I can’t remember how and when it all started. Maybe it started during that one night, a long time ago, when I was in grade one or two and I felt like school was the worst thing that could ever happen to a kid who loved walnut trees and pigs and dirt roads. I remember looking at the sky then and thinking “If I lived on one of those stars and I looked at the sky just as I do now I would see none of these things – the school, the evil teacher, even the walnut trees. I would just see some white stuff. So the teacher is just some white stuff.” This cheered me up a lot and I didn’t hate school so much after that night. Consequently, I’m still waking up every morning and going to school and I’ll probably do so for the rest of my life.
It might have also started when I was a teenager and I loved punk music and punk boys. I was hanging out with some of these punk friends who were jumping violently while some other punk guys were calling on a god none of us believed in to save a certain queen. I was very happy to be there but I kept seeing all my friends as jumping pieces of flesh so I left all of them and tried very hard to believe in god. No, it didn’t start then either…
Ok, now I remember! It was perhaps during my yogic tantric experimentations when I felt that all is one and the one is the shaft of Shiva. No. It certainly wasn’t then!
Maybe the seeds were always in my head, somewhere, but they only started to sprout when I immigrated and the new country seemed to me like a big…nothing. You see, there were no people on the street. For me, no people, just street = nothing. So, new country Canada = nothing. However, I grew out of it as soon as I had places to go to. After all, the street is for going somewhere not for people to hang out on it.
Could it be that it started just lately, when I became obsessed with cleaning and throwing out things I didn’t find absolutely necessary? Or is it that I was doing this all along, since…well, since I can remember?
One of my first memories is this: I’m sitting with my grandfather somewhere on top of the hill, in the countryside. We’re waiting for the goat to eat oak leaves until its belly is big like a huge watermelon. I can hear the goat’s teeth crunching the leaves. I like the goat a lot. I realize that this goat will die just like the goat we had the year before died. I think that if the goat died I will die too one day. I ask my grandpa what happens when we all die. He doesn’t deny the dying which scares the hell out of me. This means that we’re really going to die! After a short pause he says: “Nothing happens. We die, the worms eat us and that’s that.” I ask further, almost crying: “So nothing is left?” He looks at the goat for a moment to make sure it won’t eat the neighbors’ crop. “Well, the bones are left for a while but they also disintegrate eventually. They become one with dirt. Let’s go now, look, the goat’s belly is hanging hehehe.” That’s how my grandpa laughs: “he he he”. Cube of “he”.
Reductionism is something I do instinctively. I do hope, however, that it all amounts to something more than just dirt.
Those first two sentences are so perfect.