A spear, from inside directed outward and not the other way around

I stand in the middle of a large, flat plain. Hands by my side and eyes straight ahead. If you look closer though you will notice that tentacles rage out from inside me flailing in wild objection. That is the nature of my belief. Even my greatest composure cannot for all time betray the murder inside me and exiled on this plain my black arms cannot injure.

Before I arrived here I saw a crowd of one million men and women all suppressing themselves and going insane. Their evil nature overcame them and from the mass spewed ugly complacency and inurgency and all the things that constitute a wasting society. I fell to my knees and prayed, I said: "Lord, Lord, change me from inside and let me not strive with actions alone for I am futility and destitution wrapped up in skin and bones". And so I ran. Out of my home and my town into the land of nobody and of nothing all for nothing. I then felt that with all the running I will do in this lifetime that I will never get any closer than I have already; I will be no closer to the goal which is infinite and yet I will continue to move from my starting place. I am perpetually a beginner and confined to the realm of finitude acting upon the infinity that is weaving through my bones and bursting me outward at the seams.

We hear wonderful things when we listen. But that is hard to remember and even harder to do.

Fight! Fight! Win! Win! OR serve, serve, lose, lose

Just enrolled properly for uni and got my timetable and everything. How very exciting. Being my last year I am going to be swimming in education propaganda and probably drown because of it. My hope is that I can get out of education and into academia- hopefully philosophy or literature. It's not very interesting this whole thing but I am fairly tired and it can be so difficult trying to come up with something creative every day- particularly when you are feeling not so.

My humanities subject this semester is modernism which should prove to be interesting and Anthony Uhlmann is a good teacher. I could hijack the elective in some great protest of objective progress but I don't think they would tolerate that from a novice upstart. That sort of thing is more reserved for institutionalised intellectuals and raving madmen (Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault and Derrida). Besides we tried being unintentionally postmodern in our high school English when they asked us to write 'an essay' we literally wrote: 'an essay'. It was incredibly witty and clever at the time although we couldn't really express why.

I sat in church last night and thought about how I shouldn't be able to sit in church. How the church is a dynamic people and how we are the church. The guy up the front (it wasn't a church I attend on any regular basis) talked about how to respond to cults like Jehovah's Witnesses. It seemed very defensive to me and I just wondered what is it that we defend in Christianity? I don't think we really have to defend the Church or tradition or history, if anything, we should probably divest ourselves of history. Is it worth defending the influence of the Church today? I don't really think so. I mean Jesus had a tremendous influence although he did not pursue it. On the one hand I understand that the Church is defending freedom in the end. The freedom to believe and also defending a number of parts that culminate into the freedom that Jesus talked about. But on the other hand, freedom is never taken it only can be given (I think). A lot of people talk about how Jesus defeated sin on the cross and use a lot of war analogies but I think that it kind of strange that he died in order to do so.

I have never studied theology and I don't know anything about substitutionary atonement blah blah etc. but God did not take faithful people out of the world and grant them salvation instead he gave of himself in order to save all. I wish I saw the Church do the same thing. A lady the other day came into Word Bookstore unaware it was a Christian store and upon realising what it was shook her head at me and said how sad it was that religion and commerce cavorted in the same bed. I wanted to agree with her but I was powerless to do so.

Night time at home

I am hoping to throw away all my axes. I spent most of my teenage years building a beautiful, dazzling collection and grinding and grinding until they were sharp enough- for what?- for anything. The biggest problem is that I never had the guts to use them- like a nuclear superpower stocking weapons for that great war that would never happen we all imitate our surroundings. The political climate of fear flowed like a waterfall from on high and I would plan and plot my relationships. Plot against my friends and family that if ever that day would arise where nuclear (family) war would break out I would be prepared with an arsenal to rival the best.

How do I throw away such fear? For I am afraid, that much is true. Now I sit in silence at home throwing prayers skyward in a bid for two things: desire and love (and also patience). My whole being winces at the idea of more and more demands but I just need this much and then I will be set.

Oh, sweet Father, Father, Father. Now speak and I will listen.

A cake cut into halves into quarters

Last night I was Sal Paradise. I sat in the middle of a huge wine glass as the wine was poured from a cask toward me and life splashed and twirled and collapsed and dizzied itself around me. I was nearly drowned in the life that suffocated me- it was beautiful. The people swaggered and staggered spilling out 'hey baby's' and 'nice to see you's' laughing raucously destroying any air of 'I don't really know you'. They mixed and eddied and danced and fell and rose and got shot and stumbled over lounge seats waving cigarettes warning people. I sat there with legs crossed taking it all in, I smiled and smiled till my face stayed that way.

