NOBODY FEELS ANY PAIN~ Part One
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| An Opium Den |
200 YEARS IN AN AFTERNOON...
This is a deeply personal description of a journey I took many years ago until like Rumpeltstilskin, I Finally woke up!
This is an extract from Chapter 15, which is the last chapter of an as yet, still unpublished book about my journeys through India and Nepal, altho in this short excerpt I am on Home turf.
Eventually, inevitably I was dragged down by the stone...the Law of Gravity was having an insidious cumulative effect.
The great slide downhill had begun and I knew it in my bones, but continued nevertheless.
I needed to experience the depths of despair as well as the heights of ecstasy!
I wanted to taste it all, the entire spectrum of human experiences and without haste...Pronto!
Navarre on the other hand was my Street Angel, who was brushed just ever so lightly by the wings of madness.
A svelte Nubian female Orpheus, with gentle laughter in her flashing eyes and who despite a horrendous upbringing, managed to channel most of her pain into numerous creative pursuits and never strayed far from her guitar.
It seemed like I was always waiting for Navarre to get back with the 'score' which she always promised to bring me.
My shadow had become an oily, flickering presence that slipped deep into the cracks on the hot footpaths and disappeared while I stood sleepwalking on the surface, waiting for some connection, or seated on the bench with my sleepy head drooping and filled with feverish imaginings.
On the bench beside me is a folded newspaper and between the folds I discover a slightly crumpled matchbox.
Inside the matchbox I can see a small shiny object.
I shake it out and there on the palm of my hand lies a motionless beetle.
I look closely at it's carapace.
It has a beautiful iridescent gleam at certain angles and I can now see that it has wings...I softly fold out the wings with a matchstick.
I am overwhelmed by it's intricate beauty and it's tragic fate to wind up in a matchbox and no doubt to be eventually pinned, along with it's brethren, to some dusty board and then placed in a long forgotten drawer somewhere.
Or maybe it's just hibernating?
Then I notice that one of the wings has a small imperfection, a tear in it's delicate fabric...which is probably why it was abandoned on that bench.
Where the fuck is Navarre?
My head droops again and I can feel myself getting light-headed and just on the cusp of slipping back into the black, all-enveloping deep pool of darkness...my old friend...my refuge from the acerbic slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and from the brash vulgarities of a sick society.
Fuck how I hate this interminable waiting...it's always a waiting game and everything else is secondary until the pay-off arrives like a ministering Florence Nightingale with the score.
My head is drifting...drifting into the Michelangelo clouds in the late afternoon skies above me, as my Shadow drifts down silently like black snow falling...
Down through an air-shaft above a subway tunnel, past grimy men pushing carts filled with boxes through the Mid-Victorian atmosphere and the constant staccato outbursts of railway timetables.
Where slim Secretaries move like busy dancers through the routine choreography of their lives.
A thicket of smooth nylon legs, aspiring and sweating for a better future, with calf muscles toned by a generation of platformed high-heel shoes.
Down glides my Shadow...silently sucked into the nether regions.
From where we are now, you can almost make out the lost and wounded voices of those 'Children of the Night', Street Kids with their dreams echoing through the granite subterranean labyrinth.
All the rage, all the loneliness and all of the hurt comes flooding out down here, in a molten slag-heap of scabrous, raw emotions.
Their cries are splattered like arcane multi-colored symbols across the concrete walls in vivid spray-paint explosions.
Here and there I can identify fragments of cogent emotion;
MUM LOOK WHAT THEY'VE DONE..MUM THEY'VE KILLED ME
Or; REST IN PIECES YOU FUCKING MAGGOTS
Or; I WAS TOILET-TRAINED WITH A HANDGUN
Down...even deeper into the damp toxic gloom, where a solitary smudged cat pads silently through the necrotic waste, pawing curiously at my Shadow, delicately side-stepping an odor like a ghost emerging from the drowned carcass of a bloated animal.
Where used needles lay clustered like dead but still lethal scorpions.
Forsaken, derelict flotsam and jetsam which once, for a brief moment were animated by so much desperate, frantic anti-social joy and now lay in waiting, like radioactive memories, still bearing a sting in their tails.
