Flow Country

"One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy."

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time



OKAY YOU FUCKERS. Imagine this:

He's a man who's falling along a really tall skyscraper in NY(see) JACK
There's a girl looking up at the sky at the base of skyscraper "DD"

There are your 2 views. 

DD is walking home. She feels rain pouring down on her. The skies pissing again. Punishment for what she's done. AIDS diagnosis irrelevant. I can fuck whomever I want. I'm going to go home and kill myself. I don't care if I'm bitch with a clit the size of the MOUNT Fuji. If I want to spread then I will spread like butter. She thought about butter. Her mother rubbing it on bread with a black eye. Her victimizer snoring in the other room. It's too late now. She looks at a boy kissing his girl. Bitch. I could make that boy happy. If only I wasn't a beautiful atrocity. My smashed womb. The dead baby in my toilet. The cum stains on my lips. Fuck the world. Fuck me.

He's falling. They say when you jump off a building the world slows down. Time stands still like a dead clock. He can feel a strange, smooth elegance. What an elegant way to die. What beauty in its decadence. They say suicide in Japan is a right of passage. He remembers the dying child. Its body like African diamond. Sinkable as the Titanic like a black hole in a distant galaxy. Its body withered in the Luanda sunshine. The hospital bed creaking. The snakes outside glistening. He took the photograph for the magazine but he never knew what happened to the child. The black boy that made his journalist career. Or was it a girl? Does it matter now. Not long to go now. The ground's getting closer.

DD YOU GOTTA CHILL. LET'S SWING. I WANT TO CUM INSIDE U BABE. SOON BABE :) I PROMISE. I'LL BLOW YOU. HOW MUCH??? 500. OK, HOW SOON U BE HERE BABE? TWENTY-FIVE, THIRTY. OK BABE, MY COCK IS BIG FOR YOU. I AM WAITING. She snaps phone shut. She coughs. And then she sees it. Grey and invisible. Starchild. Come to me. Let's dance honey. The child has no eyes, it is growing like a sad flower. It watches as she stoops to meet. She whispers, beckons to it. Walk inside me. Come back into me and let my heart strings erupt the echoes of my fucked soul. I am a delicate flower, play with me, the child sings telepathic. DING DING. BABE, I WANT TO BE INSIDE U. SOON. SOON YOU WILL FEEL MY BIG, HARD COCK MOVING INSIDE U. She clutches her stomach. It is a footprint inside of her. Startled and stillborn. Its remnants down the toilet. A soul in the shit. Screaming.

He remembers nothing but everything in an instant. Five hundred years pass silently. He feels anger, like he wants to break Mozart's fingers with razorblades. Why have I done this? I could've been President or at least a pope of Africa. He thinks of his ex-wife, her ice white nail polish glistening like the blind woman at an orgy. She was fucking hick. No, she doesn't deserve this attention. His first kiss. A corvette. Deborah's red soaked pink dress. His golf glove. No, what should he think about in his final ceremony? God. The meaning of it all. The Monkeys. No, no, no - this isn't what I wanted. I want to die like an Egyptian emperor (sic.) He thinks about the past. All the words of every novel he read spew before him like a vomit filled sea of indifferent impotence. The erection he had for Miss Hubert in 3rd grade. The sexual torment of a fucked dick. The click of a camera. The dead African child. 

See when they told her she had the VIRUS the first thing she thought was fuck I guess I've got to fuck 10 guys not 5. She needs the money. Gotta pay the bills bitch, even if ur dying. There's a saying in the night game. 5 blows is 5 guys you're never going to see again. You see a lady likes to remember every man she fucks. She has a way of remembering. She remembers their breath. Not for his stench but for his memory. She remembers every man who never remembered her. She likes it that way. It makes her feel sensual. There was this one. He smelt of fish. And another, airports. But her favorite - a one she always liked to think about, he smelt of her grandmother. She liked this one, it made her feel like her mother was singing to her under the moonlit filth of Harlem. 

He didn't want to be a spectacle. He wanted it to be over like an injection. But these were his final moments. The last ticking of a clock before its batteries run out. He thinks about the man he would become. A gum stain skeleton. Broken bones smashed like a hot dog. Maybe a child would pass him and look at him and think god, another dead bird. He thought about flying. He was the first man in his family to fly. But was this how the devil fell? When he drifted into the underworld. He thought about the church. The holes the shafts of light penetrated through when the old man clutched ahold of his ball sack and told him to suck the serpent. He thought about all the birds he ever saw. My they were so good at the art of falling, so much better than him. To him - he even failed in death.

The little thing was faceless. But she knew it could've grown eyes. He held her as he fucked her quickly. Fiercely. He was one of those guys whose mothers never kissed them. And when he kissed the bottom of her back it was like being cut open with a carving knife. But she wasn't thinking about him or his smell. She was thinking about the child that swirled around her toilet bowl. YOU FUCKING BITCH YOU LOOK AT ME WHEN I CUM INSIDE YOU. BITCH. FUCK. She couldn't look at him. Not in his eyes. And as he beat her while injecting himself inside of her she felt like she too was swirling inside a toilet bowl. Only this bowl was filled with the waters of sadness and the excrement of human dreams. How could it have been so invisible? Like a piece of glue fastening a child's picture of their perfect family to a classroom wall. She never learned not much at the school. Only not to go to school. He pulled on his clothes as she lay on the bed like a piece of worn clothing. Tonight he would not wear her anymore. He would be her last dresser. Her skin sweater would need no more visitors to find its fit. She was walking to her own pool of water, the one that drained all through the city in the tears of everyone's lost Eden's. 

What had he seen in that child? That pathetic excuse for a human. The walking corpse. Its listless eyes dead and soulless. Its skin painted black. They put make-up on it before they took the photographs. A final insult to its perverted memory. He could remember the flash. The expressionless face. The smile he wore as a disguise when he took the picture. This will make the cover. The way the child was frog marched back to the coffin bed where it laid. What did it think when the lens was painted at it, the exposure calculated in the winter heat? What did it want? Some water or something more? Something ancient. A kind of understanding between a tiger and the living animal whose inside it is eating. He remembered the dead tigers he photographed in China. Their god-like eyeballs. The honor they died with. He remembered the color of the tiger's eye. Would they see the same color when they examined his on the cold pavement? Would they bring tears to people's eyes? Could he at least be granted a few  horrifying gazes in his final embarrassment.

She fell to her knees. She was looking down into the water. She wanted to find something human in there, in the silver water. She thought of the smile her child would have, its first words. The sights its precious little eyes might've seen. The blue sky of Central Park. The songbirds. Its playful first steps. The way it would grow like a tree. This was her tree. Her roots lay dormant in the cobwebs of her diseased womb. I could not carry you my child. I just could not carry you. God give me strength. She had lost God too. When you feel penetrated by a thousand penises, God loses confidence in you.

That was it! That was what he saw. He saw nothing in the child. So what did the world see when they called him a genius? What did they see in its eyes that he couldn't? Maybe it was like a piece of pretentious modern art. Maybe they saw what they thought they were supposed to see. The illiterate western guilt of the problem of the tropical underworld. The fake guilt they were supposed to carry for living easier lives with Mercedes cars and refrigerators. He had shaved one time before his final journey. And when he looked into his eyes in the opaque mirror he saw nothing in them too. A kind of lurid death wish, a burning desire to become invisible. Why did the child carry nothing when it had endured brutality? When it had been raped and beaten and its mother's eyes carved into water lashes while the soldiers buried themselves within her? What had she felt? Hadn't she felt anything? Don't animals cry when we silence their heart beats? He could feel the ground reaching out to him like the hand of a demon. It had a kind of inevitable allure like a naked woman who had opened herself to him. He was ready now. Prepared. And that's when it struck him. A deeper realization within his soul. An explanation he needed more than anything else. That the child was him. 

