Skip to main content

I Can't Go Back Home

All attention now turn to a shrouded figure on the flee. An escapee he is not, nor is he a bustling commuter. Night is impossible to bear such muted tone. All the hurly-burly seems to be swept away without mercy. A swirling smoke of dusts he incites in the wake of his hobbling pace. Beware! Night murmurs to itself as the smoke uncontrollably swerves up. Disquiet lurks threateningly in, the murky smoke slowly gnaws.

No music and not a sound are heard. Imagination sets flames on them. Alive, the music yawns itself alive from below. Like the residue of a closed bakery, smouldering melodies emit from below his mud-scattered boots, from below the pulsated earth; the flagrance of music wafts. A mirage he illusions of seeing: little girl dancing under a ring of light in pleated-skirt. Her movement coheres with the arpeggio taps. All perked-up dynamics ironed somewhat at the end of every four bars, in which a slight squeak of the girl’s ballet shoes is audible. Under the conspicuous spotlight a bizarre bronze resemblance vibrates on the skin of the little dancer. The hair is in comparison a stack of straw-yellow, sprawling desultorily about her shoulders mingled with sweats. Her dancing is somewhat ungainly, signified by those pervasive blue veins threaten to burst. He reawakes from temporary halt.

Proceeding on he picks up a newspaper skidding along the empty street from hither to thither. The story of a murder predominates the whole page. Night veils the city but she was one of the many who is still sober from the darkness. A glass of wine on one hand and a scintillating knife on the other she judges with unperturbed curiosity. The serenity of the night everybody wants to galvanize; a palpable revenge she has yet to feel. A startling laughter she tries to stifle. She lets her face fits into the tunnel-version on that of the well-polished hilt; she looks comically timorous.

Later she insists that the murder is unpremeditated. The night is simply too long; too stifling. The cabaret outside her window ceases not of their frolic. They sing, dance or pump noises until beads of sweats creep upon their already soggy shirts. She feels beads of sweats too, above her back. And no, she shakes her head in denial, no reasons can be proffered for her murderous action. A reason which is still in stammering gestation in her soporific head.

Another he appears on the wall, coyly inviting him for an eventful shadow-boxing. He baffles and halts his brisk gait. From the very far horizon of the infinite, he hears, some tentative sounds rumbling on. Remember those days from yesterday, the street sways before him like a sultry hot day. Those sounds in fragments will soon amass into a trooping sea beast. Hands it will extend toward him to draw. Before long like the noiseless city he will become, a skeleton that aches.

“I can’t go back home.” He rushes away leaving the night in the wake.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are