Where the fuck is Navarre? It feels like endless hours are agonizingly creeping by...this must be what it feels like to be stuck inside a geriatric facility during the pre-glow of full-blown senility or alone and inside an iron-lung watching a tiny spider slowly approaching your neck.
I'm getting light-headed again...I'm feeling hungry and yet not hungry at the same time and I know that I would throw up if I forced the issue.
I'm getting sex-obsessed again...no, I'm just feeling lonely.
My eyes are filled with tiny insects and my skin has turned to parchment.
I'm angry. Oh so angry at myself for putting myself in this position.
Come on Girl. Come on...!
Just fucking shoot me!
I resent every single person who walks by on the footpath and doesn't have to endure what I'm going through and I remember Dylan's line about:
'If people could see my thoughts on a screen...they'd put my head on a guillotine'
I was feeling envious of everyone who was so-called;
Normal and with their happy-happy, joy-joy lives.
It sickened me to watch them, blithely strolling hand in hand, blissfully unaware of how radically different, repugnant, nauseous and just plain cruel reality could simultaneously be for someone else.
And then a voice would remind me:
But didn't you do this to yourself?
Yeh sure, but tell me one thing if you please; which comes first, the chicken, the egg or the intelligent designer?
Hang on...is that Navarre right at the bottom of the street?
Just standing there looking out across the street, across the swarming rapids of this peak-hour metallic river-run?
I try and focus but the razor glint of sunlight on cars just 'cruising by' and on the make, just causes my eyes to water all the more.
I pull out my latest acquisition from my jacket. A new science fiction novel.
But my eyes are watering too much and my legs are starting to cramp.
So I just sit there and stare down at the cover.
It's a superb depiction of an alien planet with two suns and I can just make out what appears to be a settlement of humans.
I feel myself drifting, drifting into the park bench...
The bench and I have become one. Shit, I'm feeling as weak as a kitten and totally defenseless.
The bench begins to move and sway as I try to stay focused and control the moment by staring down at the book and it's lavish cover.
But it's too late...the bench is moving with a will of it's own.
Even from this height along the rooftops, I can still clearly see the hungry eyes of the working girls perched on either side of the street...with a sudden lurch it's seems like I'm moving again...silently...swiftly.
I can now see the clouds beneath my feet as I drift across the bay waters towards the horizon.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From this height along the cliff's edge and shrouded in banks of white misty clouds, Navarre could almost smell the living waters of the great serpentine river as it stretched out languidly before her...flashing with light from Eureka's twin Suns;
Romulus and Remus as they wheeled their way across the skies in a binary ballet.
The river was a fluid ribbon which separated the forest below the cliffs from the mountainous terrain on the other side of the river.
From this height she could see the ridges which rolled like waves of igneous rock all the way to the settlement, to the ancient Colony City 1, home to 500,000 or so of her fellow pioneers and the place of Navarre's birth.
The bell-like tones of Navarre's jewel encrusted Flute poured down the cliff-side.
Tantalizing melodic sounds began wafting through the forest's edges like a lyrical soothing wind that spoke deeply to many of Eureka's woodland inhabitants in a way that was almost hypnotic.
"We are coming now...coming through your forest" the musical wind whispered .
"We mean you no harm and we formally request a meeting with your Elders..."
That was as much as Navarre could articulate and she trailed off exhausted.
Sometimes, when she was sad, Navarre would spend hours alone, away from her companions doing what she called; Focusing
After eating some of the vinegary root of a bizarre looking plant which only grew in one of the darkest, remotest sections of the forest, she would sit with her head tilted lightly to one side, listening intently and with her eyes blazing with the orange colors of the primary sun Romulus as it began it's majestic slide...finally settling down like an enormous, city-sized interstellar craft on the horizon line.
Her finely-boned ebony face now smeared with vivid plant dyes would be frozen in rapt concentration.
That's when the voices and the screams would come.
Occasionally it was an image of her long departed Grandfather that would appear to her in his priestly robes.
At other times it was just cryptic, prescient imagery in dream-like sequences.
