Something feels off beneath the shadows of the cityscape. Life feels strange here, like an avant-garde film. Ominous. The rings of bells cut through the urban air as bicycles almost take out scurrying pedestrians, navigating the chaos. People siphon the air through vapes or smoke cigarettes and spit on the pavement. A band of foul-lipped kids clutching paint-stained bags march down the street. A man folds into the glass of the Subway storefront, on the nod, just holding up a ragged piece of cardboard inscribed with a plea for help. Everyone hurries on to their destination. How confusing and aimless it all is. How futile. 

Crashing, 

banging, 

scorching 

improbability. 

Everywhere. 

I am half awake, going through the motions when I peer up at this monstrosity of a building. Dread and doubt wash over me. The building hovers over in sharp rusted angles, protruding with the authority of knowing. It holds something inexplicable, something that is going to challenge, confuse, belittle. Life has been monotonous and benumbing, so I let myself be directed into the building like a child to a classroom. I try to enter a state capable of comprehension as I meet the darkness.  

A friend complains to me on the phone. He is bitter about someone or something in his life. I make grunts of acknowledgement but offer no solution—not that he wants one anyway. Instead, I absorb some of that bitterness to reflect upon my own situation. People seldom have anything useful to say—most of the time we try and inflict our dissatisfaction upon each other. It’s survival of the fittest and everyone is out for themself. There is no structure or stability to be found in one other. Everyone is on the edge of the abyss. People smile and stab, help and rob, and love and hate, all in a banal and perplexing blur. We are bizarre contradictions. I remember someone who used to leave the mosque on Fridays to go straight to burglaries or drug deals. This inconsistency permeates through everyone, waiting for its moment to declare itself.  

I stand here in the darkness of this room looking at these things. They sit, dimly lit, stacked up, lined up, arranged like they all amount to something. Like they all mean anything. Somewhere in the flashes of light, the letters floating on the page, the fulgurating storms of gold, the pulses of noise, I think I make out flares of the truth. But just as soon as I sense it, the truth dissipates back into the darkness of its surroundings. I’m left without an answer. Frame after frame, paper after paper, pixel after pixel—I move between vivid junctures of lucidity to flushes of empty clarity. 

What are all the words for? 

The paintings, 

songs and sounds, 

that have blared away 

since the beginning. 

Where are we supposed to be looking for meaning? For hope? Everything begs for attention, everything garish and loud claws at us. I walk past endless windows of blue, red, green glossy packets. They flare in corners of my vision and demand acknowledgement. There’s something agreeable about a neat arrangement of bottles and packets. The labels promise answers but dispense lies. My phone buzzes in my pocket. The fleas of modernity crawl the rooms of our minds. We are destined to endure the never-ending mirage of consumption, more addictive than opiates and leading us nowhere but deeper into the nightmare. It disfigures us. We are always trying to hit the spot, to fill the nullity. This relentless cycle makes us gluttonous creatures, drowning in the detail of the world. Everything is so God-damned loud and fast. We are truly up against the odds. 

Filling the halls 

of the earth 

with just enough noise 

to drown out the torture. 

I tread through the darkness, through the space, with precise deliberate steps, cautious not to disrupt the delicate frequencies of the room. I circle these objects as if they are sacred artefacts, like everything about this moment is holy and profound. From screen to paper to frame—I scrutinise and stare, trying hard to penetrate these objects with my gaze, battling to extract something from them. ’Hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail’ (Mishima, 2011, p. 101). 

Splatters of gold 

burn into my eyes. 

The room hums and beeps. 

Symbols float 

across the pages. 

To escape the circus, I seek out the concealment of shelter. I retreat to a squat and shack up with other derelicts. I decorate and arrange a bedroom in this weathered brick domicile as if it is my own, spending countless hours trawling through hard rubbish and pinching appliances from Big W. My desire to cultivate a comfortable and inhabitable space propels me. Through this process I find purpose. There is something religious about the human endeavour of a home. I develop routines and formulate plans to bring about the illusion of control. I distract myself from crushing necessity for a juncture. But crammed inside for too long I begin to rot and stink. The plaster and brick reflect my derangement back at me and I flee from the home like a rodent. The world dominates us one way or another. We set out to conquer but conquer nothing. All things end up back on the street.  

