walking around and pointless randomness

Walking Around
From: ‘Residencia en la tierra II’, Pablo Neruda

It so happens I’m tired of being a man.
It so happens I enter clothes shops and movie-houses,
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing the water of ashes and origins.

The smell of a hairdresser’s has me crying and wailing.
I only want release from being stone or wool.
I only want not to see gardens and businesses,
merchandise, spectacles, lifts.

It so happens I’m tired of my feet and toenails,
my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I’m tired of being a man.

Still it would be a pleasure
to scare a lawyer with a severed lily
or deal death to a nun with a poke in the ear.
It would be good
to go through the streets with an emerald knife
and shout out till I died of cold.

I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows,
vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,
down in the damp bowels of earth,
absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day.

I don’t want to be so much misfortune,
I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,
a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death,
frozen, dying in pain.

This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,
when it sees me arrive with my prison features,
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.

And it drives me to certain street corners, certain damp houses,
towards hospitals where skeletons leap from the window,
to certain cobbler’s shops stinking of vinegar,
to alleyways awful as abysses.

There are sulphur-coloured birds and repulsive intestines,
hanging from doorways of houses I hate,
there are lost dentures in coffee pots
there are mirrors
that ought to have cried out from horror and shame,
there are umbrellas everywhere, poisons and navels.

I pass by calmly, with eyes and shoes,
with anger, oblivion,
pass by, cross through offices, orthopedic stores,
and yards where clothes hang down from wires:
underpants, towels, and shirts, that cry
slow guilty tears.

Pablo Neruda was described by some as a monster. Perhaps this is true. I did not know him. The above poem was featured in the movie "Il Postino", a rather slow but endearing Italian film about a young man who discovered himself through knowing Neruda in the time when Neruda was exiled in Italia. The young man in question delivered the mail to the very remote house where Neruda and his wife lived. Hence, "Il Postino," or "The Postman".

Today I am tired of being. I am not tired of being, so much as I tire of being "this". I do not want to study. I want to write. My exams are in 7 weeks and I lack the proper motivation to see me through with honors. I will be lucky to see myself through. My mind is tired. For the first 5 months, I worked and studied 90 hours a week with hardly a break. Now my mind rejects itself. I am not the first. Something about excessive amounts of study makes one appreciate how beautiful and interesting is...indeed, everything but studying.

Tomorrow is the opening ceremony for the island that my hotel adopted and rebuilt afer the tsunami devastated it. When I read the schedule, there were two basic categories of everything: VIPs (very important people), and everyone (all of us that are essentially unimportant in our existence, only being the ones who underpaid do the work, the very legs that the wealthy VIPs stand on). Why is there such a distinction? As it happens, I don't think those people are particularly important at all, not in comparison to anyone else, that is.

What are these distinctions that still divide us so? The Romans gave the masses bread and circuses...knowing that as long as their bellies were full and they were entertained, they would never know how unfairly they were being treated.

It is difficult to reconcile my intrinsic beliefs that authority should be respected, and the lack of respect I have for those who would take advantage of and exploit others for their own monetary gains. I retreat further and further into the nearly forgotten places of the world, seeking what? Utopia? Equality? A realisation of ideals? Since I cannot fix nor change the powers that be, shall I simply wait in a quiet corner of the world, reveling in the beauty of the sky until such a time when it is safe to return? Even as I write those words, I do no think that there is a return for me. I have seen other visions, and they are not capitalist, or self important, or dreams of power but dreams of peace and respect for all. I know I am not alone in these dreams, and yet this is a dream of a peaceful revolution perhaps inpossible to realise.