ontaiah

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the legacy of the writer, it may be that whether it’s our forebears tackling the taboos of their generation or contemporary analysts trying to pierce through tight attention spans, words almost never land in the time period they’re intended for. Voices seem to be most often heard not straight from the authors tongue—but through the memetic echos that follow.

The soul is a fluid that slips and falls past the tightfisted—meeting the dirt from whence it came so it may properly engender a bloom most nurtured. With love comes an understanding that souls sit most comfortable in stable, cupped hands and flee from the shaky and grasping ones.

Success is to failure what fire is to timber. You can never have the former without the latter; you can skimp out to gather sticks and dry leaves, or reuse the charcoals of past victory to stall the work of logging, but you will soon find yourself sick in the cold failure of your own laze, and so you will once more find yourself gripping an axe staring down a trunk three times the size of your torso, shivering with frustration you begin striking with such a vigor and violence to your suddenly sweat and passion soaked body that you forget what the point of fire even is. You haul back to weary embers to stoke the evidence of your discipline and watch as your triumph roars louder than the fall of even the greatest lumber.

Even something as powerful as the sun will find itself shyly hiding behind the soft cloud occasionally.

My blade remains warm and wet with the follow of flesh, such that I know not the difference between edge and ichor.

If you can’t find your bliss in ignorance you’ll find it in vices — to shed yourself of delusion is to lay yourself bare to the world as it has its way with you, and the easiest way to cope is through substance and obsession. We all desire to know more and be less deluded, but rarely are we given the space and support to do so. Delusions are support structures. To truth seekers, seemingly shoddy foundations may prove to keep a great tower erect for centuries, but once you rip away the pillars of delusion that carry your selfhood, you realize how deep the sea they stood in was. You don’t know how to swim. By fate alone, the troughs of the waves give you occasional time to breathe and recover from the endless depth and dark, but you still lack any ground to stand on; you’re hardly swimming and more-so just barely staying afloat by the mercy of the tides. You look up at those who remain delusional, some laugh proclaiming your lack of faith to be of karmic consequence, deserved for someone as devilishly hollow as yourself. Others empathize with you and suggest that you need only stand as they are, but they will never understand that you could sink for decades and still never know the sea floor. Both of these types insist their delusion is but faith in a truth you are too ignorant to see, but they remain dry and with not a drop of water in their lungs. They don’t know how cold and cruel the water is. Many romanticize truth unaware of the consequences of seeking it wholly, they are humble enough to acknowledge they can’t and don’t know everything, yet they live as people who have nothing left to learn beyond the little obligatory berries of bittersweet revelations they passively pluck for the rest of their life. When I was younger, I desired more than anything to know without bias, understand everything I could, I despised delusion, I lived surrounded by people who would let themselves and others rot by attaching themselves to their own delusions — but I went on this journey with no support, no plan, and while I always knew how painful it would be, I ended up rotting myself. Maybe I am still delusional, I don’t know. I will likely find myself disagreeing with all of this someday, but what I keep thinking about is if I’ll have to fool myself in order to do so.

Every thing that touches you is a brushstroke illuminating your nerves, lighting them up like a UV laser shining onto a glow-in-the-dark toy, you feel what you felt even long after you felt it; you cannot ever truly take the paint off the canvas; you can scrape it off but not without permanent damage. It is you now. To forget it is to pretend it cannot glow; to ignore it is to pretend the color you can name does not exist. You brain does not stop at the head, it is a mycelial fabric woven throughout your dermis alongside your capillaries. Being the ultimate painter is creating a masterpiece of sensation without so much as touching a brush. Where it is the soul that paints your feelings from the inside instead of the outside world. Let your life be one painted from the inside.

Every person is a texture, and just as you could look at something you’ve never touched before and know what it would feel like to lick it, you could share but one exchange with another and understand a particular topography of their soul. At the bottom of a seemingly negligible ravine could lie tucked away a mountainous cavern that could collapse in on itself at any moment — nevermind collapsing under the weight of your presence. The winds of wisdom may place its hand at the sacrum of the dunes of affinity, guiding its form such that you know how their taste and character will shape over time. Some pools of grief will dry up while others erode the continents of their soul, and where they might see a sentimental oasis of love or clarity, you see something that turns their grounding soft and sunken-in. To demonstrate your capacity to understand someone is to tell them “I’ve never walked your exact path before, but I have seen many of the trees you have, been thrashed by the same river you dread swimming in, and hiked a mountain as tall as the one that has paralyzed you, and I’d like to share the map I’ve lovingly traced with you—someone who seems to be lost—if not just found and a little disoriented.”

I share this sentiment. If my prose is too cold or flat, It doesn’t feel right to post it; even this sentence here is pushing it. I believe the true ‘purpose’ of nonfiction is to inspire fiction, just as the purpose of fiction is to inspire people. Nonfiction grants us the ontological scaffolding upon which to construct alluring falsehoods; for a moment we submit to beautiful lies so that we may depart for many more moments of beautiful truth. To write nonfiction is to skip pebbles across the river of truth and let them sink where they may — in the minds of onlookers. The water is clear, and while some see the pebble dance for miles, others can only ever see it as part of the riverbed. The twirl, the whip, and the succession of rings you betrothed upon the finger of sea itself means nothing to the spiritual bottom-feeder. Particulate are both river and riverbed; the former being blue and infinitesimal, the latter grayish and countable, and although it is the blue that grants respiration and aspiration alike, it is the gray that some only ever seem to see, for they would much rather know the fathomable than fathom the unknowable. This can discourage some from ever bothering to find that perfect rock to begin with. Nonfiction is not opposite to fiction, just as dark is not opposite to light, and cold not opposite to heat. Instead, one is a greater presence, as opposed to the vacuous one it emerges from. Light exists amidst a sea of dark, heat amidst a sea of cold, and fiction amidst a sea of nonfiction, or rather, lies amidst a sea of truth. It is these well-meaning lies that we sprinkle throughout the amniotic fluid that let us birth the tasteful discordances and phase cancellations that the brilliant melodies that so effortlessly break the waters surface are composed of and by. All words and phrases and concepts are approximations with varying degrees of mutual agreement amongst all of mankind. Nearly nothing is objective. Even the most obvious, blunt, boring truths are either poetry or lies in the eyes of some, just as the most beautiful, abstract, and moving poetries are either nonsense or obvious truths to others. The life we live is nonfiction, but the life we perceive is fictitious. It is the gaps in knowledge and the willingness to venture orthogonally across being itself that grants us meaning. We are not God, so to fathom absolute truth is a pipe dream, but to dream itself is absolute. In understanding the world, we are often tasked with a decision: count thousands of river rocks, or throw one. Perhaps it is worth asking if writing fiction to you is an entirely different atmosphere to adapt to, or if you simply must learn to take deeper breaths of the same air.