Usually these images were too enigmatic to be taken on face value, yet Navarre had learned from bitter experience and also from the communications with her Grandfather, that they could no longer be safely ignored and that their survival as a Colony on this planet of contrasts was somehow inextricably tangled up and embedded within these streams of imagery.
TO BE CONTINUED SHORTLY...
The great slide downhill had begun and I knew it in my bones, but continued nevertheless.
I needed to experience the depths of despair as well as the heights of ecstasy!
I wanted to taste it all, the entire spectrum of human experiences and without haste...Pronto!
Navarre on the other hand was my Street Angel, who was brushed just ever so lightly by the wings of madness.
A svelte Nubian female Orpheus, with gentle laughter in her flashing eyes and who despite a horrendous upbringing, managed to channel most of her pain into numerous creative pursuits and never strayed far from her guitar.
It seemed like I was always waiting for Navarre to get back with the 'score' which she always promised to bring me.
My shadow had become an oily, flickering presence that slipped deep into the cracks on the hot footpaths and disappeared while I stood sleepwalking on the surface, waiting for some connection, or seated on the bench with my sleepy head drooping and filled with feverish imaginings.
On the bench beside me is a folded newspaper and between the folds I discover a slightly crumpled matchbox.
Inside the matchbox I can see a small shiny object.
I shake it out and there on the palm of my hand lies a motionless beetle.
I look closely at it's carapace.
It has a beautiful iridescent gleam at certain angles and I can now see that it has wings...I softly fold out the wings with a matchstick.
I am overwhelmed by it's intricate beauty and it's tragic fate to wind up in a matchbox and no doubt to be eventually pinned, along with it's brethren, to some dusty board and then placed in a long forgotten drawer somewhere.
Or maybe it's just hibernating?
Then I notice that one of the wings has a small imperfection, a tear in it's delicate fabric...which is probably why it was abandoned on that bench.
Where the fuck is Navarre?
My head droops again and I can feel myself getting light-headed and just on the cusp of slipping back into the black, all-enveloping deep pool of darkness...my old friend...my refuge from the acerbic slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and from the brash vulgarities of a sick society.
Fuck how I hate this interminable waiting...it's always a waiting game and everything else is secondary until the pay-off arrives like a ministering Florence Nightingale with the score.
My head is drifting...drifting into the Michelangelo clouds in the late afternoon skies above me, as my Shadow drifts down silently like black snow falling...
Down through an air-shaft above a subway tunnel, past grimy men pushing carts filled with boxes through the Mid-Victorian atmosphere and the constant staccato outbursts of railway timetables.
Where slim Secretaries move like busy dancers through the routine choreography of their lives.
A thicket of smooth nylon legs, aspiring and sweating for a better future, with calf muscles toned by a generation of platformed high-heel shoes.
Down glides my Shadow...silently sucked into the nether regions.
From where we are now, you can almost make out the lost and wounded voices of those 'Children of the Night', Street Kids with their dreams echoing through the granite subterranean labyrinth.
All the rage, all the loneliness and all of the hurt comes flooding out down here, in a molten slag-heap of scabrous, raw emotions.
Their cries are splattered like arcane multi-colored symbols across the concrete walls in vivid spray-paint explosions.
Here and there I can identify fragments of cogent emotion;
MUM LOOK WHAT THEY'VE DONE..MUM THEY'VE KILLED ME
Or; REST IN PIECES YOU FUCKING MAGGOTS
Or; I WAS TOILET-TRAINED WITH A HANDGUN
Down...even deeper into the damp toxic gloom, where a solitary smudged cat pads silently through the necrotic waste, pawing curiously at my Shadow, delicately side-stepping an odor like a ghost emerging from the drowned carcass of a bloated animal.
Where used needles lay clustered like dead but still lethal scorpions.
Forsaken, derelict flotsam and jetsam which once, for a brief moment were animated by so much desperate, frantic anti-social joy and now lay in waiting, like radioactive memories, still bearing a sting in their tails.
Where the fuck is Navarre? It feels like endless hours are agonizingly creeping by...this must be what it feels like to be stuck inside a geriatric facility during the pre-glow of full-blown senility or alone and inside an iron-lung watching a tiny spider slowly approaching your neck.