She put her hand on the handle. She was ready to let go now. The room she had prepared for her little girl vanished from her mind. She extinguished it like a cigarette on an ashtray. But something kept her from flushing it away. The same thing that made her so eager to fuck as many men as she could. The same longing that her lonely body craved to fulfill night after night, cock after cock - kiss after kindness. When she was a child an old man with a harmonica pulled her onto his lap and said "D I will show you how pretty you are." He pulled her up to his face and kissed her sweetly on the lips. She never stopped kissing him even though it had only lasted a few seconds. Every man carried his kiss upon their lips. It wasn't a sexual kiss. It wasn't even love. It was a kind of universal completion a crying child seeks all their life. After that kiss, her life was completed. Everything that happened afterwards didn't even matter. And as she thought about his kiss, his gentle, cracked lips upon hers - she realized she couldn't do it. She couldn't flush away the one thing she had made her whole entire life. The only thing she had ever really created from her own broken, used bucket of a body. And searing within her intrepid consciousness, a toilet bowl of its own stinking endurance - she knew she was with her. They were holding each other without touching one another. As one but departed. And all around she could hear the child's heart beat. Loud. Deafening. A screaming concert of joyful cries like the first cries she sang when she came into the ugly world. 

The child looked nothing like him but it was crying on the inside. Just like he was. When an animal cries it doesn't spill any tears, it simply shatters into a million pieces. And as it shatters, the glass cuts into its organs and it bleeds to death from within. He cried because he carried a terrible secret. A horrifying memory. "You will never tell" shush now, shush now. When you're young, you're so delicate. He wasn't even angry. He was crying and no one ever heard him. He could feel the shrill air pulling him down like the force it took to lift off into flight. Like a human rain, he was falling faster and his pulse quickened, turned on by his imminent demise. We're all being penetrated, every moment. Life is a constant weeping womb of penetration. A celebration of incision. Whenever he used to sleep with Diane, he would close his eyes. She didn't like it when he wouldn't look at her. She wanted to be appreciated like a painting. But he would not open, not even as she did for him. He couldn't bring himself to look into the eyes that still starred at his crumbled bloodbath, the eyes of excitement. An anal afterlife. His scrawny childish body shivered as he crawled back outside the box and lifted his trousers to break out into a frenzied walk through the pews. That night he told himself not to cry. But he couldn't help remembering the flash of the camera. The embarrassed boy in the pictures. An enduring testament to a tortured infant. The memories of the devil. They say the warlords will rape a virgin child if they've contracted sandulela ngculazi. The child would always be him and he would always take the photograph. The fucking picture that eyes would leaf through in comfortable working toilets while they discharged the food they preserved in their refrigerators. 

She scooped up the water in a carton of milk and put it in the fridge. It would stay there forever. Her last contribution. A faceless child that would cry out even without a tongue. The paean of the fetus child that was sparked in all of her dreams. The night was biting cold and she could smell something new. A scent that stopped her and rooted her to this spot. This pavement crack that had endured a million footsteps in its short time it held up this electric city. She felt the lips of the old man. The scent of her grandmother. The feeling of being completed. She listened to the sound of the heartbeat erupting through the bowels of the city. Not once did she have the desire to look up. To realize. To see.

Now that he was complete he was ready to go. He was ready to be broken. It is few men who are shattered on their own terms and their adjusted timeline. He took in one final crust of breath into his lungs. In this one moment he was complete and in an instant he would become entirely separate. A glass masterpiece of pieces that could never be put together again. All his memories would be pulled apart like the energy of the Big Bang. He would never feel any more fear, any embarrassment, any tinge of regret. He would be free.

And in one joyful instant. As his head met hers - they were completed. They were one. As two completed souls become broken in a fraction of a second - they shared the most intimate of partnerships. The art of dying. If one could freeze time, you would see one human - half of it standing upwards, the other half falling down. A miraculous reflection of our own unhinged nature. Neither of them had ever met each other until now. And under the circumstances, no introductions were necessary. Men had always wanted to be on top of her. This would be her last. And he had always been falling, from the moment he was spurned into life. For this is how a human being moves. This is the journey their first steps take them. The terrible need to move. To move within another. To move into a new world. To move into each other to let someone else move to, into their own eyes. As  one great mechanism of movement, falling into each other. Ruining one another. 

But where are we moving to? Where does the water flow towards? 

There was no honor in his suicide. And no interest in her death. When the news reporter took the photographs, he knew they could never run. He hung the negatives and looked up at them wondering what had led to this strange and unfortunate meeting. He thought how these two souls could've passed each other on the street and never known they would meet again. But deep down he knew that he didn't care. That people jumped all the time and people died every second. One point eight in fact. But of that eight of a human? What kept them from being whole? He didn't care enough to follow his thought stream, there would be new bloodbaths to photograph and his lens was waiting to capture them.

The night her baby had been conceived she was fucking an older man who preferred to listen to rap music. As he stabbed her like a knife penetrating meat - she found herself feeling his heart beating with the rhythm of the music. And her heart beat with him in a beautiful syncopated movement. While their union had no love, at least it was in time with the music of creation, at least it had rhythm. And the song goes "I got rhythm. Who could ask for anything more?"

Before he jumped he looked out at the city. And he saw a plane sailing through the clouds above him. People were so stupid, they have to pay for a ticket to fly, he didn't even have to pay a dime. And as he jumped out, into the blackness - he stopped crying.

What connected them? What allowed them to be human? They cried and no one heard them. They cried when they came into the world and they cried leaving it. They never stopped crying. And the sound of their tears was so deafening, so loud that no one could hear it anymore, our ear drums had tuned it out. We cry so long, we cry so much that no one remembers what it sounds like. We just think it's static.

All the men she ever fucked were fucking her. All the people he ever photographed looked into his lens. And all these people watched them touch each other, head to head - in the final moment they engulfed each other in penetrative unity. 

Now they were invisible. Just water in the toilet bowl of death that is flushed away with each movement. And no one could see them, not even themselves. They were like a fetus moving through the sewers of heaven. Maybe that was the way they were supposed to look, like nothing. Or maybe there was something more to them, something hidden in all the shit.

Back to Zero

In the future there will be no cinemas. There will be no movies. No novels.

There will still be music. But music will not be the same. It will be in seconds, not minutes. We will watch what I call "live art." We will be able to view holographic virtual reality. Holograms of our favorite actors will speak to us. But there will be no current actors. No more celebrities.

We will live "enclosed" lives in virtual homes. We will employ robots who will do our work, do our jobs and fight our wars. Nothing will be real anymore.

We will be able to watch classic movies like the Godfather and exist within the scenes. Handing a gun to a young Don Vito. We will feel everything but nothing at the same time.

Novels will return to a form of Haiku. An instant short story that is short and visual. Our attention span will be so low that novels will be a kind of preview to keep us thinking. A good metaphor for future novels will be the paragraph under the title "plot" on any film wikipedia page.

The greatest challenge for the future human will be fighting the urge to stop imagining.

We will become the creators of our movies. We will be able to create massive special effects in an instant by a computer remodeling our thoughts and dreams into visual reality. But it won't be real, it will only be experienced as real.

We will be the main actors of our own movies as they will be a kind of reassembled dream. There will be no need for knowledge because entire encyclopedias of knowledge will be downloaded into our minds. We will be able to genetically alter our talents and abilities to give us designer attributes.

Our minds will stop requiring the need to think, our bodies will lose an individual form because of our ability to re-design them at will like wearing a different set of clothes and our human needs will be grossly unmet.

As each new generation grows outward each individual will lose meaning in a world of more than ten billion people. As technology develops, our emotions will be unprepared for this great change and we will try to rebel against our technological progress.

But what is the point of saying this?

I want to write a "future" story. Something they may look back at one day and call one of the first. My thoughts are simply predictions. But perhaps this is the future of writing. From the earliest days when we wrote in ancient languages on cave walls to the first writings with ink to the spoken dialogue of Shakespeare, our culture has used language to communicate. So what would a future story communicate? What would its theme be? What is lost in this future? Our humanity.

Handholdyours LOVE :) kiss/kiss=one "I want you" scary moment. A scream. I lost u...Monweday 'member u LOVE :( G(one) .

Maybe I'm not a man for my time. I don't really mind if no one reads this blog or no one even reads it. I guess that's not really the point. I don't think any of the stars in the sky need anyone to look at them for them to exist. To shine and to burn and eventually to die. After all, they were twinkling for millions of years before we oozed out of the soup.

~

What has happened to poetry? Perhaps it is time for us to dismantle the ancient inklings. There's not much point in us being protective. We'll all die eventually. We have all this base concerns. To overcome the suffering. And this is what I want to write about tonight. The human mind.

