and be of dreams… silence… visions. Staring at the reflections on a shiny, black, wooden table.

I got away for days on my bicycle. I pruned the trees in my parents’ garden. Read old stories of Russian peasants, dressed in rags, red faced drunk and violent. I transported myself into that world and into myself. Remote... Looking for silence. One with the stains on the ceiling...