The music bound my ears and I bounced and nodded and closed my eyes and swayed and shook and took out all my inhibitions. The night stretched from my birth until eternity and we wrote poetry and forgot and walked up stairs and leaned against walls and let life overtake us as we ran at breakneck speed to keep up with it all. The Moroccan gentleman on the way home was dynamite. He spoke with a French accent and spewed crazy Australia better than Cronulla and Bondi and Manly combined. I was raptured by him; I wanted to go home and meet his family: 'how do you do?' bowing low and English- like. I wanted him to take me to Morocco and show me where to eat and walk through the deserts and rush through marketplaces knocking down fruit stands.

When I arrived home my heart was swimming and waterlogged. Both heavy and light and dancing and aching and stretched out over my bed I closed my eyes and fell asleep into yet another dream.

Hoppípolla: Sigur Rós

This video is for Marianne. I hope that if we do grow old together that we never stop having fun and that youth sits in us like a consistently exploding bomb.

Fly by mouth

OMG! A river! It fell from the sky!
The whole town was swallowed by it!
The virgins all drowned! (how sad, how sad)
The television stars all cried! (how true, how true)
Helicopters were crushed and crashed!
It was on the news, I saw it. (mutter, mutter, horrific, blah, blah)
I hear that it is now a serene countryside with cows and old fences and grasses and trees and farmers saying hello to neighbours and passers-by.
Oh what a tragedy! (what a waste)
We all wept for days and to celebrate our sorrow we bought new clothes (hooray, what did you get?)

Toward revolutions

Daniel lies on his back, eyes open to the ceiling, blurring his vision so that the cream canopy seeps down over the walls and the room melts into a haze of off- white. Today is another day. Not that day in which all things take place but a day in which all things are thrown aside. That day in which ideas come and go like visitors and where everything is fluid. The worst part is Daniel knows it. He can feel the aching complacency growing heavy and solidifying in his bones as though it were a natural process.

As the world is bathed in a creamy blur he has an idea. An idea for a piece. He will write out his frustration and his anxiety toward revolutions. A revolution against revolutions if you will. The usual questions assault his mind. Medium? Form? Language? It is probably not worth writing. He tracks the idea instead; where it came from and where it will stop:

'I heard a song yesterday, about being a revolution. It was disgusting and made me want to hurl rocks at young people. The revolution went something like this: I (the instigator of this new avant garde) am indefinable, I defy you to label me, to pigeon hole me. I am a million things at once, so much so that I cannot even give you a cohesive answer for my dynamism. Perhaps one word would suffice one word can sum up my brilliant, erratic, unpeggable character: I am a revolution.

'That is no revolution, a revolution stands and is a consistent torpedo through society. It runs a course that is predictable and steady but because of the wavering and crying and bending within the majority of culture a revolution stands out. The whole idea though kills me; I want to begin a revolution but it is beyond me if only an idea could be birthed by me and nurtured and grown into maturity by somebody else. I think that society has enough babies though. Perhaps that is why no- one can raise up mature ideas anymore. We have petulant children of thought exploding all over the earth in magazines, newspapers, televisions and movies. My thoughts are no better though. I have no firm missile to launch into the bowels of society and rupture a response. I simply just lay here and wrestle with myself and debate and whine about how I cannot pick up my stories where I leave them. Somebody else will have to do it.'

Daniel put his pad down on top of the alarm clock that would not ring and slid over the opposite side of his bed facing the wall. He let out a large sigh and let darkness cross his eyelids. His bedroom was neat. Across the side of the room, opposite his bed, was a large study desk which also doubled as a book shelf. Along it were volumes of poetry from the English greats as well as literature from contemporary writers whom he found amusing: Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Don Delilo, Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski. At the end of the room was a large window which overlooked the park behind his house. Just below the sill was a window seat covered in all sorts of accumulated boxes and unfinished projects. Spray cans, canvasses, large sheets of paper, art books, pens, paints and all sorts lay strewn about the neglected end of his room. Daniel would fall asleep for another two hours before waking up again. Upon which he would again sigh then throw together some clothes and go and drink bad coffee down the road. The coffee, set against his brain and coupled with the weight of complacency would drive him to head home and fall asleep again on the lounge. For now though, he is still thinking about how he will never fall back asleep in his single bed; he opens his eyes for a second and staring at the wall he forgets everything he ever thought about.