Humanity prides itself on the basic idea of relation. We relate to each other through marriage. We form teams. We work at a company. We live in different sections of buildings. Some of us are richer, poorer. The other principle of humanity is timing. Everything needs time. Everything has a time. We have birthdays. Death days. We wait for events. We plan ahead. We move at certain speeds. We drive fast cars. We sleep for a certain amount of hours. Our hearts beats. And these two principles form one other - if you take the idea of relation of objects and timing, you can extrapolate that to the movement of the planets and the time that the earth spins and form something else: the idea of form. And this is where the illusion reality appears. If we are all part of the same fabric of the universe, what institutes distance and time? But form. We perceive the notion of "the other" in order to create distance and perceive the notion of "past, present and future" to give a sense of separation. What if in-effect everything that exists was part of the "one", a universal unity that connects everything together, a formless tao and then also time was one, the past, present and future were all one and everything was happening at the same time forever, as if every moment was a constant repetition?

I believe I've come here for a purpose. There is a hidden reality. I do not claim to have any facts, just thoughts. I do not claim to have any secret. It is just possibilities. A philosophical framework.

Einstein worked as a postal clerk. He was a messenger. His message was relativity. The same idea applies to this theory of one-ness, a wholeness. Let's extrapolate this a bit.

Using this idea we can assume that: if you hurt someone you are in-fact hurting yourself. If you make love to someone you are making love with yourself. If you see someone, you are seeing yourself. There is no living or dead, no individualism - just parts that make up a whole. Take the human body - can we say that our lungs, our hearts and our brains are not part of our bodies? What if we were simply the organs of the body of the universe - that we worked in tandem to maintain the whole. As human beings we are always striving for a sense of wholeness - the ideas of redemption, sacrifice, growth and love are all connected to a sense of physical incompleteness.

I do not know if I am a religious person. I cannot say that the wholeness represents God. But I can say that we are connected to one another in ways we couldn't imagine. The evil of humanity is part of us, just as the good. It all forms the constituents of the one. This is where love is so important to human beings, it is the act that brings us to wholeness including feelings of personal sacrifice, dependence and sexuality.

My message is more than that we are all together and the world is one. I'm saying that we cannot separate ourselves from the actions of the other. We are no different. The notions of racism, intolerance, persecution are invalid because they show an ignorance that we are different.

But isn't this the benchmark of human freedom? The idea of the self, of individuality. But what is democracy? Isn't it about human freedom? It's also about equality. The idea that everyone has an equal the say. The idea of a vox populi. Remember - intolerance of people that are different or have different beliefs comes from fear of the "other." If we are indeed all part of this fabric, sex has little meaning and therefore gender and sexual persecution is not only immoral but invalid.

Much of my theory flies in the face of a capitalist society. My idea is inspired by the Buddhist limitation of the self. Even in a western society where we celebrate the self, the individual, the celebrity, the personal freedom - we also value personal sacrifice, selflessness through good deeds and religious growth. All of these ideas are about the destruction of the self by giving yourself to others and to God but destruction is the wrong word - it is incorrect.

I am arguing that our perception of reality is flawed. Our concept time is human in its limitation and our concept of the "one" and the wholeness of the universe is undermined by the strive for individual self importance in order to derive power and therefore control over others. We are certainly controlled as population by fear more than ever but then that applies to this very principle - the false idea of giving our control over to our government when in-fact we are no different from our leaders. We lionize our celebrated leaders (including politicians, pop stars and religious figures) because we want to feel that there are Gods who stand above us that we can worship and aspire to be. But in-fact we are no different to them, there as human as us.

If this theory of reality is true. If as formless matter we are all connected and one what implications are there? Firstly, death is in-fact not a physical death as we never had a self anyway. But it has a much greater implication. If we are all part of a universal harmony, if we are all part of the one: then we are much bigger than single human beings - we are as large as the universe! This is why human beings can understand the greatest mysteries of nature - because we are nature, we are simply unaware of our limitations. With the power of an entire universe, we are capable of the greatest advances. The reason many of these advances has come through sciences is because science is the only knowledge form that understands the vastness of our reality and our universe and therefore can draw from a greater well spring of possibility.

Haven't you noticed how art (our view of the world) has become reductionist? We're telling the same stories. We're exploring the same characters. We're still worshipping the same Gods. We're hearing the same rhythms and tones. Painting the same shapes. Following the same stories through the same trials. This is because the wellspring of human knowledge on this planet has been used up. Once we realized we have the knowledge and power of the stars - we will be able to expand our consciousnesses and tell greater, deeper stories?

Am I saying we have magic powers? No. I'm saying that in order to understand the basic laws of the universe (relativity and quantum physics) - we realized that that the limitations of the human body didn't exist? That in-fact, through our collective wholeness - we could see clearly the true meaning of our reality. If we saw ourselves are more than just selves, as more than just bodies with personalities - we could understand the deepest truths of existence.

With the vastness of universes (in oceans of many universes) we reach the height of the furthest stars by expanding beyond our bodies to reach beyond the limit of minds and explore a deeper reality. But this theory is very uncomfortable for people. We cling to our notion of self, to our notion of power to overcome our child-like fears of abandonment. We cling to our hierarchies, our ladders, our power struggles instead of embracing harmony and balance.

As long as we continue to fight over individual power, we will see abuses of wealth, wars of tribes, the quest for individual power, celebrated god worshipping and individual selfishness. We will also see abuses of the planet and the natural world by humanity's quest to harness the destructive power of nature by perverting our own human nature which is the movement of the seasons, the power of the sun, the energy of the stars and the gravity of truth.

If we are all one - there is no "other." There is only connection. The observed and the observer are entangled. The stars that human eyes first set their gaze upon all those thousands of years ago were in-fact part of those very eyes, burning within.

We will only grow in our deep knowledge of the inner workings of the universe. First we became masters of nature, then masters of our bodies and soon masters of the stars but we are only mastering ourselves like a child learning to use its body. There is so much more we have to explore, to discover but the deep truth that humanity didn't truly understand its own reality has repeated throughout history.

At first we thought we were the centre of the world, that the world was made in seven human days, that the earth was flat, that the universe revolved around us and finally that there was no hidden world within us. We learn and rewrite. We write and wipe away. The truth will always be rewritten. But those of us that can see, that we are all part of the unity of the universe are no different from those that see us all as separate, as broken. Much of the human journey is about fixing ourselves, finding our place. When we love someone, we love ourselves only more. In human terms this is a form of healing but it is simply the recognition of wholeness, of everything connecting as it should.

The future isn't broken, it's one.

In past writings, I have argued that as a culture we are slowly moving to the recognition of the wholeness. By forming one world economies and one world cultures - we are slowly forming into a one world society. We are recognizing we are more than individuals but parts of a whole world. While we are proud of our independence - humanity isn't governed by isolationism but by co-operation.

I'm not sure where I fit into the world. I have the same urges all of us do for dominance, power and fame - for the gratification of my own wounded self. But I am beginning to understand I am part of a much larger being. Something wiser than humanity, something stronger than our most powerful weapons, older than our most ancient beliefs. I believe that am part of the future as much as I'm part of the past. As one vast continuum, I exist as something much larger than what stares back at me in the mirror. I am impervious to form, invisible to human sight, a perfect combination of light and the dark.

Without darkness there can be no light.

I do not think this theory makes us any less human. It will have its distractors. But it makes the most simple sense to me. That when I look at another they are not better or worse than me nor a repetition of me but a part of me. That when I look into the stars, I am part of their brightness - I give them their light and they give me theirs. I don't think we have superpowers. I don't think we can manipulate physical reality. But when you see that we are all part of the universe, a strange human question emerges:

If we are all part of the universe and yet are given the illusion of self through form - perhaps that's what we are supposed to think right now. Perhaps it's easier to acquire the dream of breaking free from our human bodies and human planet through the illusion of a human self. After all - everything about human beings has its advantage so why not then our perception of reality?

The camera is about distance. It frames emotion. It can be connected to the thematic idea of closeness and being far away. We are connected by how far we are apart. All lost souls separated in a sea of mortality. The camera accentuates this separation, this break-up. It shows our separation, our loneliness and our closeness. It shows us this and makes us feel something because of it.

