a rose bush in the desert…
This job, for all its rich social contact, is beginning to curdle my brain. To be fair I could be earning my sterlings in more strenuous and decidedly less satisfying vocations so perhaps I should focus my mind’s eye more widely and indulge the scope of this critique of my growing feeling of stagnation to include my extra-curricular activities, this town, this country, and looking more broadly still, the Western Way of Life which is rigidly enforced here in the UK and similarly in that barren outpost at the bottom of the planet where I habitually escape, Australia.
If the sole aim of my existence is merely to survive, to cement myself in a comfortable, ongoing position which causes me little drama or adversity, I am a successful man. But Security and Routine are neither my aspirations nor enemies. Which makes little sense to my long suffering mother who deigns my reluctance to settle, to accept my Lot, to set down roots; as nothing more complicated as puerile rebellion. What she fails to grasp is that while like a Tree I possess a propensity to grow, to reach higher into the sky, adding branches and leafs to my trunk as I head for the stars, thus far, when it comes to marking an X on the Earth, calling it my own and laying down roots, I have behaved more like a ship; plunging my anchor not in the ground but into the watery depths of the marina, whence an Escape is always a possibility, even an inevitability…It is the society here, not the Earth, which lacks fertility. And without adequate nutrition, my soul loses health and vitality like a rose bush in the desert…
What is really missing from this situation is a demand for attention to the Now…Too much of the Now is borderline mechanical, requiring little thought or enterprise. And it is this Automation of Existence which grates against my ideals, my instincts, and my zeal to feel Alive. So as my mind lapses more into pondering the Past and creating dizzying flights of fantasy out of the future, I am growing restless and more aware, day by day, of this clouding of the sky of my Psyche, my essence…less light is coming in as the depths of the Beast that is Daniel cocoons itself from the tedium and banality of the Now…Greenhouse effect of the soul, internal temperature is rising. It will continue to do so until the latent fire within reaches such intensity that it will burn a path through the clouds, like a blowhole in the ice, erupting in a cataclysmic explosion of Daniel Lava…That kind of Show must be avoided…Something must be done before I reach that very definite point of no return.
Maybe it is this internal greenhouse effect, the build up of psychological energy and pure passion, suffocated beneath the thickening clouds of Now, which is responsible for the sporadic incidents of Spontaneous Combustion which fit as cozily into the annals of human history as a Right Wing Rabbi setting up a pork-pie stand in the heart of the Gaza Strip.
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