After the carnival
May. 17th, 2008 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonYou know it's funny, but for a guy who spends an inordinate amount of time living inside his own skull, I certainly have the strangest need to seek the validation of other people to provide me with a sense of justification in my creative endeavors - a notion that I have done well if you will, that my time has not been wasted, that my efforts are noble and my failings, if nothing else, are at least amusing in their contemplation. Yet I realize the inherent weakness in this need, that it is an abdication of self responsibility that renders me in servitude to the whims of friends and the 'kindness of strangers'. But the recognition of this need isn't enough to either satiate it or quiet it... so the justification becomes both a craving and a denial at the same time, one wrapped in the other, unraveling constantly between the two states.
Sometimes I feel as if I've built an amusement park inside (and out of) my imagination. Look! I've added trap doors to the memories that drop you deep into sordid Tunnels of Love with the walls lined with funhouse mirrors and mechanical skeletons that pop out of corners whispering innuendo. There's a rusting roller coaster that I carefully erected out of my years in the punk scene - the tracks rattle with off key feedback and the cars are spray painted with band names that read as messages from all yesterdays parties, it runs through a series of loops and twists... but careful the ride cuts off abruptly to send the cars flying blindly into a nebulous future. There is a freakshow of imaginary characters performing a poorly rehearsed burlesque of whiskey, women, magick and bad luck. I have taken the carousel and tilted it on its side to make it my Ferris Wheel of Eternal Recurrence, a spinning mandala ride where the horses of drama, comedy and tragedy spin endlessly off the axis of my reminescneces... so that over time only the passengers change. There are of course little prizes to be won at the game tents - jpeg tchotchkes, tiny jokes of fish that swim in clear plastic bags, dusty retro-relics framed in nostalgia and of course the little stuffed beasts of burden waiting to be buried in closets of romance.
But though this amusement park is always open... the gates are always closed. It is a zoo cage and through the bars I bark the merits and thrills of the rides but don't get too close... those bars are electrified! In the beginning people would pass by my amusement park and tell me it was indeed a glorious and strange thing indeed... but still I refused to sell tickets. Soon people stopped stopping at those gates, then even passing by them, no matter how splendid, how titilating, how death-defyingly glorious the rides promised to be. They simply grew tired of being teased with a carnival that they could never be allowed to enjoy.
Now as I learn to reluctantly open the locks chained across those gates, now that the rides aren't free but at least accessible, now that the fair grounds have finally been cleared of land mines, the inner demons given clown make-up and the freakshow unionized... I have to wonder if it's too little too late.
Sometimes I feel as if I've built an amusement park inside (and out of) my imagination. Look! I've added trap doors to the memories that drop you deep into sordid Tunnels of Love with the walls lined with funhouse mirrors and mechanical skeletons that pop out of corners whispering innuendo. There's a rusting roller coaster that I carefully erected out of my years in the punk scene - the tracks rattle with off key feedback and the cars are spray painted with band names that read as messages from all yesterdays parties, it runs through a series of loops and twists... but careful the ride cuts off abruptly to send the cars flying blindly into a nebulous future. There is a freakshow of imaginary characters performing a poorly rehearsed burlesque of whiskey, women, magick and bad luck. I have taken the carousel and tilted it on its side to make it my Ferris Wheel of Eternal Recurrence, a spinning mandala ride where the horses of drama, comedy and tragedy spin endlessly off the axis of my reminescneces... so that over time only the passengers change. There are of course little prizes to be won at the game tents - jpeg tchotchkes, tiny jokes of fish that swim in clear plastic bags, dusty retro-relics framed in nostalgia and of course the little stuffed beasts of burden waiting to be buried in closets of romance.
But though this amusement park is always open... the gates are always closed. It is a zoo cage and through the bars I bark the merits and thrills of the rides but don't get too close... those bars are electrified! In the beginning people would pass by my amusement park and tell me it was indeed a glorious and strange thing indeed... but still I refused to sell tickets. Soon people stopped stopping at those gates, then even passing by them, no matter how splendid, how titilating, how death-defyingly glorious the rides promised to be. They simply grew tired of being teased with a carnival that they could never be allowed to enjoy.
Now as I learn to reluctantly open the locks chained across those gates, now that the rides aren't free but at least accessible, now that the fair grounds have finally been cleared of land mines, the inner demons given clown make-up and the freakshow unionized... I have to wonder if it's too little too late.