Monday, March 14, 2011

Lazarus

To borrow a phrase from Iron Maiden, 'maybe one day I'll be an honest man'...

Another year gone past without a post and suddenly, out of nowhere, the past seems to have caught up with this reader again... Gone is much of the vocabulary, having been replaced by the simplicity required by one's profession; and so too is much of the allusive imagery that used to be invoked in order to cloud the issue and shroud the meaning behind a delicate veil...

Instead, the reader stands here today, redemption having been achieved in another form than the one considered to be the sole - purgatory.

And yet, a glimpse through the blog has taken the reader through the infinite ebb and flow of emotions he went through back in the day...

A 21-year-old, taking baby steps into the realm of the unknown, began writing this blog on the basis of a whim, a desire to write, and some goading from a virtual stranger.

Almost five years later, the reader of this blog is bordering on 26, is well established in the profession he loves, the virtual stranger having become the most inseparable part of his life outside of his own body.

And yet he finds inspiration in his younger, inexperienced self... The inspiration to return from the language of thought to the language that the heart spurted forth... The inspiration to put away the humdrum of life, to come back home from work and actually shut down Cricket2007 before completing a match, and to go back to that rather more mature pursuit he had left behind with his 21-year-old self...

Having been enveloped, as the young writer had hoped, in comfortable mists, the reader had perhaps failed to see through those very mists and look at the picture that was painting itself behind the curtain... That with everything looking 'settled', it was time to put the feet up and enjoy retirement... The shortcut to the end, as it were...

But what the ghosts of 21-year-olds past brought flooding past the reader was the realisation that he had lost out on a lot of time in his pursuit of the mists... That the mind of the 21-year-old writer had not got left behind in time, rather it was still attached on the inside of the reader's skull, and was just coated in a thick, greenish-red layer of corrosion...

Time, then, to shake off the rust and be Lazarus, come back from the dead, again...

Or if the reader, for a moment, be allowed to borrow his younger counterpart's image...

The Phoenix rises from the ashes. Again.

If the virtual stranger be reading this post - hello shadows. what goes on here stays here. because redemption-reprise is back to being what it was and always should have been - an outlet for the reader and the writer.

* * * * *

One bears guilt today. Guilt of the order that one had to actually confide in somebody, not something he is wont to do, in order to rest one's mind.

The young writer is not the only ghost of the past that has decided to pay Uncle Scrooge a visit. The old muse has returned to one's mind, for reasons unknown and unfathomable.

Blame it on the stalker/murderer who shot that poor girl. Had that not occurred, the red bricks, the grey sandstone and the green lawns would have remained a distant, unpleasant memory. Instead, all the ink that was blotted out of one's sheet has appeared again on the page, forming distinct words.

Words that reflect old quests - like the old trunk in the attic that still holds the artefacts one stashed away in extraordinarily whimsical moments. Or like my other cupboard, in which one does find a skeleton or two.

The human mind is a strange instrument...

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