falling

i fall in love with each and every one of my characters and stories. i walk around seeing through a character's eyes, feeling through his, hers, or its biography. i mold my thoughts through the idiosyncrasies of my characters. i meet one or another that fits my unadulterated description of the character and i start exploring the real to construct the virtual. adulteration begins, fantasy and imagination do their magic, and i disappear. it is the only prayer and blessing that i know. it is escape.

it is time to cut the strings loose. it is time to let go of it all. it is time.

i like whores and adulterers.

i am falling. i am falling in love all over again. once more. it is not even for old time' sake.

 

cycles 2

i return to the scene of the crime. emotion. pure emotion. exhaustion settles in. exhaustion. it is time that you know that i fell in love yesterday with a dead man who was impotent when alive, and with another dead man who was homosexual. by now you know that the sex lives of dead men interest me more than the sex lives of living men. men, just men. it's a men's world, and i have never known another world. women are an invention for the weak, the coward and the spineless. women, like god, are dead from too much veneration and too much oppression. god, like women, is dead. it does not take a professed philosopher to make such a statement, it takes an ignoble ego concocted from frustration and repression to declare the death of all identity.

then there was last night, and again you flirted with that tormented and ignoble ego that i carry around. you make me feel that i am standing on the edge of that abyss of intimacy that you are promising me. you make me want to go again at the break of dawn for a walk along the river, to listen to the crows and smell the moon's whispers.

the warrior returns to details. the ego denies all.

magic

the other day you called and you began thanking me. thanks and more thanks, you laughed, you were busy, you had no time, you called. i will always blindly take in the thanks and laugh with you. then i asked you what was it that you were thanking me for, and then we really laughed. to loose one's mind is a good thing, and those are the moments when we loose our minds, when we laugh there is no mind!

just the other night and exhausted i argued with another. he is right and i am right, and we argued! for all he knows, you exist only in my imagination, and there is nothing concrete or real about you. i understood his concern, and then i realised how slanted this storyteller is: a trickster, a magician. one omission, one fact untold, a gesture unseen and the story turns from the serenity of existence to drama.

how could the magician have forgotten?

i resent

resentment! what a strange word in my vocabulary it is. it is a foreign word in this vocabulary of mine. here in the place of horses and egos, my resentment has found a home.

i talked with you yesterday, you called, i answered, we both had no time. we connected. i feel naive and humbled. i am tasting sadness like i have never tasted sadness before. you told me about your back and your kidneys, and i told you about that secret that i keep hidden in plain sight, my pain.

i resent that she never took action to touch me. i do not resent being ignored.

it is strange that time and again you appear in my life to comfort me. you are a muse, you are inspiration, and you are imperfection itself.

are my sadness and pain the expression of my resentment? i do not resent not being acknowledged.

how can i tell you that it was not in the arms of another but in his arms i found that warmth that i dreamt could exist? when he found me i had so much resigned to my own solitude. now i need you the muse, and i need him the one of my one, his own.

i resent the deception. i see the suffering. i find myself powerless. i can only observe. but do i feel? do i care? i resent.

vertigo

flirting is to me a wonderful gift, it is respectful, it soothes the ego and it promises absolutely nothing while opening up a world of possibilities and exciting the imagination. for the storyteller whom i am, you were more than a loving and dedicated teacher last week, you are a gift of the universe. the right one at the right time, at the right place. how can i thank the universe? i thank you. flirting is like going to the museum, you admire the art, you imagine what it would be like to have a Rembrandt in your living room, and then you don't touch, you don't take it home, and you do not possess. beings, human beings are art. the philosopher in me would love to expound on being human and being art, and the human being in me has had its curiosity aroused: what is it like to explore experiencing that being who calls himself by an angel's name? and the other wrote: "he, now the third man in this one episode, he is neither swiss nor japanese, he has neither blue eyes nor a long time relationship with me, he is also not the man of my dreams. he entered my radar a few years ago although i can not quite recall the exact time and date. the first time i saw him on the tatami, i knew that i had more than just another technically brilliant human in front of me. he impressed me then, and then i proceeded to forget his existence until last week. he shows up last week, more through my own utter oblivion than any sort of fathomable intentionality or rationality. last week, he shows up with several faces, the one of the master, another the loving teacher, and still another of the flirt. my ego has been ever so enthralled with the flirt, any flirt, and i am left with the answer to all my questions: i don't know. nothing has to happen, anything is possible, be ready for all, do nothing." being myself is doing nothing.

it was good

it was good to sit around a table with you and just relax, listen, and be.

