The Economy Of Time (2nd extract)

For a few years of my life I thought I had found balance, calm, spiritual peace. It was actually death. I was rotting inside my skin, and I had mistaken the cavernous echoing of my hollow soul for a new age dolphin song of spiritual enlightenment. But I had repressed so much that I turned inside out.

Lucy was my liberation, and my salvation, and it took her only two days to repeal the harrowing guilt and crippling fear that had dictated my consciousness. She tore me off my cross and let me dance within her flesh, and with such a display of truth and purity she threw light and revelation upon the conflicts and curiosities of my being. I don’t know that she was ever aware that I had been born only at that moment, and that my passions had graduated from their cocoon, with wings of silk and silver, but she would never again feature in my life, except when her cruel and ethereal beauty returned as an apparition in my memories.


I owe a great debt to her, but she disappeared before I could repay her. Until she awoke me I was in constant hibernation. Life was happening around me, but I did not participate. Afterwards, the bright conflagration she had ignited behind my eyes allowed me to confront the darkness, to run towards it and bathe it in illumination. When Lucy left I felt no sadness, no regret, or no mourning, for I had never fallen in love with her. Instead I felt a great sense of kinship, camaraderie even. We were both looking for something, both turning over stones to find completion. We united in the journey, and we advised and counselled each other, but we were just two people exploring together, ultimately destined to go our separate ways.


Convention divides us into separate selves, our professional self, our casual self, our spiritual self, our sensual self and the component parts are not to be mixed, except for the odd leak, the rare osmosis of one part into the next. But experiencing freedom and liberty made me feel singular, and essential, as though every thing I did was but an expression of my soul, not an act perpetrated by an element of me which surfaced as and when required, and must be suppressed when inappropriate.


When I am at the piano I am at the lips of a woman, and when I paint the brush caresses a female canvas, and when I write I am tattooing her flesh with my words. The street goes both ways. When I am with a woman, I am writing her character, exploring her depth, and imploring her to melodies, posing her as a grand sculpture of wonderful femininity to express the beauty of her form. All of our perception of this earthly state enters through our senses, and so we can choose to exist as mere assimilators of information, deducing and theorising, or we can become one with the wave of sensation, lapping against the shores of euphoria, grabbing at the sand, tasting it, and rolling back into oblivion until we can gather enough momentum to return.


- This is another extract from the novella I'm working on. A lot of the writer's I love have a very sparse style, and use words very sparingly, but when I write I find that I have a natural clumsiness, and the words tumble out as I they spring to mind. I think it stems from my lack of trust in words, and language. I am always conscious that somebody might read something differently than it was intended, and that once you throw your ideas out there they may get themselves into trouble. I liken it to the feeling mothers have when their children "fly the nest". I am trying to learn to let go, but it takes time...


©2009 Daniel J. Fiasco