There is a tickly tinge of me – a slim sliver of a goldleaf gleam – that occupies the office of “businessman.” Marketing and promoting and other sneaky lions pace back and forth down some palegreen corridor all drenched in fog and characterized by gloom and omen. Some from this school – Darwin’s social ilk – say you must walk the corridor for survival. That you must extend yourself beyond yourself, perhaps to lose yourself, all for the sake of yourself. Selfity self-self, self. It’s a concept I’d not heard until completely confronted by its looming temptation.
This corridor, as I see it, splits the center of some abandoned elementary school, backlit at its end by a persimmon streetlamp in Twilight, through a set of frowzy frosted glass doors. Looking down the hall from where I stand, the lockers at the perimeter of this passage have all been swung open — No. 2 pencils and Trapper Keepers strewn about the linoleum beneath layers of dust and greedy grime.
There are a few chairs here where I’ve chosen to stand, and the absence of dust on on their seat-tops meant someone else’s been here too recently. I’m not really sure why they’ve been situated here [or by whom], except for the sitting purpose, and so for a month I sat down to consider deeply whether or not I should or shouldn’t pass through the hallway and on through the frosted glass doors before the lamp-lit whatever. Since then I’ve stood again – ready to go somewhere. In which will the Ought be fulfilled?
If I were categorize, this is a spectral space, panning the distance between Consume[d][r] and Creat[ed][or] — between Take and Make — and I can hardly help, in my proclivity towards Extreme, to see something like a beguiling gap between the two, Systemitic critters creepcrawling up the walls and squriming out of every crack. And seeing so my mind my may never push my legs into their function, synapse sent from the intellect-center only to be quickly returned by the compassion-seat saying, “Yes, but, Andrew! You don’t believe that.”
It’s not a fear, it’s an Awareness of the Right, which always Illumines the wrong and the hurt it will cause. And with that, I see the flickering streetlamp outside the doors on the opposite end of the hall an icon of no more promise than security and comfort — which is in fact no Real Promise at all. For in that, the only thing to be built would be myself for the selfsake, and, contra-culture, I am left dissatisfied with with that “potential” for “satisfaction” — perhaps because it actually isn’t that at all.
So, though I’m still on one side of the hallway, but I’ve finally arrived at the realization there is not as much to question of that plight. For if Value is of any value, then I never will [my will never!], and within [Our] Person, that is ostensibly proper. It’s taken some sand-sifting to see it as such, but as soon as I’d realized that as fully as now, it only continues to compound, and I’ve found that by turning my body only an acute smidgenofasmidge, there is a wholly other directioned hallway, a wing of the building I knew, but had forgotten to look for. Upon the reorientation, the lions are quickly made to sound as kitten.
That other hallway allows volition to pan from self-denial for the self-affirmative, but with the discovery of this new hallway, such a silly decision is loosed! The choice is clear so much that the choice is not a choice at all! The glass-doors at the end of this new hallway are lit with a different hue and intensity than the flickering persimmon streetlamps at the end of that other one, and, in fact, categories of “Hue” and “Saturation” and “Lightness” fail to justly express what I’m seeing here. And I’m so excited about it all that I need to use exclamation points!
The only language I have here is the comparative kind – that this is something like the Sun, though it is surely something infinitely more than the Sun [if not more than more! Something like a supra-similie?] – and the Sun is perpetually rising, glowing in the most radiant of all Persimmon, incarnating a Hope to incarnate! And I am choosing, more and more and more, to move its direction, whatever is the cost. I do believe the Cost is All.
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P.S. Thanks Mom
More than any other human being have I taken photos of this guy. Providence has us sharing space for upwards of eight years now – playing together in multiple bands, crafting web identities for fake clothing lines [college is something to miss], backyarding Ellsworth just beneath Stanley, and, sinking in the sound of Love is Hell from the Libertine‘s high-backed-booths. Like any, our relationship is far from Perfect, but, even less perfect, I think, are we as individuals — so there is that.
Anyywhoo, yesterday, Austin took it upon himself to be my assistant [since he also knew the guy we were photographing], carrying a large volume of stuffs I didn’t end up using, and readying lens caps for the quick switch in a needing moment. We tested a bit of the Dallas light before the shoot, ‘specially since I was a bit inspired by those near-Muttons.