Imagining to be a writer

I am twenty one years old. I really do not know much about anything, I am not sure what I want to do and I have no idea where life is going to take me. I do know that I do not want to be enslaved to a full time job and all the pointlessness of the chase for wealth. Fulfillment lies beyond wealth and material satisfaction. It is as though sometimes I feel by sating our immediate desire for the material we deny any deeper reality and consequently let ourselves be short changed. We sell out. Selling out to what we can see, touch, hear, smell and taste is so easy though and often it is so good. It is only through desiring a deeper truth or a more satisfying experience that we can be led to that.

I deeply wish to be a writer. I have no idea what it takes and I have no idea if I am any good; I have never taken any writing courses or studied how to write but ideas and thoughts brim in me and I have nothing to do but scrawl them down in all their incomplete, incomprehensible gibberish. The question though that supersedes me being a writer is what is it that God wants? What is God's will for my life?

One thing, in relation to Christianity, that I often think about is my failure in prayer. I am hopeless at praying and I do not really know how it works. My ideal is obviously Jesus who healed sick people with just a word (and sometimes not even that). The first thing I should say is that I do not want to be some superpowerful healer dude who just walks around selling wellness. I want to know God so well that I know God's will so well that I can heal in a word, or so that I can walk in confidence in whatever I am doing knowing that God is laying the path before me, with me and behind me.

So while I have a desire to be a writer I have no idea whether or not it is within the will of God. And if you have made it this far please remember that I do not know what I am talking about but I am hoping to incite conversation (I love using incite there because it has such a violent tone as opposed to conversation). I am only twenty one years old. And I hope things work out.

Cava bien

At this riverbank the sun falls and old men in their dark worn trousers and pastel shirts with the first few buttons open to dark, leathery chests wail to each other. Tired and exhausted horns spread their wings and glide over the river and the whole world feels like a Polaroid of the past.
A young man with a bad case of heartache plays the tambourine and sings sorrow into the cupped ears of the fishermen. The grasses are still and orange is stretched over the sky as though a painter has streaked the canvas and created something accidentally beautiful. The smell of open air and running water and freedom break over the atmosphere and for the first time I run my hand across the top of the tall grass and know that I am not alone.
As the dark overtakes I slowly stand and begin to walk back listening to the beautiful chatter chatter of other languages. As I stumble back into town I pass the entirety of my wealth to the young man and his tambourine and crackly old gramophone and sore, bruised heart. He continues to wail and moan with eyes closed and it fills me with a great hope; the kind of hope that breaks on the shores of beaches or that grows toward the sky in rainforests or that cooks fish to perfection in the tired and warm glow of Sunday afternoon.

Inside

inside he bungled across deserts in a rusty suit of armour
outside it was incorrectly fitted and he often had to carry it

at night I stand face first into bushes and she walked on ahead
who knows what acrobatics the back of the back of her head is doing
the dolls teeter and squeeze me into cracks all Russian in their dress
it is hopeless really to think that I could run through this fun house

the sun melts his wax fortress of solitude and ragged and blind
and aching and his heart beating so fast that it may come outside
he walks across the room and drops a piece of paper that reads:

"if you stretched your hands upward, as if to the sky, you would be beautiful from your toes until your fingertips"

You are in a hurricane and you don't even know it or You write with too many brackets!

The circle was either a sun or a moon. I think each person in the circle thought they were a sun. Our writer's collective was like that. Every person there felt their own writing so much more powerfully than each others, apart from one girl, who barely read us anything. Whether she wrote or not at all we all silently wondered, I think. I mean, it wasn't like we discussed it, we all had our suspicions though (or perhaps it was just me). Writers (if what was collected in that large, echoing room every fortnight could be called that) are funny. So many seem to just manufacture depth and experiences from nothing. It seems all very deceptive; they come off sounding like authorities but to give these guys any grounding would see your life thrown into a hurricane.