once i asked another very dear to me how it was that he could stand to live with a person whose ego is ostentatious and unbearable. he smiled, shrugged his shoulders and told me that it builds his character. recently i have been facing lots of opportunities to build my character in this manner. when i encounter such an individual, i am tempted on occasions to just bury my head in the sand and ignore them. however having my head in the sand is not much help in either developing character, building reality or being present to existence. burying my head in the sand is denial. burying my head in the sand is being out of relationship.

i had a short talk in the shower room with her. we talked about my relationship with you. i felt her insecurity, and i wanted her to be reassured. afterwards i was left thinking that perhaps people do not really want reassurance while living in virtual insecurity and fighting for possession.

i had been scaling the walls of some fantastic mountain without any ground under my feet when i first met you. it was many years ago, and i did not even know that i had found myself scaling a mountain, much less that the ground under my feet was missing. i was lost, i did not see you. then one day, i found myself on the mountain and you were standing on my side. vertigo!

it was good to sit around a table with you and just relax, listen, and be.

i feel silence. silence.

why is it that instead of saying thank you, i say that i love you?

it is grey, dapple-grey

it is perhaps a day like any other. like any other day, i am not ready for it. if there is anything that i know, i know that most days greet me with surprise.

it is a grey and sobering day. the sunshine is hiding and i am alone in my solitude and my desire to live.

emotion, pure and simple they say, that was it, that is it. that is life, it is emotion.

there is nothing to say, nothing to tell... it is grey, dapple-grey it is.

woke up remembering a dream, once more defending you in my dream like in all those little inconsequential conversations that splatter themselves across my day. why must i want to defend you?

so, how has it been, you will ask next time, like you did last time. i will look at you at a loss, for the only certainty is that i do not know how to tell you how it has been. after i looked in your eyes and looked for what i can not find in your question mark, i will smile and i will say something or other, i will hide, i always do. you will hold me again, we will not talk... i have nothing for you, you have nothing for me. we shall be.

it will be in some time from now, and it will be in a time that i can not imagine. the certainty of my other dream is not grey, it is bright and trepid. trepid is my nature, bright is my essence.

fluage

the woman and the cavalry

why fluage?

fluage is a french word, and it means the slow deformation that a material exhibits upon being exposed to continued or permanent stress and strain. it is the kind of word that you will not find in a pocket dictionary, and i can not quite come up with the english translation beyond matrix deformation. it is a term used in geology, seismology, and material science. in short, it is a very technical term from the general discipline of mechanics. mechanics deals with materials, and material the thing is!

however fluage: the woman and the cavalry is about the ego. it is about my ego, and it is about its interaction with the ego of others. interactions of body, spirit and mind are indeed very human and can be very beautiful, however bringing the ego into the equation is to submit to a process that may bring in irreversible changes. interactions of the ego tend to be very confronting, bring about all sorts of emotion, and they can kill you or make you. the ego is that anvil on which our human being gets pounded, it does shape us. i am not about to damn the ego, i like my ego, and it has on more than one occasion saved my life, and certainly maintained my sanity. still the ego is an unruly abstraction of that which makes us human, yet a healthy relationship to one's ego will demand its disciplining. the ego is a very powerful ally once it has been well trained and you can ride it like one rides a horse. ego horsemanship could be an alternate tagline to these posts.

i get inspired along the way by many of the people whom i meet, and there are a few who have touched me deeply. then there are others whose paths only briefly cross mine, we interact and then drift apart into the entropic universe.

there are no main characters here, no major sources of inspiration. there are muses, angels, gems and the all of you giving form and shape to me by your touch. some of you are very real, flesh and blood humans, others are very abstract constructs of our culture from language to money, and the ego itself. there are places that inspire, and there are places which have inspired or touched me... and i remain an architect, a builder, a dreamer and here.

grateful

this is still the place of abstractions. you are the reader and you are the inspiration. this is for me, this is for you. you are a muse across the border, you are a loyal friend, you are dear to me, you are my family and you are my life. your face changes, our lives go on. some go and leave memories, other linger and share precious moments of just being here.

fluage remains the only active blog with the voice of cairo otaibi. i still need this one here while i am busy in the background furiously writing that story that has had me in its grips for a couple of years, and that has me now waking up at four in the morning just wanting to write. i still do not know if i can or if i will succeed, i just want to. i have no choice but to write it. prose is rare here on fluage, and when it is prose, it is very abstract, but then... that is the noise that i like producing, abstract noise. when i began writing fluage i knew that i had embraced a journey and that i would tunnel through to another side unknown to me; you all have been the midwives of this tunneling journey of mine. within the past four months my being got accelerated through the tunnel and all my resources were absorbed in the process. it started while i was in another european city, a city that in the past had spoiled and pampered me with both creature comforts and successes that i had yet to understand. when i returned there four months ago, i returned as "the poor artist" who slept on her cousin's home office floor and used public transportation for the first time in that grand place of glory and tradition. yet, the unexpected manifested itself. it was a good space to be, i was with family and i felt at home. there were a few questions on my mind, and i wanted clarity as to what the answers were. i started asking, and i started making some of you uncomfortable.

