Every new beginning; every fresh start; the new leaf; the dawning of a new era; from this point onwards; now; as I write; every single marker pinpoints a point of realisation, a revolution, proceeding which bursts forth the fragrant beauty of the new. To break with the failures of the past we often intend immediate change to the dynamic of our lives. Often reality is lost in the immediacy of change. In the pure light of the potential, the pasts trudging advance through the thick grey mire; the lingering presence of slow progress in the thickness of tangled concepts and loathsome intentions, seems so heavy and weighted with the all consuming burden of falsity and sloth.
The vessel of progress; caught in a whirling eddy; slowly drifting from slack water to slack water; the dense shade of the high, thickly wooded banks casting cold darkness upon the clammy stagnant water; the densely pungent miasma clinging to the air, fills the nostrils and lungs, so thick and coarse as to stifle the breath. Thick moss and surface scum clog the path of the vessel ever slowing its advance. The stagnant slack water forces the advance to halt; proceedings halt; contemplation lingers. In such a place one can hear sounds otherwise drowned out by the plundering, bowling, bursting, coursing rage of progress. Sounds echo from the coal black depths of the bank; the sound of introspection, doubt, failure, glut, lust, desire, over-contemplation; sounds that would otherwise be heard only as fleeting reminders, encouragement in the haphazard bursts of cold, fresh water lashing at the beams. In the slack water they are all that is heard: they become the consumers of the soul, biting and gnawing at the sinewy tendons that attach reality to desire. Thick green lianas and parasitic vines attach themselves to our vibrant imaginings, forming a new hull; disfigured oars that twist the thoughts. The final remnants of the ties between reality and desire are grotesquely devoured by the ethereal bank side creatures; their sirenic voices alluring; damming. The rational bow is cut loose and glides undirected into the bubbling white rage beyond the slack water, to be demolished, it's very hull torn; like flies to wanton boys, are the frail boards of reason to the gods of time, beset on each side with crashing torrents, unaided and helpless without its stern. Desirous stern, still trapped in the slack water, now so imbued with the festering malignancy of its parasitic limbs and removed of its connection with reality, sways with the lulling rhythmic lappings of the cast off water; the slack water scum, slowly rising and falling against the jutting boards and rusting nails, staining them a mottled, dirty green.
Eventually the remnants of the once strong wooden vessel, soaked through by the cold stale water, break apart and sink into the gently swirling undercurrents; flakes of sodden wood become one amongst the buffeting mass of bubbles, driftwood and sediment; eventually drifting down river towards the sun-dappled future.
Old desires and old reason, decimated by the constant abasement of the torrent of life, are soon replaced by new reason and new desire: a new vessel; a shady hint of its former self lingers yet; benign? This hastily assembled replacement bears every physical resemblance to all others preceding; it differs only in guidance, it's blind oarsman now wiser to the river's peculiar orientation. To avoid reciprocation of slack water stalemate, the oarsman must steer as his memory best serves. But his knowledge of the rivers eddies, is singular, empirical; he may know of this eddy but eddies are many in a river meandering and long. Sooner or later, the vessel, and creator, shall succumb to desires slack song.
To build on a platitude is to construct a weighty fortress on a mire. The blind oarsman struggles time after time to drag himself from the slimy thick slack, each time cursing his vessels creator. Yet, every time proceeding, finds himself smoothing the coarse grain, fitting tongue to groove and sealing the hull watertight. Curse who he may, the oarsman is the architect of both bow and stern.
What the blind man's eyes have deprived of him is accounted for, and countered more than tenfold by his other receptors. The crash of a wave pours a liquid marker over his ears, the foul stench of the putrid slack water, cries out the snaking pattern of the current: no, it is not alone his blindness that leads him astray time after time.
Though the blind oarsman knows the river's subtle geography, he knows not where either he or the river is headed. It is aimless meandering that each time, draws him to into the consumptive slack-water. The pale, redundant eyes that scour the emptiness, cry out for a hard-eyed coxswain to guide the dammed vessel to an end that shall not see itself painfully reciprocated.
An adept capacity for orientation accounts for little without direction. The lulling calm of the wide river mouth, biting gently on the cusp of the ocean bears a dangerous resemblance to the eddy; the swirl and sit and stagnate of the slack; warm and festering; so unlike the cold, clean estuary in reality; so similar in allure. For this reason, without a guide, the blind oarsman finds himself drifting into uneasy calm, each time wishing he is at the mouth; each time discovering that he is yet in digestion: as the bubbling stagnated bile pierces the soft boundaries of his senses and thrusts searing pangs of stench into his, swirling, fragile mind.
To the oarsman, the looking glass is redundant, it sits, every voyage, rolling to and fro along the bottom of the boat, marking with every lap of cold water, the perpetual roll of the portside beam, to the starboardside beam; port to starboard.to port.to starboard.to port.to starboard: eudemonia, a lost hope, its function, drifting among the flotsam of former desires and fragments of reason.