Collectively through, through the lens of the entire history of the world: we were a tiny, tiny moon. We basked in reflected glory and shone down on everyone else; actually it was less shining and more gloating down on everyone else. Anyway, the point is we were not a sun. We did nothing new and spent most of the time suspecting each other of not fulfilling the quota that we would set each time we met (every fortnight if you weren't paying attention). So sitting in a ragged circle in a large, old classroom with wooden floors and stone walls (basically a machine for generating noise- squeaking chairs, a cough, the following 'excuse me', then of course the drone of the person telling their story which sounded as though it were spoken from a narrow hallway and bounced off every wall as it ran up to meet you, or the way I ten- pin bowl. We would reel off stories, mostly just written for each other, and suspect each other (silently of course) of plagiarism or perhaps just ponder exploding out of the group with delusions of grandeur.

I have really no way of finishing this expect to point out what I tried to do. Firstly, those who know me will know that this is all lies- I do not attend a 'writer's collective' but if I did I think I just convinced myself to leave. Secondly, being false, I tried to critique myself and you as the reader by having a go at writers and their crazy plans for world domination (or maybe me and my crazy plans for world domination). Thirdly, I tried to write in a lighter, more personal and ultimately more comedic tone. And lastly it was just practice and I had to come up with something...

I'd love to know what you think so send me a letter (a real letter, not one of these crazy e- letter things) at 17 Neirbo Ave Hurstville 2220. And please don't firebomb my house and for those actually considering writing a letter remember how hard it is and long it takes to walk to the post box, and you don't have any stamps anyway.

Potential

The things that everybody said rattled around in his head for every day that he did not fulfill his promise. They would bounce in between conscious thought and that hideous sneaking fear that something, anything is going to swallow you whole. Most of the time what everybody said would condense down into one word; like a sun dying and collapsing in on itself until it is no bigger than a basketball but weighing one million times more than he was capable of.

The biggest problem was that he did not know what to do with this curse (or blessing). On occasion he would wear it, a medal around his neck to convince others of the truth of the promise that he made to the world. Other times, the times it would crush him underneath, he would pray for it to be gone or for freedom from it.

He read a lot of books. He read a lot of great books by great, dead men (and some great, dead women). He was well aware that artistic brilliance shines through the worst times of ones life but he was always curious as to whether these great, dead men ever felt the weight of the promise they showed the world and whether they were ever paralysed by it. No doubt there were millions of artistic nobodies who fell by the wayside in the great march of lineal history. Who were paralysed by the weight of their own expectation. But they were nobodies and he would not be relegated to their ranks, a cast of billions, perhaps.

He stood at bus stops for hours hoping to wilt away into the scenery. He would stalk the streets at midnight hoping that someone would think him dangerous and cross the road to avoid him. He really just wanted to follow through though and actually steal from someone, give them something real to fear. He desired to be a rich man who threw plasma televisions from his fourth floor balcony and who still bought home brand groceries. It was the stereotype that fascinated him. He would deliberately conjure himself up to be an ironic stereotype that would give people reasons to say cliche things.

One day though, his parents died in a horrific car crash with an evil drunk driver who survived. He quit university, got a job managing a book store and spent his nights remembering the joyous weight that promise felt like; wondering if anyone would ever say it to him again.

Three styles, all done badly

I would be a person as well. Religious conviction has laid me low and transformed my opinion. I am the stereotype and not the archetype. It is strange how Christians are regarded as less human; as not having had to deal with life. In some ways I can see how this is right but in others I grow frustrated because my own wrestling with Christianity is not seen as legitimate within or without the Church. In this way I find the Church wildly ungracious and if it were not for Jesus I'd probably give the whole thing in.

Last night I drove an hour with my girlfriend to visit an old friend of mine. We had a great night together- eating dinner and telling stories and being together. For some reason there was never that awkward air that seems to attach itself to me and the way I relate with everybody else. We drove to dinner in the one car and put on Cansei De Ser Sexy's "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" and danced in true Sao Paulo style; it was wonderful.

On a completely different note I have now come to think that marketing is perhaps the most evil of all corporate devices. The whole machine of marketing is driven in order for people to be unhappy. In capitalism, in order to keep everybody busy, there is massive overproduction of goods; so, somehow those goods have to be used (at least for some time) and the only way to keep it true to capitalism is sell them. To sell them though you need to create a need- a market. This involves making people feel as though they are unsatisfied or unhappy with their lives without that product. As we weary on though our lives become more and more meaningless with our ever- increasing amount of stuff. Therefore whether marketing only creates need or creates and fulfills it, it only succeeds in propagating the unhappiness that is rife within the capitalism ethic of 'more'.