Most films are about a character who seeks a goal. To destroy the ring. To kill Kurtz. We follow the hero on their search and their quest. Films are at their core about human beings. We at our core are obsessed with one simple thing: being human. Each of us has a time we are born, our era in which we pass through the house of life. I am passing through this house in the beginning of the 2nd millennium since the death of our savior. I will only live a certain time and then I will be gone. We follow the exploits and struggles of each beings striving for something but what does it matter? This is my question. If indeed we are going to die, what we seek to achieve matters so little. If our life is truly the systematic continuation of DNA through the spectrum of space-time, across the sands of time - then perhaps the only important thing about being alive is to continue our genetics, prolong life. Is this way the very act of creation - procreation is so pleasurable? The act of the ultimate force of closeness, a penetrative one-ness between the two gender forces.

Our world exists as a series of dualistic connections. The sun and the moon - the light and the dark symbolize the moral forces of good and evil, life and death, woman and man and night and day. It is this rotation of the dualistic forces that maintains the equilibrium of passing time and lived life. Too many humans think of life in terms of the past, present and the future rather than a continuous process. Life never freezes. Moments last forever. Life's future has been lived, much like its past. Once you zoom out, on the lens of the universe - you see that all time is one and has no arrow but one continuous life. While this contradicts the basic 3rd law of thermodynamics, I believe that time is eternally passing - it exists as one mass. A film has no beginning and no end. It is just one contained passage. You can begin it at any time and rewind it at any time - it can begin whenever you want and ends whenever you'd like. Our time here seems forward moving - we strive and seek a goal. But it is not what lies at the end of the road that matters but the journey that leads to us - so again I ask - why does the end matter?

If we die and then that is it - why then do we live out lives struggling for something, for one single moment of satisfaction? We create invisible ladders for ourselves to climb up like rats in a maze. Other human beings control other beings, we love and we live, we fuck and we kiss, we die and we procreate - we are invisible and we are here. If you were to look at life as a painting without an arrow of time, if you were to examine the canvas of life and pull away, as if zooming out to look at it through the eyes of a cosmic God - you would not see the future or the past - you would see one single canvas, existing in multiple dimensions. You would see ink for every lifetime. A series of moments dotted together to form something larger. Think of our brain state or our memories - do they exist only forward? We think long of the past and wonder of the future so then where is the present?

I am a filmmaker. As filmmakers we are forced to make generic stories to make bundles of money. What's the point? Who will care about what money is your bank account when you're dead? We live our lives as if we are immortal and act surprised when we find out we're not. It is a bleak future. A painless invisibility. A nothingness. Emptiness. And yet Buddhism tells us that experience, that life is suffering. That true freedom is escaping the human state. Wait - I thought humanity was the core of an artistic life?

I am not a scientist. I am not fully religious. I only can write of my own thoughts and experiences. If they are invalid, so it is. I have lived a life of experiences, of feelings, of ideas. I have come into a world filled with goals. Filled with quests I must go down. Finding the right girl. Making a film. Winning on a team. But what really made me happy was being good to some people. Was being a good brother. What do terms truly matter? We live our life surrounded by terms. We idolize gods. We sprout opinions. We control others. We kill others and then we punish the people that kill only by killing them. We contend that we know that a God created us. We build nuclear bombs. We build bombs to blow our enemies up, we buy things and sell things. We listen to music. We eat, sleep and drink. We live and we die. We smile and we cry. And through all of this we assume we are important. That is the core of film - the importance of humanism. And yet as a culture we are beginning to learn that we are not as important as we thought. We are not the centre of the universe, the earth isn't flat, the Gods that created us in THEIR image do not exists. Surprise, surprise - we're beginning to learn we are but tiny grains of sand on an infinite beach. I believe soon that one day we will find many other aliens cultures outside of us. But I suppose this is the last bastion of hope - that we are alone in the universe, that as a planet filled with life - we inhabit the only one. But with the discovery of the goldilocks zones and more earth like planets this may be challenged soon. And how are we learning to deal with this. Machines are taking over. Our culture is becoming global and we are becoming mass produced. We have become tiny in a global world. We do not live in villages but a global marketplace. We are sold to as a global community. We board the internet as one, not individuals. We are a crowded mass, not an individual few. And those that lead us become god-like symbol for the unwashed mass. And we as a culture allow our controllers to control us and allow killing to occur under the banner of security to keep us being controlled for fear of what would happen if (god forbid) we became individuals. Democracy was the beginning of the end. What united us as one. In losing our individual humanity, we recognized our own unimportance. How in-fact our lives would not matter and held no important significance.

As we became insignificant we realized something important. That the human element had to go. 2001 Space Odyssey predicted the next stage of our culture - the shift away from the human element towards human genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and finally to a state where we didn't die, where we didn't need to eat or sleep - where we became Nietzsche's over humans. And this is the great danger of becoming like Gods. We drift away from our own humanity. For mortality is what truly makes us human. The lust towards death imagery mirrors humanity's pursuit to live longer. To become less human. To become monstrous. And reach a level away from ourselves. We have turned the act of procreation into a kind of perverted power act in the war of the sexes. Why - to distance ourselves from the purpose of it - to survive. Perhaps that was the recognition that as we crawled out of the caves and created an earth-like culture held under God that we would need to erase the flaws of humanity that held us back - that to truly survive the dangers of our evolutionary demise, we had to rid ourselves of the human traits that put us danger. The great challenge of our age now is whether we will survive as a world in a nuclear age. With two nuclear disasters and nuclear weapons already used in the field of war - we are not far away from global annihilation. Doesn't this effect many millions of years of genetic evolution? How could we evolve as intelligent human beings to the state where we could destroy ourselves? What is the point of that? While we may well be insignificant, life itself is not, especially a human life in that it can decode how we came to be this way in understanding how the universe was created.

I wonder what the point of my life is. Why I pick up a camera? If the point of my life is to simply continue life, to have children - what will someone look if you made a movie of the moments of my life? Was I too frightened, did I waste my experiences to defend myself from pain? Could I have withstood more? I thought about mortality as a child, I thought of everything that we lose. I thought of love. It brings tears to my eyes. Love is our greatness weakness and yet our greatest strength. It keeps us going when all seems lost. I feel lonely and insignificant sometimes. I feel like no one understands what I'm feeling or asks these kind of questions - do they even care? I want to go out knowing I asked the right questions, the one's whoever made this life for me would've wanted me to ask? Surely if I met my maker I think he'd want me to ask what the most important thing about life was? Was it love? Was it the truth? Was it being human? What is the point of being human, of living? Perhaps it is different for everyone.

When we go see movies we escape from life. Is this a great indictment of the fact that reality has become too hard to bare? Do we disappear into the entertainment of art's other worlds as a voyeurism to experience everything we can't? Does it allow us to dream and keep us from living? Am I manufacturing dreams for people to escape their real lives from? Why aren't real lives as beautiful as our dreams? We always look to events such as slavery as examples of escaping from tyranny and yet we are all human - so really weren't we just escaping from our own human system of brutality? If we are all connected in being human - aren't we indicted by our own evil nature? But there is good in this world. A lot. So where is the separation, where do we draw the line - where is the distance?

I wonder why I've become a filmmaker. What line do I draw to form my goal? What am I going for? Cinema has polluted art and destroyed inventive storytelling. The agents and the producers stand in the way of true art. Real art. Human art. Our culture has been destroyed. The lines that we set ourselves to become heroes our set by our own standards - by people and not by talent or strength or even force of will. Cinema is so young because it is not the intended medium for stories. It is a simplified way of taking artistic art forms such as art, music, drama, writing and theatre and combining them into one monstrous form. It is large and gigantic and yet a strange, diluted mixture. It's as if we took our five favorite foods and combined them into one meal. What would that taste like? Art is a representation not of reality but of the senses. It is not a representation of real life because then it is no different to a mirror. It has style because it represents how we interpret the world through our sight and sound connecting to our minds. Art, photography and theatre connect to our eyes in a visual while writing and drama connect in an intellectual way while music affects our ears. Cinema was an attempt to create an Avengers style recombinant of art to market to the masses. It was created as a way to bring all the fans to give their money over much as Avengers has done this year - it took many different films and drew more people into one. Film has no core, no real medium of philosophical backbone because it has no history. It is a mutation of form. The precusor of photography was the beginning of the end - an unreliable and unreal representation of really as we know it. The death of the human imagination, the end of thinking and the mind - the beginning of forming into one and the loss of the individual - the moment the camera zoomed back to see everything and the death of mystery, of wonder - of contemplation. Truth may have told us what was really there but our imagination cannot be held back by truth. Film is a bastardized child of once important art. It has no history. Music goes back to Pythagorus and further. Drama to the Greeks. Storytelling all the way back to ancient civilizations and art to cave paintings. Oral stories survived through the eons of time because they were not mutated but important to one of our most cherished desires - imagination. Movies are the product of thousands of people, of computers, of advertisements. We visit church like cinemas to adorn ourselves in a massive, communal experience of a bastardized art form. And what have movies given us but the same basic plot-formations:
A hero we come to love
A goal the hero seeks
Noble friends
Love
An enemy that stands in the hero's way producing conflict
A series of trials
A resolution

You may argue this is the corner-stone of all ancient storytelling, yes this is true but can we apply the same formalistic attention to music, to prayer, to art - even to theatre. Cinema had more possibilities than simply trying to create the same basic storyline as the novel. But the novel itself is a young and dying medium. Poetry is an old art form. The Iliad and the Odyssey were poems. My favorite film 2001 acts as a kind of science fiction tone poem for evolution. It creates images in our imagination that connect to our inward experience. It speaks of life and death. Dualism.

