descent

22nd Aug

Peak of Puncak Jaya.

Real visions are short, shorter then mind itself, We live in delay, grasping merely the afterglow of things. Consequences. All that's left in memory are shadows, geometry of after-pain.

We try to construct the stories composed from symbolic piles of ash. Stories about some great, great, mythical fire. Sum of all voids.

Half-weary. Half-aware. We are here already in past tense. Line of experience however thinned by adrenaline. Awareness of imbalance in the senses, underscored by field of inert, scentless smell. The view. The air. The space. The light. The space-light watching us. Wind brushing streaks of wild grass.

I lay myself down. Feeling darkness in the weather.

Resting. Eyes unseeing days of walking.

Raising my head from the river bed of memory. Firm wave is the river dark, river strong, billowing an empty dark head from the bottom soft, meek-mellow river shoal. Resting on the peak of river wind. Life-long life at the bottom of air-filled pool under void filled space. I feel volumes of hungry space.

Over top swirling stratospheres affirm the step, light wind-blown under head, under walk, walking further up the airy swirly tiers, with what shoes? With what flimsy floppy tender feet? Firm weakness of this lightsome billows of an upwalk smoke.

Eyes waking down. Firm stones thrown into river thrust of winded nonsense clowds. Resisting.

I lay myself rested on the mountainside steep edge. With head leaning on my arm, with arm rested on the limestone rock of bare summit. Among the gathering of compressed miniature bones. Jaya, the sky-high tomb of mollusks and forams; entire mountain mass came to be as sediment of marine fauna skeletons, residue of ancient coral and plankton, ancestral foundry in which the enterprise of nature invented geometry of forms, through scientific accumulation of half-death, a thousand million year blind self-holocaust crowned with the ridicule of automatic human feet going up and down steep frosted slopes. Up and down the screamless shells of particles of never remembered almost-life, up and down the basic units on evolutionary plane.

Jaya the open fracture in oceanic graveyard floor-crust skull of the planet. Why am I here?

Eyes were over the edge, falling, cast deep into thousand meter void, failing to recognize things left there below, in the thick autumn clowds.
Above all doubts, this doctorate in detachment from angelic protection of gravity must fail. This god is never going away.

A top. A stone at the top. A stone on the top of a stone at the top. Arrangements of thoughts, and memories throwing themselves over this void, helplessly trying to cover it.

Memories of simple things, simple sensations. Not even memories any more, in this cold and wind. Frozen imprints. Transparent relief. Alice. Between the sky and stone, a wind, a ripple in the snow, a footprint across the ripple. Breathing in the absence only to prepare for descent into her arms. Arms which are no longer there, not yet. Why here?

My sight was constantly going in and out of this illusion, keeping me half-convinced that I was looking not down, but straight ahead, as the weight of the limestone peak set back the sky behind my back, to a vertical shining screen of flaring blue, while the slope before my eyes so strongly imposed itself to be a on horizontal plane, mildly uphill, ended with a distant wall of clowds and earth. Only here the world truly reveals a pivot of third dimension, a tangible balance in depth, where perspective gets expelled in all directions.

My body stayed motionless, softly cramped by exhaustion, but from behind my eye-lens, as through open door of two darkened rooms, a conscious dream crawled out, advancing double image  of falling tears, illuminated, bursting beads of stars in boiling vacuum, and the sight, heavy and drowsy from this vision, pressed on the pupils, hanged from them with a pendulum that striked sharp billion year seconds of carved rock, poured down the slopes with a sweeping echoing stream of lines, chiselled by vibrant light the mountain abyss resonated. Small dirty snow clumps brought after-tastes of roasted rice. Alice.

Heart beat after heart beat this dry-dream shook my sight, chains of geometry broken against limestone coast, the presence dripping out through narrowed pupils, panes of fragmenting, shattering memories, frozen into tasteless sharp splinters, all suddenly forgotten into dispersed transparent grains, falling out scattered to the bottom of this pit, grinding the frosted ridges, seeping through demented almost-shapes of clowds, white snow-foam and black snow-stone, even air - everything made of hundred types of glass.

My body no longer here, living inside this moment of falling, ringing, resounding, this chaining from top to bottom, this spray of recall, fountain of transparent chimes, peaking, tumbling, at bottom shattering, in one single moment of day-to-day-dream, swelling heavily droplet of mercurial thought at this eyes needle tips, over tongue of space, over heavy thirst of stone.

Mirrors chasing mirrors, facing mirrors, and no eyes to see, no mindful tender finger tips to grasp this string of light.

For endless moment in our place a waterfall without a name, and cool forehead plate on which the wind puts a freezing chord in five voice types of cold: dry, wet, acrid, tingling, and a heavy painful cramp.

Temples feeling empty, under foreign distant moist hollow mask of frost. Entire sense weaved out from me with streaks of sublimated sweat, to blend with cold steams below, flow down hill, mist into the blue, or thicken as the residue of frost at the distant floors, beyond the reach of sight.

