Rain..

The rain is falling harder now. It started with a few, pale trickles down her spine as she walked back inside and now, as she presses her fingers against the deep, cold glass of the window in her room, she can sense the sharp, icy blades of grass wincing under the weight of a heavier visitor. Everytime it rains, life stops for her. For five minutes, or five hours, or five days, as long as the rain falls, she stands. There are thoughts in her, that are stimulated as each round, bright pebble falls on the warm, brown earth in a liquid embrace. She thinks of transitions. She thinks of the wind and freedom. She thinks of unicorns and dancing girls. She thinks of her childhood. When it rains, its all one. When it rains, she feels as if she's stumbled upon a magic hourglass that softly strips down the layers that seperate one broken path in time from another. Everything merges. The past, the present, and what is to come.
Nostalgia. That's what they sometimes say it is. But it isn't. She knows. Its her life through the eyes of God. She wonders when she will let faith take over. Logic isn't working. And she allows that. She allows it to prevail.The logic. Its her life through the eyes of God. A God she thinks she doesn't believe in. A God with whom she stands right now and watches herself. Thinking about them both.Thinking of the rain..
She wants to dance. She wants to run out screaming and dance like a pagan in the rain. She wants to be.
But its almost gone now. The rain. God has passed her by. Today, she will have to return. Tommorow's another day......

Eleven Minutes

I keep hearing people as they talk about how much better "The ALchemist" was than "Eleven Minutes". To them, its a descent. Paulo Coelho, ladies and gentlemen is coming down the stairs. And I am in love with this book.

Its funny how the pseudo-intellectual in all of us keeps battling with that other person, the one, who really thinks. History mollycoddles. It suffocates. Call it a necessary strangling of an untainted mind. And so we grow up, thinking that ambiguity or complexity is the defining feature of depth and intellect. Aah, the linguistics of "Intellect". It sounds bougeois.Let's settle for a "thinking" person. We begin to think that unless soemthing is hard to understand, difficult to grasp, and requires hours of our time, it isn;t really worth our attention, if we are to consider ourselves truly "intellectual". Or a truly thinking person. And yet, its strange, how insight takes a single second. Its liek intimacy, actually. You can spend all your life with him. Until the obvious lashes out at you. That one moment, when you were laughing with him in the front seat of a white car, between a mosque and a brothel..was IT. That was all. That one moment. That one second was when you felt the absolute uselessness of words, the knowledge that there is nothing to say to someone who is inside you. He knows. That's intimicy. One second. One moment. And we live our entire lives in a halo fringed by the fading light of a fading memory.
If I am to understand God, I donot think that I need to study him for half a century. No. I just need to answer the simple questions. I just need to break complexity down to something that is more real. Something that connects to me as a living, breathing person. Its all in the simple questions, really. Where did the earth come from?..The Big Bang..OH. Well, Where did the Big Bang come from?..And you hear thunder. The sky has fallen. Beyond that, there is just you. Alone. In solitude, you find that moment. Insight. And you are reborn.

"Eleven Minutes" understands "woman". I admire prostitutes. In a lot of ways these women are my inspiration. There are places where its important to draw a distinct line between the "person" in herself, and the independant nature of the work taht she does. We make them. These prostitutes. They come from us. From history. From the scorn of centuries as they pile into tangled coils over each other. So, essentially, they ARE us. And that is why, if we are to understand them, we must first embrace them. And only through understanding, can one ever reach that other, rosy-cheeked, four-year-old side of morality.

Maria is me. As she is a lot of other women. We are different, and yet we are the same. Are women essentially teh same?..Not really no..But human nature is. Because human nature is the centennial culmination of objective truth, and truth is eternal. Oh we change. But just as the core of this world, as the core of history, remains untouched, so does the person. The man. The woman. Primitive. Raw. Real.

Paulo Coelho said something about "love" being the light that opens us to the world. That opens us as persons to ourselves. Love, in its raw, pure form, is not about respect or loyalty or esteem or any of the baggage that we attach to it in the same way that we attempt to stretch our one moment of intimacy over a lifetime. Its about itself. And that is why love can never be generous. Its selfish. Jealously so. And it should be. And in its true, raw state, its about no salvation. It destroys. As surely as a light from a candle scatters the ashes of the moth it loves, love kills. Its one moment.A spark that erupts in sheer ecstacy out of a slow, burning fire and dies out before it can come back. Respect, taht is usually said to be an inherent part of love, is actually an independant variable. The two are not linked. Excpet that our desire, as human beings, to inject a sense of security into most everything, forces the two together. So really, real, raw love is beautiful. Its a naked, feral emotion that hides nothing. No, not sex. Don't confuse "sex" with love. Sex is a need. Real, raw, naked love, is not a need. Its an accident of fate. Or, to be more politically correct, the culmination of history, of time, into two individuals. And that is what "Eleven Minutes" is about. And that is why I refuse to accept that "The Alchemist", no maytter how deep, was better. Greatness is achieved in finding our place in the jigsaw puzzle of history. Not in removing that jigsaw puzzle piece from its place, and cutting it up into a million pieces so we can observe it from a million angles. Philosphically stimulating, yes. Life-changing?..I don't think so.