And yet poetry as an industry is dead commercially and there are few poets around anymore.

So the real question is whether there is much artistic merit in cinema? Really not much in my opinion. It is really not a true art form, it lacks a history. A sense of its own life. It stokes the ego's of the stupid and repeats the mindlessness of the masses. And how we argue for it to represent our reality when it helps us escape from ours?

It is not real life and so is robbed of its own realistic decency. Of its own humanity. It manipulates into paying to be manipulated. Imagine if we had to be paid to see movies, to endure these stories rather than to be entertained them. In the world of mass culture, of instantaneous communication - why do we go out of our way to escape? Because reality has become terrible, unlivable. But hasn't the world become safer? No, it's become bigger. We see ourselves as one. As whole and collapse individually because of this.

As we lost our individual humanity, we died as individuals and become one and so art became one. It fused inorganically into one mutated medium. We didn't want individual art forms so we made a Frankenstein-like "one" that contained them all.

Cinema comes from the word for movement. Moving images. It moves us and the images move as do the stories. That act in a state of constant change. And yet is not endless, it has definitive end points. It is an exercise and nothing more. A journey that people like to take. It does work upon us like music or prayer but as a kind of meal that we consume. We do not move in our seats - we watch people moving. We become watchers, observers bringing art to life in a quantum world. We become passive, immobile, unspoken and therefore INHUMAN in becoming participants for cinema. It allows us to become passive. It distances us from reality.

We can no longer tell the difference between reality and CGI. Real and fantastic. Magic has overtaken the world. Myth and religion have been replaced by actual hyper-fantasy. All our stone age dreaming has become real. We cannot call a medium that creates Avatar ever a realistic medium. It is not real - that's the point! We grew out of our dreaming of heavens and Gods and now we can realize it in our cinematic churches. We can worship what isn't real and escape from what is.

We are escaping from what is the most real - being human. There is a war on humanity. On reality. On living. It's battlefield is art. We have escaped from the real world, gone through the cupboard to our Narnia-like state of existence. We have scanned the real world and decided to go to a better one.

Cinema, as a polluted form of mass produced culture allows us to create our own worlds. And yet doesn't that allow our imaginations to grow? What am I arguing for? The death of cinema. No. I am simply pointing out that we are becoming less and less human. We are being taken over by fantasy and the machines.

We have distanced ourselves from ourselves, we have become separate. As one we are not individuals anymore. When we do not matter, we have no importance.

If I bring this piece back to my own personal life I wonder what the point of being a filmmaker is but more now I wonder what the point is of being human? Am I really asking that? What it means to be human? The goal is to bring back humanity. Not through film. In another way. Wrestle back what it means to be human. We are frightened of our own human possibility. Our minds built the bomb and fought world wars. And yet these same minds loved each other to continue our species. We worked hard enough together to go to the moon. We built beautiful cathedrals and wrote symphonies. We created beauty and discovered the heavens that hid above us. Storytelling is not real humanity. The closest thing to real humanity used to be religion but that in itself requires a kind of tyranny. A kind of control. What more than simply being human makes us have meaning? That itself is the most important question that we haven't discovered yet. What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my life? I can search back through all my memories, contemplate the future that is yet to be but really remains truly a mystery to me is what it all means?

The meaning of my life is something larger than art. Meaning from a human stand point must have some connection to goodness. I do not believe in scientific meaning except for us to evolutionary runners, continuing to pass the torch on of our genes. But human meaning must be equated to human goodness. So then I must ask what good I can achieve in this life? How can I make other people's lives better? Especially those that I care about. And this again reflects a simple idea: the death of the self. The death of selfishness. Buddhist and yet the very thing I have written about this whole time. The end of the individual.

When God became a monotheistic idea - when we believed in heroes, we understood humanity as being an individual experience but now it has become many. Celebrities are worshipped. A mass culture lives on.

If cinema is not a true art form - then what is art? Art in the eyes of Aristotle is an imitation of life. A replication of reality. Then what about reality? What if we looked on to reality - what do we see there? Look at this piece of writing, it exists not as a conversation but as an art piece, a piece of writing? Culture has led to art transmographying into itself. Everything becomes part of the wheel. It has no beginning and no end. No point just a continuum.

And maybe that is the point? The meaning of life is to find any meaning in this pointless canvas. If we can find any meaning in anything it is worth something. Even though we die, even though we are insignificant - to find some form of meaning in all this meaningless has to mean something!

If I can look at a sunset and it can make me happy I have found meaning it. Can a tree find meaning in it or a rabbit? We live our lives as a series of values, positions, ups and downs - distances. We strive and we seek. We win and we lose. But at the core it is all pointless because we have the same fate. We are all the same. We are many.

If you look at something giant and extravagant and compare to something tiny and small - what of their separation? This giant universe carries around tiny human beings. And yet we matter. On a cosmic level our giant cosmos makes us tiny human beings quite insignificant and yet we find importance in ourselves, despite reality.

We think we were created by gods. Does an ant think it was created in seven days? Does a whale wonder who created us, does a dolphin question where it will go after it dies? If we are all animals, from the same primordial soup - what innate knowledge rests inside us that tells us who we are.

Do whales have meaning as they move through the ocean? Do they build churches to gods? Do whales pray? If whales prayed what would happen? Would the earth shatter, would the savior return? We created gods to symbolized that we were made for a reason. We killed our savior because we knew we knew we are not god-like. However close we get, we will always fall down - it's gravity you know...

So where does this leave us? This separation from ourselves and gods? I don't know if my life has meaning. I don't know if anyone will ever read this. But I know I'm human. Why? Because I am told so. No, it must be something I know - otherwise how could the first person know? It must be something inside of me. Some truth. I know that when I stare into space I only see emptiness. I don't see humanity. The closest thing to realizing I'm here is to look into my reflection. To re-create reality and reflect it back. And that becomes art. The purpose of art is to remind us that we're human. To point at lens back at ourselves and says - we are alive. We are human. But that was the point of art long ago. Soon we will no longer appear human. We will have no use for our muscles, our minds, our fingers, our eyes and our mouths. We will lose any need to live a human life. Machines will do our work. Computers will do our thinking. Robots will do our labor. We will see what we're told to see and have've nothing to say because everything will be said for us, as one culture. So what will the point be in being human? What will be the need for art? We have forgotten we are human beings. That we make catastrophic errors, that we contain great evil and great love - that we die. That we are important and unimportant at the same time. That we are all unfortunately the very same in a very different way.

And after we have forgotten we are human, perhaps again we will need art to remind us. We will listen to the great sonatas of Mozart, the flawed heroes of Shakespeare and the great paintings of Da Vinci and realize our humanity again and destroy the computers, break the machines and kill the robots. Once again human beings will rule the earth and art will make us human again. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is not the future we face.

It is not technology that is the problem. The problem is a human problem. When we killed off our Gods - we acknowledged that we were not being guided. When we journeyed from the heavens, we realized we were alone and when Darwin understood evolution, we realized we did not come from angels but from apes. To be without purpose, alone and animalistic made us strive towards a dark future - one where we became separated from ourselves. At our core, to become whole we need to understand not who made us but why they made us - meaning. We turned away from meaning. We turned to potential. Instead of understanding why we were - we sought to know what would we become. You cannot become anything important without first understanding why you are who you are in the first place. We built nuclear bombs without the emotional capacity to understand why we couldn't be allowed to have them. We toppled religion in the name of science without understanding the value of belief and faith. And for what truth? For what meaning?