Perhaps I forgot to breathe, perhaps the wind through half-open dried lips poured in with swift cold cataract down the wet sand of throat, resonating in lung cavities with hissing swirl, maybe I have found position in which respiration no longer remains a necessity, as body gets sealed so tightly within worlds vital flows, enough to part the lips, for the wind and rain to quench the thirst and fill incessantly the cup of breath.

Perhaps I found, resting on this peak, a final and ultimate merging point of body into constant currents of land-scape. As dwarf tree clinged to mountain face, collapsed deep into own absence, against the onsets of wind after wind after wind, semi-transparent dream of a column of still-half-born bistre smoke with a thick beard of mughal green, petrified in shameful, thick stupor.

In the corners of my eyes, then, a while inside a while, spotted a stream of viridian light, sliding down the slope, maybe, followed a thought, a stream, maybe a streak of greenish ash, or some eerie thick rotten azure myst, and suddenly gone, and then no longer somewhere at the side, but right above my head, this viridian dusty glow, chopped by scourging wind, splattered down the precipice along my line of sight, and only after a long, long while, the stream appearing more echoic, more greenish in a soundlike way, carried by the wind in torn phrases, soon separated, broken words in voice, reaching me, through eyes into stone cold ears, voice humane, weak and mat, pulsating as if drifting inside a deep ripple, semi-transparent dome of blurred jellyfish-sound, appearing and disappearing in the waves of wind, human voice which firmly and tirelessly explained.

 A distant sensation of strong grab around my foot joint and from this pressure, through an icy, sour, exhausted muscles a sense of touch filling in the body, which with a lazy movement wishes to crawl out of the visionary, breathless dull rest, only to realize accumulation of weight in legs and back, sediment within the painful collapsed muscle mass, as some mud of time gathered during the hours of lifting itself towards the empty sky.

- Pete - it weaved my name - oxygen, Pete - it waved - you forgot  - it waved - oxygen, Pete wake up, - it waved - oxygen, Pete, ...

The weariness finally condensed darkened and covered me with a veil of lead.

23rd Aug

Hands and their complex memories of touching Alice through her skin, now frozen. Strange how frozen hands freeze up to the very memories of touch.

And now, resting at this hard cumbersome summit, under meaningless sky I start to suspect this top is a bottom of far greater massive, mountain of questions - with peaks like - why am I here? Five kilometres above sea level still below any progress on the slope of reason. I chose the convenience of slowly removing myself from this thought, resting, unwalking, unthinking. Watch the space, take it, I gave it to myself. Passing through this point, as through any other point in time.

Blackouts are common while resting. They throw us in an unusual way into the nothingness, on a crash course. Eyes become absent, you feel the pressure of blindness, which at first remains as a half-images of pulsating air, but soon gives way to decompression in the visual space. You learn your eyes have a space, images have volume, weight, and when they are gone, the peculiar lack of this weight feels like sucking out darkness through eyeballs.

Then muscles. If you stand up, you collapse on the grownd. But if you already lay at the grownd, you collapse inside, your body disappears into a small opalising spot-thought at the meddle of nowhere, which slowly turns still.

24th

The space sucking out all things into existence, decompressing seeds into trees, ice into waters, waters into lives, the space which calls us like it called the mountain tops during Melanesian orogeny. Space, the midwife of all forms. How easy it is to be resting in the tender hands of space, giving birth to mountain questions, I'm here because I heard the call. A call that obscured her voice. Alice, the howls of wind, not drowning the memory of your voice. There must be then something windy in your voice, or something song like in this wind. Your voice was an endless song. Even when You were silent. It was always a written rest.

We go because we believe it transforms us, seeking identification in our own mindless obedience to simple instincts. Chaotic urges conveniently described as "I". Drifters, egotists, we are truly drifters, self-identified with the current.

It was not ego that pushed me up here. I was not seeking my self, nor I was seeking our common self. I really made a semi-conscious choice, to leave Alice down there, to conquer my own nihilism, to climb during the war, to escape duties, which I never  believed in, did not accept. It's only 18 days. Gathering experience in pointlessness. Trying to walk around questions. Walk, run, climb, automatize. Reset. I was composing.

Rest at the summit. Eyes cast down into abyss. Perspective of distance in which eye becomes no longer a useful tool. Blinded with distance. It's only 18 days.

These words are my soul leaving me to spend unconscious short eternity inside a note book. Words of a ghost, aminoacids of soul, radiating from me, like the heat from my blood.

Why walk to the top, when you can stay at the port hotel and sip red wine, just writing about it? Everybody knows what it's like to have a long walk, the mind turns into mechanical insect, there is no thinking, just responding to the rigour of grownd with another step. Why turn yourself into this walk-chain, this mindless automaton, and with reaching the mountain peak reach peak of mindlessness, and uselessness, and pointlessness?

