...finally, every circle completes before death. It is abnormal to expect the snake not to eats its tail. We rise, we fall, we rise, we fall and on and on until only echoes of our rising and falling like mists remain on the land. What dies gives birth to something. Sometimes that something could be a story, a way of life, a child or even more death.
It gets tiresome after sometime, the repetitiveness of nature. One moment, you are in awe, overwhelmed by the power that is life; the next, you are weary of the mundane machinery of existence. You want more. You want something new, something different, something uniquely suited to your new knowledge of the world. So you walk away from every old thing, everything that reminds you of yesterday, of structures that you have created, of comfort, contentment.
At first, you seek reaffirmation of your reality. You need to be sure that you cannot change your reality into something new. When you have satisfied your senses as to the regularity of every sweep of bird wings in the sky, the constant drama of crickets at night, the steady swing of trees in the wind, the heat the sun brings, the emptiness of your bed where missing bodies had once found shape, you go within. Your mind becomes the uncharted territory that you have to travel. In it, you hope to find something new—an animal, a god, a human being just trying to be.
Like those mind travellers of old who sought gods beyond the realm of sky and rain, you take to mind bending substances if your imagination cannot suffice. It could be alcohol potent as acid, it could be acid potent as death. You may choose opium, the sweet ease unlimbered from your weary bones. You may decide to start with a blunt, hand rolled, tipped at the end, blue gray smoke curling like prayer into the first layer of heavenly bliss. The options soon run amok in your collection of victims. You hoard tools of the trade, razor blades, pipes, pipettes, cigarette paper, gas lighters, spoons, needles, and on and on. You freely give yourself as a sacrifice in this search for something different.
The experiences beyond the elixir of unknown feelings are intense. You find a new world. A world of colour, of different shades of darkness, of beauty and horror, of primal vivacity, of empty tortured landscapes filled with walking promises shrouded in the mystery of desire. Sometimes you find the lips of the abyss and if you are strong, you walk away but if you are not, that dark eye, that loathsome hungry mouth will put hunger in your flesh, beneath your skin, to fall into its cold arms. In that place, truth sometimes comes but most times, there is nothing but the most utter oblivion.
To fall is to untether, to let go of everything material. It is to feel your quantum self, the multitude of yous compress into a singularly aware entity within your mind and then allow this entity jump into the abyss. It is better to wake from that drugged slumber, that delirium at the moment of the leap or else. In that abyss, there is no beginning, no end. There is only you, a god of nothing, a creation without creator, a mind full of thought without hope of expression.
In that place, you get the sense that if you stretch your mind a little further, you can create light. You feel the beginning of sparks behind your eyes. You sense the possibilities a short distance from your fingertips. You attempt to reach it and you fail because there is nothing there. The deception of the abyss works on you though and soon you prophesy. You have seen things. Things beyond imaginings. You have escaped the reality of your mundane existence and in the extra-terrestrial plane of your mind, you find that your mind is as unknowable and alien as another’s.
Far enough into that abyss, you will be seen. Yeah and amin, a consciousness beyond your finite grasp of what is possible will see you and you will feel it see you. This entity is of you but not of you; you will be sure. It will have the capacity to destroy all that is you and rebuild you into a mindless beast or it could fill you with knowledge beyond your own understanding if it so desires. In its gaze, you sense that it holds the power of life and death and you sense its primal hunger to devour everything. You flee if you can. If you cannot, you prophesy.
There is nothing as scary as the vast aloneness of the drugged mind. The pyrotechnics and strange hues may occupy you for a time but once you notice the darkness beyond all that noise of light, you realise how lonely you really are inside, how empty your aspirations, how truly silent the world within is. You have found different, something new, a universe unpopulated by the complexities of daily existence. If you do not dare the abyss, if you only seek within this empty landscape of light and colours, you may begin to create a world of your own. The problem would be that you can, in that place, just on the edge of the madness that the abyss promises, only create with tools that you have taken from the real world. And if you use the imperfect tools of reality to create your new world then expect the lapses of the real world to also be present therein.
What have you seen? What have you tasted? What have you heard? What have you dreamt of? If it is the substance of your everyday life, fragile as dew, you build your new world with, it will be no different from the old. It is therefore not surprising that after a while, the quantity of drugs imbibed are no longer enough to keep the awe that you had once felt. In a bid, for something new, something stronger, something more terrifying, you take more.
If you are aware of the pitfalls that lies beyond that all consuming hunger, you may decide to slow down at this point or stop all together. In a way, even though you stop, you will forever have that experience beyond the walls of your mind etched in your brain. You know now that just beyond the realm of deeds, beyond the realm of thought, there lies a world on which you are god. In that world, once upon a time, you separated the waters into two, one below and the other above. You said let there be light and it was so. You hung the sun, the moon and the stars in the sky. You planted the first trees, the first grass, the first fishes in the sea. You saw that it was beautiful. You made something in your image and nature to guard and guide all that you have made. You loved it and taught it. It broke your heart and you fled.
Every day of your life for the rest of your life, you hunger to go back to that place, to see what has happened to your creations. You wonder if they remember your face, your delight. You attempt to remember them but their faces are distant as a half forgotten dream and the drudgery of reality soon takes you back into the coma of mundane survival. Yet for those who see you in this reality, they see the hunger at the corner of your eye, lurking like a shadow, praying that one day, in this world of ordinary tragedies, you will find something of colour and light, darkness and shadow, beauty and horror that will uplift you and maybe take you to that place or at least the edge of it.
It is here that you discover the feast of writing, recreating as if fantastic your young world. It is here that you discover how to turn your trauma and abuse into blunt objects. It is here that you turn your hallucinations into truth. You tell the story of your world. Your imagination has been torn open by your experience. You know of things beyond the understanding of your readers. You bend words, manipulate realities, you lie and each story takes you further back into that place and so, you relive your experience. This is only if you step away from the abyss.
The monsters you create are astonishing. The poems you write are unblemished. You are stark with your observations of truth yet these gems are hidden in the wild tune of the music you compose on the many pages of your tales. To those who read your work, you are a master craftsman, you have revealed something new, something beyond the ordinary everyday of their lives. In their minds, you have lived a wondrous life, seen amazing sights to have written a work so tranquil and utterly mad but they do not know of addictions and pain, of sleepless nights and utter shame.
How do you tell them that your stories are derived from ingesting substances you should not have touched? How do you explain that place beyond thought that must live in every human mind? Will they understand or will they just call you a junkie? The dilemma of the genius becomes a simple thing in the hands of a child.
To appease your readers whose appetite for the extraordinary has been honed to a brittle sharpness, you write more, tell more lies, pad the truth with your imagination and soon that world hidden deep within you is forgotten and what remains is the echo of what it used to be. It is in such a way myths are made and so, my dear one, do gods die.