I am long way from understanding all of these questions. Perhaps I never will understand. But I know I am looking towards important questions. Questions no one else is allowed to ask.

It doesn't matter what I say or do or even create. Why am I a filmmaker doesn't matter. I'm not a filmmaker. I'm a human being. So why am I human being? Is it about what made me human or what makes me human? Gods or nature? I am a human being because I am contemplating why I am a human being. I'm thinking, therefore I am. To think is to exist. This is what dies. Thought. This is what drives us. This is the true art form. The art form of thought. Thought is not cinematic because you can't see it but it is larger than anything in the world. More powerful than the most powerful things. It is a beacon, a weapon, an imagination - a world. In the world of thought, there is no limit. It is endless. I think a lot and I notice that people don't like to think anymore. That's a shame. Thinking is what separates us. We think about things. We wonder. Contemplate. Dream.

I dream a lot these days. Of other places. Of random thoughts. I think too much perhaps. But I love to think. You can't take away what I think, you can't even know it. It's my own. You can't buy it. You can't realize it. You can photograph it. You can't take it away from me. I can think about whatever I want.

One day I believe we will realize how important thought really is. It is the reason cinema is not an art form. It is the reason that language and words separate us from the animals. It is what dies. It is what we can create from our flesh. It gives meaning to our lives and asks to contemplate meaning. It allows us to dream and to create. It cannot be seen but can be felt. It is invisible but everywhere. It is in you and me and everyone you know. It gives me hope and joy.

Do not stop me from thinking. Do not ever make it a crime not to think. Think a lot. Think more than anyone will ever allow you too. Don't ever stop yourself from thinking too much. Don't be lazy and not think. Thinking will protect you, save you - inspire you on through the bleakness of life.

The war on thought is beginning though. We are instructed not to think. Orwell was right. Thinking is the most powerful tool of a revolution. Thinking makes us human. As humans we were meant to be free. Thinking is free.

I think that you think this essay must come to an end. I think you're right. If you don't think so then I will leave you with this:

Our minds are the most important asset we have. To have a mind is a very important thing. Consciousness is very poorly understood. It is mysterious. In a world where everything is exposed, we must seek the ideas that remain in mystery. The world of the mind is unexplored. As the first settlers must have contemplated the new world soon we will voyage into the mind. What will we find? What are we capable of? What lurks within our thoughts?

The point of life.

Thoughts?

Frances Forte as "Naomi" in Terezin

Frances Forte is an actress of tremendous bravery and fearless desire who has created an unforgettable performance in Terezin. I have worked with her on various film projects for two years and I have never seen such a fearless actress. In approaching the role of Holocaust victim Naomi in "Terezin" - Frances and I worked on the role for an entire year to discover the character through method acting. Finding the character was difficult for both of us as we were forced to consider the daily struggles and terrors of a woman suffering in the Holocaust. Frances is a true feminist and brings a great justice to the role. I firmly believe that every actor should create a character that is separate to themselves and Frances created one of the most interesting, deep and moving performances I have ever seen. Uncovering the painful and raw emotions of a victim is one of the most difficult challenges about making a movie about the Holocaust as the character must appear true to their circumstances and honor the memory of the six million lost. I am a firm believer in trying to face up to the grim realities of history and never forget. Frances' performance is truly extraordinary; she plays such a difficult role with a constant emotional intensity and terror that could only be found through continuously intensive rehearsals and a full year of working to find the emotional heart of her character. Frances stayed in character on set and the emotional toll of the performance must've been completely overwhelming but Frances never flinched in discovering the deepest layers of Naomi. Actors that push themselves to their limits are the great artists of their generation, they are able to uncover levels of continuous emotion that most of us only feel once or twice in a lifetime. Frances, being a true artist played these emotions throughout the performance to create what I believe is a character that is both iconic and extraordinary. Performances like this one come along only rarely and this one cannot be missed.

-Nicholas Tolkien (Director of Terezin)

Terezin

I'm currently editing my 3rd feature film "Terezin". My life is a daily journey to my computer to begin the process of piecing together scenes of loss, horror, pain, suffering and survival. Soon the world will see the story we've created. I can't wait to hear their thoughts.