It sits, 

in the shadows 

of the mind,  

and in rooms  

and on streets. 

The more I stare at this neat stack of papers the more my urge to send them flying across the room swells. I condemn myself for wanting to do so—the content printed on them is sacred. I have entered a state of unadulterated feeling. The monitors are there to be smashed—like an adolescent with a drug habit, I imagine flinging them into the walls or hearing the reassuring crunch of their LCD screens beneath my fists or feet. Of course, I won’t do this, but the image lingers in my mind for an uncomfortable moment. Control is about lying to yourself. You try to appear on top of things, but depravity and animosity sit in the nooks of the mind.  

I pick up an errant brick and launch it through the window of a bus stop for no good reason. When the glass shatters and falls to the ground I am rewarded with a slight moment of relief. A reminder that I am still alive. The glass flashes beneath the yellow glow of the streetlights and there is something beautiful in the solitude and melancholia of this moment. Things feel different in the night. Beauty meets me in darkness and violence, like it often can. But the sensation that led me to smash up the bus stop returns. I drift through a chasm of confusion, devoid of hope or reliability. I walk on through quiet suburban streets, pointless and hopeless, past rows of production-line houses. Who designed this hell? When you can’t figure something out you often get the urge to destroy it.  

I falter. 

My thoughts, 

my experience, 

my understanding, 

collapses in on itself. 

I drown for a moment. 

I need to write something down, but I can’t record what I see or think. I can’t find the words. I can’t describe the sensations. I can’t discern anything coherent. As I try to think, I interrogate the accuracy and validity of the observations within my thoughts—I want to be done with it. Fuck explicitness, fuck reason and restraint. I give up. I walk towards the monitors perched up their stones and slip on the polished concrete, catching myself just before I crash into one of them. The noise of the room amplifies and fills my mind as I falter into delirium. 

I can’t sleep. Back inside, I lie on a bare mattress as dawn starts in through the cracks in the windows. Inevitable and condemnatory daylight. The room groans and creaks, even it seems to ache too. Then the birds begin to laugh at me. These wattlebirds—their chirps of ridicule pierce through me. Cackling as if they know something I don’t, like they have all the answers. They probably do. I roll over and remember things I don’t want to remember, people, images, and things I’ve done over of the years. Sometimes all it takes is a passing thought, a hostile stare, a jarring noise, an unplanned moment of reflection. Things like these provoke a fleeting moment where everything feels wrong. Living like this, in this way, in this body, in this room. 

Monstrous shadows 

loom out, 

over the stained carpet. 

White noise, 

in your mind, 

your eyes, 

your ears. 

This strangulation brings about ugliness. A random mess of light bounces off the monitors and walls. The harsh and angular construction of everything is unforgiving and oddly derogatory. I become the butt of the joke. I imagine I look rather pathetic, ambling around, staring intensely but not quite able to decipher anything. Watching me is in this room is much like watching me fumble through life. Hopeless and desperate, I clasp for something. Anything. A tool that serves a basic function, something solid and simple—a pen, a chair, a lighter. 

The body doesn’t lie. Experience extinguishes something as it takes hold of our anatomy. I look at my cracked and scabby skin, my haggard frame in the scratched and scribbled-on mirror of a public toilet. I look deep into my sunken, vacant eyes for an agonising moment. My youth has died at the hands of truth, my body has decayed and given way over years gone by. I am repulsive and depressing to look at. The etches of experience distinguish us but collect us too. We can congregate and gather ourselves in our universal experience of the aches of being human. We can push against the truth of death in numinous junctures of obscurity. I want to roam free, but the walls of my mind have hardened from clay to rock. Experience has erected biases and boundaries that I can’t seem to break down. I exit the bathroom to face the music once more. 