It's not a theory, walking, that it requires an experiment, a proof. You prove nothing, you prove you are capable of reducing yourself into a walking animal without a meaningful goal. A top of a mountain does not exist, it is not a real point, it is as good as any other point on the surface of the planet. This point is meddle of a line, a line of walking, which a pointless mind clings to, as a blind man following a kerbstone. Eradication of truly dangerous dreams, with a simple walking-climbing dream, a hand-leg dream, in which the head is left behind, hanging unused, like an overcoat hood.

When walking we satisfy our feet. Feet satisfied become silent and maybe that silence bears itself against thoughts, becomes a heavy lift.

We are going down in two hours. We need to take great care. Everyone is half mad with exhaustion and sense of accomplishment. Everyone except me. I'm tasting the dopamine from tired muscles, unable to find any fixed point. Alice. This was a useless journey. But only those who had it can fully understand what uselessness really means. It was a journey to understand the depth of uselessness. It sets the sky back.

25th Aug

Too long rest confronts us with immediacy of experience. We let the daze of muscle work cool down, and must face the thoughts.

The view. The view which can not be appreciated by a brain mechanised, flooded with exhaustion, 17 days of walking in snow and wind, a day of climbing. The view of oxidated adrenalized blindness. And yet.

Isn't life an endlessly repeated joke, which with time, through repetitions of physiology looses entire charm while humour evaporates, stops making sense, becomes unbearable, tiresome. Entire pleasure of human life lies thus in the single instant of conception, a first few times when the joke is still fresh, and the world interesting. The joy of walking, is obfuscation of our inability to reach meaning behind the joke of life, the joke about walking. All pleasures are pleasures of an exile. Paradise lost is a lost pun.

We work it around trying to laugh at the absurd, but really, we don't understand poetry behind the joke of life any more It's more of a situational comedy. Has something to do with being small, helpless, but completely ignorant. A suicidal attitude in a grown up human. Walking up a mountain.

That's why we hate children often for their ease to crack a smile - they remind us of our disability.

26th Aug

I have again and again this obsessive thought, that things have no inside,

27th Aug.

Walking is easy. Climbing is easy. Looking is easy. It's what nature made us for. It's more of a submission then an effort. While writing is against nature. Writing, and above all thinking, is a true struggle with nature, where we confront not a wall to climb, but an emptiness to navigate, fill in. In writing we are always blindly going into worse pain of labour. The breath-killing void of nature, which is not so evident in hard rocks under climbing feet.

In writing we go against human nature - we go against all men and women, against ourselves. We become an outcast, an alien, a strange creature which grows strange tentacle like wings, soft fins that let us crawl into tightest vacuums of meaninglessness.

Imagine if a mountaineer came down from a climb completely transfixed, metamorphosed so deeply we no longer could call him human. And that's what happens in the mountains of thought. We become monsters.

In writing we find out that the hardest thing is not to move forward, but to stop, when everything is pushing and stretching us, and to oppose this current, to avoid resonance, becomes the greatest effort. If the top of Jaya is the top of inertia, the peak of submission to the animal urge, then the space of deep thought must be a resistance to all calls.

More writing? In writing the hardest part is to keep words consistent, maintaining their weight. The natural void in which the writing enters, the void of discourse, is a place of word-annihilation, sense-deprivation, it is a great skill to send a word into vacuum and keep it at the end of such sentence, that it does not suffocate and perish, to keep it constantly fuelled with meaning. A book is a jelly-fish record which weaves its tentacles into nothingness.

Life is a betrayal of death. Whatever we do, we do it to betray death, to escape it's jealousy, and that betrayal is ultimately the highest ethical aspiration. Whatever is death - we must betray it. My country is death, and that's why I betrayed it.

Alice, we are wed to our deaths. All love is an affair behind the backs of death.

28th

Brief moments of enjoyment.  A good night sleep. Submerged into the body. Out of time. Another obscured peak. Still walking down towards Alice, back to the molten core of my life, to living touch, to thinking through her hands.

29th

Image is a moveless attack of panic with colours screaming from objects which can not otherwise express the emptiness of their existence. Every inert creature in my path sends a message of unimaginable pain of imprisonment. Only animals like us can excrete this pain, through movement and screaming, reject it for a brief second, throw it out, but it comes back like a shadow in the morning, rubberbanded to the essence, to the saliva and blood, to the impulse in the muscle, what is it, what is this pain that moves us? fear of stillness? fear of sleeping?

fear of movement which replaces movement, fear of inertia, fear of imposed to replace personal, fear of oppression, stand, sit, drink, move, stop, hold, move, stand, over and over.

the sense of freedom is not just blindness and art is not ignorance

fear the movement which replaces movement

fear help

30th

Senses are a narrow confinement. Association is a first step to escape them.