Death and Co. by Nicholas Tolkien

Death was a collector. He had looked into the eyes of every living soul who died and remembered the colors. The blues, the greens and the browns. Sometimes he would come upon an albino and watch their final moments. Death was always present for these terminations, he had witnessed millions of car wrecks and terminal illnesses and was so used to plane crashes that the screaming of desperate passengers didn't phase him. He had slunk along the starboard deck of the Titanic, carefully observing the iceberg in the distance and had solemnly walked through gas chambers, covering his eyes for even death could not watch such a perverse debasement of human nature. Watching the last moments of every human being's life had given death a certain loving kindness for the human spirit, he had seen the courage, the bravery and the relentless acceptance of the cataclysmic fate that awaits all human souls.
Death was not a god nor devil but a passive observer; a gatherer of the souls who took each human by their hand and led them into the light of time. Death did not know what happened after the light for he had never died, he had always existed in a half-state, a creature of limbo and lifelessness; undead but almost human. Death often wondered why human beings were fated to die. Sometimes he liked to go to maternity wards and stare dimly at the faces of the weeping babies and wonder if they knew the hapless fate that awaited them. He looked into their curious eyes and knew that one day, he would look into their eyes again and lead them on into the labyrinth of death. Death had no friends for he was visible to human beings only after their hearts had stopped beating and as his spirit rose to the top of the great pyramid of Giza: a place he liked to perch atop to stare out at the silent world - he felt a great loneliness infect his heart and yearned for someone to share his sadness with.
Death remembered the field of the Somme where a million souls had perished on one fateful day. He remembered the smell of the towers at Auschwitz, the green radioactive clouds of Hiroshima and the monstrous flu that made 1918 a busy year for death. These were death's memories, his keepsakes and his tokens for they were the collective sum of a life lived only to satisfy its ending. For as human beings progressed through the slow passages of each new and more fulsome generation - death knew that the same relentless meeting awaited them. It was in this knowledge that death looked upon the great pyramids, the skyscrapers and the beautiful works of classical art with a keen sense of irony. These objects of human intelligence were created in the knowledge that their creators would perish and be unable to see their creations evolve through time. "Why create anything", death wondered - "when you will not see what will become of it?" Death wondered where he came from and who created him: why would anything create something that would be so horrifying and so destructive?
Death had seen an ocean of tears spilt for his existence. He had watched loving mothers wave goodbye to their children and children gather at their parents funerals. Today he was sitting in a hospital, a usual haunt. He was waiting for a young woman to give birth but death knew that this maternal journey would be her final action before her own life would be extinguished. He looked into the woman's eyes as she underwent another heavy contraction and felt a great sadness for her that she would not be able to see her child's life, their birthdays and their own lifetime. Death had tried to kill himself a thousand times, endlessly trying to join his silent victims in that vast, angelic light but it had always repelled him back to continue his thankless occupation.
As death wondered through the hospital ward he looked at the old, sickened faces he would soon meet. Women and men, ravaged by cancer holding on to a last, childish hope that their final days would not be in this white, sterile graveyard. He came upon one old woman who was weeping without end and sat by her side wondering when her time would come. Death would not receive instructions of a death until their final moments when he would quickly appear at the destination and witness as a voyeuristic prisoner - the sad final moments of a human lifetime.
A boat had capsized and death sat, crossed legged on the water as the passengers desperately tried to keep afloat in the frozen waters. A woman had been brutally murdered under a highway overpass. Death watched the murderer in his sick, excited act and felt a terrible guilt that he couldn't tell on this monster or even punish him. Death had witnessed thousands of unsolved murders, he had all the answers but no one to share them with.
Death had a photographic memory. He had been present throughout time and wondered if his duty was some form of universal punishment for some crime against nature he couldn't remember. Sometimes he looked up at the stars and had flashes of other worlds and comforting words. He wondered if this may have been his childhood. He thought constantly about the course of lifetimes: the victories and the joys, the highs and the lows and what the purpose of all this cyclical existence was? Just as the waves recycled their endless shell dance, over and over again - human beings came and went like a flickering candle, blowing out in a dark cellar.
Death was riding in a car with a young woman. He knew the train that would soon kill her was patiently making its way across nearby tracks. He looked at her curiously wondering if she could feel his cold presence. She was flicking through her phone when she got a text. It was a break-up text and death could see her lose complete concentration. The music was blaring and it droned out the loud train sound. Still holding onto her phone, her finger shaking a little - death did something he had never done before. Suddenly he turned off the music on the radio station. Replaced by the sound of the shrieking train barreling down the tracks, the woman suddenly looked up and broke just in time, narrowly avoiding hitting the oncoming train. As shock pulsed through her  face, death looked at his reflection in the car windshield and then back at the radio. Death had endlessly tried to stop deaths from happening but some universal force had always stopped him and made his silent contributions ineffective and moribund.
Death wandered through a field of lilies wondering why he had been able to save this young girl. Why was she important? He had seen millions of car wrecks, the endless blue police lights and the charred red remains that stuck to the dash board. Perhaps it was the music but why her? Death came to her house that evening and sat at her bedside. He listened to her sad tears of loneliness and fear and walked about her house looking for some clue to her survival. Everything looked so ordinary, so unoriginal that death only grew more confused and curious to why, after so many repetitions of the fate of human beings: this one had escaped.
One hundred and fifty thousand people die every day,  two every second and death watched them all but he didn't think about them and their own personal misery. He existed outside of time and today his mind was wondering elsewhere, to the events of the previous day. He thought about the girl and why she was different to all these others. What about the poor pregnant girl who was mercilessly killed in a robbery in Cape Town? Why wasn't she saved? Again death came to the house of the woman he saved. He looked through her mail and read her name "Mary Sullivan" - how ordinary a name, death thought.
And as death watched Mary slowly go through her nightly rituals: a shower, brushing her teeth, peeing and changing: he began to slowly believe that her survival had been as random as all the deaths he had ever witnessed. And as death stalked away from Mary Sullivan's house the moon threw a cold shadow over him: casting him in a hollow glow of muted colors and half-light.
And as death slept: he dreamt of a existence where he could bring life to souls. Where he could witness the ornate pleasure of sexual reproduction, where he could spark the gift of existence into a billion eyes and watch children grow like flowers beneath a speckled sun. It is a sad and beautiful world and to death, the end is a beginning and through the journey of life itself: there is the terrifying feeling of existence that permeates each soul with its own, intrinsic meaning but what was his meaning? What was he but some ghoulish agent of time itself, dragging each soul to its unknown conclusion before it was ready and overseeing the vast wasteland of life itself. Death wondered why he was immune to his own punishment: why had he not discovered what lay beyond the light?
Death hovered over the graveyards, casting a green spell over the tombs of the souls he had captured within his paralyzed and gormless hands. He saw the names written on each stone and knew that every day, more headstones would be added and more initials carved. The names they called us, from loved ones to enemies would be etched upon our final resting place as a final calling: that we could always be found, even in death but to what end, would the knowledge of our final resting place have but as a kind of sad certainty that we would never be lost again even if our eyes couldn't see and our hearts couldn't beat.
Death had been to Kabul many times over the last few years and the sweltering heat of the Afghan summer made his brow sweaty. He was sitting in a crowded market waiting for a car bomb to explode. He looked around at the happy faces of the crowd busily shopping and knew their final moments were close at hand. He thought of all the last moments a human being has: the final word they say, the last expression their face makes, the final thoughts that run through their brain - their last smile. All these moments, lost in time. Before the bomb went off, death saw another man - about his size looking at him from across the market square. No one ever looked at death and as the car bomb went off, causing debris and rubble to fly through the air - the man kept looking at him, as if death had been noticed.
Slowly as an old woman's aching hand held her husbands for the last time in the hospital room - death walked inside and sat down at her bedside. Slowly her hands fell from her husbands and the color drained from her eyes, he kept crying and calling her name though he knew in his heart she had passed. She sat facing the window looking at the dour city skyline and slowly turned around to look at death.
"Hello. I am here to help you move on" death began, reciting his usual speech - "the process is quick and painless. Do you have any final requests?" Sometimes people would ask to see their loved ones one last time or to visit a happy place from their childhood or relive a perfect memory - their wedding, their first kiss - the memory of their mother's embrace. But this old woman had no last requests. Resigned to her fate, solemnly she followed death out of the hospital room. At the end of the long hallway - the bright white light was shining, as if it had appeared out of nowhere and only these two souls could see it.
"You will walk towards light and move on to the next part of your journey." Death had spent eons on the words he said to the dead before they left him.
Slowly the old woman began to walk towards the light but then quite suddenly she turned around. She walked back up to death and using all the force in her broken, sickened body she kissed him on the cheek. Slowly she put her arms around him embracing him as if trying to find some kind of comfort in her last lonely minutes.
"Will you walk with me towards it" the old woman whispered.
Solemnly death took the old woman's hand and they walked slowly towards the burning yellow light and when it was time, like so many others - she disappeared in its bright mystery. Death's fragile hand rose to his left cheek where she had kissed him and felt his skin burning.
Death sat at the top of a skyscraper. A young man was standing atop of it looking at the blurry city beneath him. Slowly he got onto the ledge ready to jump down and face his annihilation. Death solemnly took his hand and without the man knowing, they jumped together. Death felt himself falling endlessly down as the mass of souls beneath him grew larger and larger. Death wondered what it would feel like to hit the hard gravel on this suicidal downward spiral but before death hit the ground he found himself looking down at the charred remains of the man who jumped. The man was also looking down at his broken body and then turned to see death.
"What did it feel like?" death asked, timidly.
"I wish I hadn't done it" the man replied, broken as all men are who've made grave mistakes.
Death sat at a large train station. He wondered who was next and looked around at the great mass of people, waiting to catch the next train. He thought about the woman he saved and wondered if she even knew he had saved her. And then, a man sat next to death and offered him a cigarette. Death recognized the man instantly as the man who had starred at him before the car bombing. The man was nondescript and wore a hollow black suit.
"Thanks but I don't smoke" death replied.
"My mistake."
Death wondered if the man had died, had he missed it? The man seemed too relieved, too content to be among the dead. Death was slowly starting to understand that this man had come to speak to him, a strange reversal of his usual handiwork.
"I came here to speak you directly" the man began, almost soothingly. "about the young girl you saved."
"How did I save her? I tried to save so many others" death countered, ever curious for answers he'd never been given.
"Because it is your time to move on. I have come here to replace you."
Death's throat choked up. He looked into the man's eyes and saw a nothingness in them, a lack of humanity that he saw in his own eyes.
"There were others before you" the man continued, "and now your turn is complete."
Slowly death heard a train approaching the station.
"What if I don't want to go?"
"I'm afraid that isn't up to you" the man replied, as cold as snow.
Slowly the man boarded the waiting train and beckoned to death follow him. As the train slowly rolled out of the station, death found the train was empty but for him and the man. And sadly, death began to feel fear. He was shivering and frightened like a small child.
The spirit of death hovered over the face of the ocean. He lingered in the wind. He walked upon the clouds and fell beneath the waves, further and further towards the endless deep.
And then he was brought back to the train. Unwilling to go, death kept moving around the world. A sandy beach filled with laughing children. Death saw a collection of crabs fighting each other. He sat perched upon the tallest tree in the world and looked out upon the sad, empty view and felt what all the souls he had taken had felt once - the sadness and the paralyzing certainty of their collective fate.
Back on the train, death looked out at the window at the passing countryside. He yearned to be able to be alone in the knowledge that nothing bad was going to happen, that there was nothing that need concern him but to fulfill his duties and be present for all the others that had died before him.
The train slowly ground towards a halt and death followed the man off of it. They were standing in the middle of a field next to a farmhouse. Death looked around it and remembered playing in the grass on long summer days, he looked at the animals - the cows, the chickens and the horses and remembered that he had been here before long ago when he was young.
"Do you have any final requests?" the man asked.
And of all the things death wanted, he asked for only one.
"I'd like you to hold my hand as I walk into the light. I don't want to be alone."
The man nodded and took death calmly by the hand. The white light was shining perfectly in its glory in the middle of the field. Beautiful colors consumed the sky as death and the man walked slowly towards the light. Death could feel a hot, burning sensation upon his face as terror welled up within his eyes.
He thought about the faces that had walked into the light. What had they felt?
He felt embarrassed for being so vulnerable and child-like. He thought about the destructiveness of life - the murder and the horror. But then he looked down and felt his hand being held and was comforted by this small gesture. He thought back to all the loving people that had said goodbye, the bravery in their hearts that burned more brightly than the stars. How courageous is the bravery of man! How loving is the kindness of women! A mother's touch. A child's smile. The unending hope of a better life. A new world. The promise of an end to the mystery.
Death thought about life and death and the great mystery that what lies behind the curtain of light was a knowledge none of us could truly know. Perhaps we couldn't comprehend it or perhaps the disappointment of answers would be too much to keep us going, year after year on into the unending continuation of human existence.
Slowly the light enveloped death and he felt his body disappear. He was everywhere he had ever been and all the faces that had departed with him were all around him. He had never seen a more beautiful collection of souls in his whole life than the people that had gathered around him leading him behind the light.
Death finally let go and relinquished the human feelings that still lurked within him: the fear and the sadness and finally he was free and was taken away into the light.