I'm getting light-headed again...I'm feeling hungry and yet not hungry at the same time and I know that I would throw up if I forced the issue.
I'm getting sex-obsessed again...no, I'm just feeling lonely.
My eyes are filled with tiny insects and my skin has turned to parchment.
I'm angry. Oh so angry at myself for putting myself in this position.
Come on Girl. Come on...!
Just fucking shoot me!
I resent every single person who walks by on the footpath and doesn't have to endure what I'm going through and I remember Dylan's line about:
'If people could see my thoughts on a screen...they'd put my head on a guillotine'
I was feeling envious of everyone who was so-called;
Normal and with their happy-happy, joy-joy lives.
It sickened me to watch them, blithely strolling hand in hand, blissfully unaware of how radically different, repugnant, nauseous and just plain cruel reality could simultaneously be for someone else.
And then a voice would remind me:
But didn't you do this to yourself?
Yeh sure, but tell me one thing if you please; which comes first, the chicken, the egg or the intelligent designer?
Hang on...is that Navarre right at the bottom of the street?
Just standing there looking out across the street, across the swarming rapids of this peak-hour metallic river-run?
I try and focus but the razor glint of sunlight on cars just 'cruising by' and on the make, just causes my eyes to water all the more.
I pull out my latest acquisition from my jacket. A new science fiction novel.
But my eyes are watering too much and my legs are starting to cramp.
So I just sit there and stare down at the cover.
It's a superb depiction of an alien planet with two suns and I can just make out what appears to be a settlement of humans.
I feel myself drifting, drifting into the park bench...
The bench and I have become one. Shit, I'm feeling as weak as a kitten and totally defenseless.
The bench begins to move and sway as I try to stay focused and control the moment by staring down at the book and it's lavish cover.
But it's too late...the bench is moving with a will of it's own.
Even from this height along the rooftops, I can still clearly see the hungry eyes of the working girls perched on either side of the street...with a sudden lurch it's seems like I'm moving again...silently...swiftly.
I can now see the clouds beneath my feet as I drift across the bay waters towards the horizon.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From this height along the cliff's edge and shrouded in banks of white misty clouds, Navarre could almost smell the living waters of the great serpentine river as it stretched out languidly before her...flashing with light from Eureka's twin Suns;
Romulus and Remus as they wheeled their way across the skies in a binary ballet.
The river was a fluid ribbon which separated the forest below the cliffs from the mountainous terrain on the other side of the river.
From this height she could see the ridges which rolled like waves of igneous rock all the way to the settlement, to the ancient Colony City 1, home to 500,000 or so of her fellow pioneers and the place of Navarre's birth.
The bell-like tones of Navarre's jewel encrusted Flute poured down the cliff-side.
Tantalizing melodic sounds began wafting through the forest's edges like a lyrical soothing wind that spoke deeply to many of Eureka's woodland inhabitants in a way that was almost hypnotic.
"We are coming now...coming through your forest" the musical wind whispered .
"We mean you no harm and we formally request a meeting with your Elders..."
That was as much as Navarre could articulate and she trailed off exhausted.
Sometimes, when she was sad, Navarre would spend hours alone, away from her companions doing what she called; Focusing
After eating some of the vinegary root of a bizarre looking plant which only grew in one of the darkest, remotest sections of the forest, she would sit with her head tilted lightly to one side, listening intently and with her eyes blazing with the orange colors of the primary sun Romulus as it began it's majestic slide...finally settling down like an enormous, city-sized interstellar craft on the horizon line.
Her finely-boned ebony face now smeared with vivid plant dyes would be frozen in rapt concentration.
That's when the voices and the screams would come.
Occasionally it was an image of her long departed Grandfather that would appear to her in his priestly robes.
At other times it was just cryptic, prescient imagery in dream-like sequences.
Usually these images were too enigmatic to be taken on face value, yet Navarre had learned from bitter experience and also from the communications with her Grandfather, that they could no longer be safely ignored and that their survival as a Colony on this planet of contrasts was somehow inextricably tangled up and embedded within these streams of imagery.
TO BE CONTINUED SHORTLY...
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