I squat next to the circular arrangement of screens, weary from staggering against the violent waves of doubt. Uncertainty is logical but agonising, tiring. In return for my subsistence, I am rewarded with the ability to feel fatigued. My head throbs and I need a cigarette. I retreat from the darkness out into daylight. I stand by a bin, and struggle to light up a smoke in the wind. I take a long slow drag. Numbed. I look down at this cigarette, locked between my fingers. I study it like I’ve been doing with the artefacts in the room.  

I can see it.  

I know it.  

I taste it.  

Sweating balls in the backyard of a detox home, I sit and stare at flashes of lightning. Jagged strands of dazzling light, intricate and precise. Sometimes the awe provoked by the natural world makes you believe in something more. It demands respect, grounds you and humbles you. To subsist withdrawals, you need to find some sort of meaning. It is common for addicts to end up devout believers. Recovery often steers people to religion. You need something to give it all meaning and ensure it isn’t just pointless suffering. Through religion, people seek redemption and apply meaning to their predicaments. Sometimes we need to find something quick before reality crushes us. We must bring our own light to the darkness. 

Distance has allowed me the space to generate words. A cigarette is easy. I type some notes on my phone as I finish it off. Distance creates ambiguity. Maybe the words I write are lies, but the truth is harsh and unpalatable. Truth must be veiled and obfuscated. ’Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish from truth’ (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 435). This interval has been necessary for creation, for any form of understanding. The words I write don’t do much more than the cigarette—they burn and subsist through the flame before wavering out. Words endure the blazing veracity for a juncture before crumbling beneath its infinite weight. The room is littered with tools of the same nature—words, objects, depictions. Implements for coping with the blistering imprint of experience. They shine hope down the void of what we don’t know. 

An Instrument 

to loosen, 

the coarse rope  

of absurdity 

that strangles everything. 

When you stop and reflect everything is rather funny, I remember the GP looking at my swollen, purulent feet in horror, asking if I’d been on a hiking expedition when I just had crack-foot—a common affliction among derelicts who don’t remove their shoes for days at a time. Not long ago I was lying in my own filth, smacked out and up against it. I clawed my way back to some sort of sanity. I think it was La Bruyere who said that life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. There is danger in falling too deep into either. It is a delicate thing. Like walking a tightrope, a balancing act between knowing and unknowing. When you stop scrambling, every so often, everything comes together to say what needs to be said, to hit just the right notes in just the right proportions. There are foreign moments where the strain retreats and we transcend the nightmare of clarity. 

I look up at the sky and see the same haphazard flashes that radiate from the floor inside. An elegant and graceful chaos. Sometimes, these tools for subsistence can pierce through this speculative hell. These instruments perforate—they puncture the blisters of doubt for a sublime moment. You just need to sit with yourself and wait. Somewhere within the shadows of these things, one can perceive flickers of the truth. I put out my cigarette, walk back through the sliding doors, and remind myself to let meaning find me, opening rather than peering in. I step back into the darkness of the room to stare down the barrel of uncertainty once more.  

We catch glimpses of it if we wait long enough—within the ambience of a train at 3am, in the soft creases of a passing face, beneath towering trees and brick and rain. Not even the wails of sirens, or the flares of LEDs can drown it out. For a sublime moment you find it, reality plays just the right chord. Then it wavers out, and fades back into the gloom, the corners of a room. You are left unsure again. Sometimes, descriptions falter against the potency of a moment. Reason and prose become futile. Transcribing the awe of this experience is hopeless—one can only sit and admire its transient authority.  

The room is busy with people whispering, staring, waiting for something to happen. The light sparkles across the walls, a dazzling eternity in each flash on each screen. And within the blur of it all, everything comes together to hit the spot for a moment.  

It flickers, 

spins, 

mutates. 

References 

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 2011, (first published 1956) 

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1967, (first published 1901)