Thomas and the Whale by Nicholas Tolkien

It had washed up like God draped in his sweetest fineries and as the children poked and prodded at it, they couldn't quite comprehend the giant beast that lay before them. What was once a proud voyager of the seas had become a dead, sullen carcass collecting sand. Thomas, the oldest boy had never seen a whale before but he'd read about it in a dusty book he found in a library. This smart, ancient creature had outfoxed even the most cunning sailors and now it lay here, open and vulnerable for these little children to inspect it like an old man at a funeral. Thomas remembered the day he saw his dead grandfather, dressed in an old suit in an open casket. Did this whale look any different? Thomas moved around to face the beast eye to eye. He starred at its eye and saw that the whale had a little life left in its cold, human eyes and as Thomas watched it, he thought he heard the whale's heart beating 'tap, tap, tap'. And as Thomas's eyes filled with tears and his friends laughed at this abominable and heartbreakingly beautiful creature in its final moments of life - Thomas put his hands on it. He tried with all his might to move it back into the ocean as its giant brain longed for the watery home it needed most vitally but it was like blue rock, cold and immobile and there it laid, in its horrendous finery - dying in a sandy grave. As the other children soon grew bored of the dead God and went down the beach to build a sandcastle, Thomas sat next to the whale and looked out at the sweet blue ocean behind it. How appalling it was, Thomas thought that this beautiful whale had washed up on this sandy beach and died alone and vulnerable as little children who could not understand its beauty laughed at it like a circus freak. How appalling that it died beneath a smiling sun. How appalling that it couldn't sing anymore. Thomas gathered stones and laid them around the whale and prayed for it, trying childishly to remember the prayers he had ignored at church. Soon, the men would come and take pictures of the beast, maybe they'd even put it in a truck and take it from town to town as a circus exhibit. Thomas looked up at the sky as the sun began to set and wondered if there  really was a heaven. Was this the saddened God that the priest talked of every Sunday? Had he fallen from the rainbow sky and dried up like an old man, buried with the worms? There was something gruesomely beautiful about the dead whale, like the make-up that Thomas's mother applied to her dead father's face before he was lifted into the open casket, the shoe polish applied to the dead man's shoes. Why did they need to make the dead look beautiful, to cover up the atrocity? Thomas looked again into the whale's eye and let out a soft sigh, a grave realization of his own mortality. The simple knowledge that he too would face this fate, one day.
And as Thomas slowly began to walk up the beach, he looked back one time as the whale's body glistened in the blue evening light and he thought about the day he read Moby Dick. To him and his child-like imagination, this beautiful animal had seemed so powerful, so dignified and now it stood there, a colossal reminder of the power of death and the weakness of beauty. He thought about his mother's face, her beautiful smile, the warmth it left in his beating heart. He thought about the pretty girl he sat next to on the yellow school bus. And then, running back up the beach he looked back into the eye of the whale and with all his might, he slowly closed its giant eye and honored it, in a way only a child could. And knowing that this small gesture was enough, he turned back around and began to walk home. Slowly the ancient beast grew smaller and smaller till finally it was only a dark shadow, cast against the moonlit beach. We all become shadows, Thomas thought - beautiful ruins of God's perfect creation but in a strange way, in our brokenness - we form a more perfect shape, for anything that breathes must also die and anything that is dead, has once felt the energy of life. Thomas never forgot the whale or its giant eye, it lingered with him forever but he never came back to the beach, he never found out what became of it. For it often happens that whales wash up on beaches and children learn of death just as the birds sing in the trees and babies spring into existence.

Chinese Whispers by Nicholas Tolkien

Chinese Whispers

I.

I remember the house where I lived as a child

the lagoon of tubas that sang to me in cold evening.

I remember the sound of children playing

their laughter harpooning through the hyacinths.

I remember seeing daffodils bloom,  hearing their first words

(and their last)

As the moon burdens the sky and banishes the sun

I am lying awake watching from my pillow.

Walled men knock at the door of my father 

Poisoned voices.  Speaking, hissing

words I’m too young to understand.

Beneath my window people are talking

while strangers walk on Chinese fields after a bad harvest

a woman is crying

there is a scream…

Then a silence that can never be disturbed.

(I remember a harbour where ships are leaving and waving goodbye to a face.

I remember going in a carriage to see a relative I never saw again.

I remember the sound of a funeral being broken by birds chirping.

And I remember the nights I dreamed of you.)

II.

A naked man drinks and lies on his back watching the stars.

His body is boneless and his eyes are spirals.

Stoned, he wakes from the dreams of experience and the dreams of life

Then wanders to the garden where he used to sit…(with her)

Watching the same stars, sipping the same wine from the same glass.

He remembers the air.  Its perfume.

Only people change.  Nature is always the same. Endlessly the same.

And its perfume is the same as the night when they first kissed.

His black hair fell against hers like a mirage…

Now his hair is white.

And noone sang his song in the end.

(I remember watching the river and wondering what becomes of water?

And I remember the end of childhood, how my hands were bigger than before)

III.

He walks to the river.

IV.

Fish are swimming, quail fly home from southern winters on southern lakes

He is on the water now

and the winds of Pallas from a distant time

billow Chinese whispers in the moonlight.

The stone dragons of the water are speaking

and he is listening; listening to sounds he cannot hear.

Enthralling the interest of the geese, the man falls into the water

and begins to drown in cold evening

The fish are swimming still

The birds are chirping  still

(A woman is crying

There is a scream…)

And now a goose is being born.

V.

Bluebells are calling, a moth is on her way

and lovers hold hands in a picture…

for all things are connected by how far they are apart.

And sometimes, the man remembers nothing.

He watches from windows

while dark souls depart through shadows of  moonlight

and the southern winnow moves across the sky.

Silent, as if thunder is silent, as if our hearts are silent.

(as if the trill of violas could tame the tigers lame)

As if we all are silent.  As if we all were silent once.

VI.

I cannot hear the Earth turning or an ant dying

but I remember a person.

And I remember a body

And how they were at birth bonded by a blinding light (that came from heaven)

And I remember how different the face and body became

And how at the time of passing

The person swam away into the river where children played

And floated to a new hill, to a different body, to a foreign sky

And I remember nothing more than the sound of laughter and the sound of memories

(Because even though I did not remember them, I had not forget them either)

VII.

And while I dreamt of you, tiger lillies danced on blue vestiges.

I felt part of some wider picture that I wasn’t painting

a million fireflies were dancing that night

and tomorrow a million more would dance again.

After all; in the seizure of a picture, there is no centre

and that night, someone was looking at me,

admiring the paint and admiring the figure.

Who is sleeping now on a bed of violets?

VII.

Dreaming and remembering, thinking and cursing

an old man tells his life:

“What Fate.?”

(I remember youth’s promises.

I remember the rain and all of  its consequences)

Bone-dead, he whispers in her ears, silently,

(as if thunder was silent)

“It doesn’t matter, I have continued life.”

But tomorrow will hold its grudge.

And winds are coming from Eastern lands.

I remember the Gargoyle’s sacred song that told of what’s to come…

(a silence that can never be disturbed)

It began like this.