home, being at home has been a rare feeling with this creature inhabiting my body. i have rarely felt at home, and i have felt at home everywhere in the world when i am in touch with my own being. yet, before i could ever become conscient of it, that feeling has much too often drifted apart and i was left all over the place and no where, homeless and orphaned. this journey now has taken me to that place of being conscient of home and who i am. you all knew already who i am, i did not. i had hopes and i had dreams, and i have worked adamantly at getting here, and i was clueless and blind, deaf even.

one of you had a gentle boldness, and you were not about to drop the ball. you told me how you saw me, you repeated it, and you did not know that i did not know, but you were sure, and your words were those that i could barely discern from what i thought was noise. i have heard noise before, and i have learned to be weary of noise. while i could barely hear your words, it was the rest of your being that finally transmitted the message. the words just barely got through, but your being, that i fully got and i found myself at a place that i barely knew, it was home, it was me.

one of you! how can i dare write such generalities when you are so very precious? how can i dare? just last night i wrote to you and i told you a whole lot about me, all that you already knew. where was my concern for you? don't i know that you are there busy in the joy of your own dreams? i know, it does not even occur to me to question it. you are sharing your dreams, that i know.

freedom. my first poem ever published was about freedom, it was also my first publication and i was barely fourteen. i have long lost a copy of that poem and i do not remember the name of the publication, the byline read my original name and i was just another girl full of energy and life. i climbed trees and run for miles, swam in the ocean, and made a whole lot of people uneasy for girls are just not supposed to be that way. i built soap box cars with the boys at the seminary and i was not interested in kisses or boys for that matter. i had a dream, it was freedom.

somewhere between then and now something happened. they call it traumatic experience. i have suspected for years that one traumatic experience happened when i was fifteen, but its core and its pain have eluded me and most of therapy until just now. in a way it is as though it was only now that i was ready to deal with this part of my life, first there were earlier experiences that needed to be reprocessed and accepted. i have wondered very far from my self and my home, i have travelled far and wide outside the confines of my being to return now to that being and to find myself very humbled by the magnitude of my own existence. oh, what a ride indeed!

i am here. there is no distance between you and i, there never was. grateful i am.

these things that i do not like

i have this nagging feeling that my father is dying. i am at a loss. my parents have been on my mind a lot lately. i spoke with my mother yesterday and i could feel all her fear. i did not like one bit of it.

i also do not like it that i have this sense that my father is dying, if he did, it would however not surprise me the least bit. i think he has realized something about his life and the pain that this causes him may be more than he can bear. he was never a very strong man. as a matter of my own experience, he is one of the weakest men that i have ever come across, the total opposite of his father whom he has always been so fond of criticizing and moralizing over. i always identified with my grandfather and our biographies do run a few parallels, for that reason any criticism from his son, my father, towards him is something that i always took personally.

i do not like this at all!

you could not!

you could not help it, you had to tease me yesterday!

that is you: you tease.

this time it was about photoshop, and how refreshing it was!

i wanted to hug you yesterday, and then in the commotion of it all, i simply forgot. i did not have to. i forget.

i forget so very much!

i often wondered as to what would happen to the wonderful muse whom you have been, if ever you would be any closer.

fact is, you have been damn close all along, the distance was mine, the distance was mine alone. you have been there all the time, yet... not i. i was not there, was i?

sometimes it feels as though you were the memory of me, and that is odd indeed.

my life is odd, no doubt.

what a wonderful odd life this is!

alive

oh ever so alive, i be! feeling the pulse of each breath each breath being life and death death and life life and death and so it goes on pulsating. so dead the past is. oh so very dead the memories that be!

pain, addiction and the generality of nothing

i think. sometimes. maybe. all i need is the smallest of all gestures, and then i am calm again. you show up in the remotest corner of my horizon, you are peace. oh, i do not understand this, and i am delighted in my lack of understanding. would we be able to access solitude and silence in the nurturing arms of each other's respect?

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ecstasy

the total absolute folly! i refuse to call this love or to call it anything at all. do you know it? can you imagine it? you are human, raw, animal, lustful and stressed. your brain steals from you the greatest of carnal pleasures, and you stand there spent, insecure and with an omnipotent resolve to hold on to your dignity. you and i share one thing, or perhaps nothing at all beyond a few erratic moments of pleasure displaced by waves of ought to be or not be. yet, it is. if we share it, then it is that thing of seeing each other's vulnerabilities and weaknesses and not giving a damn about it. i do not identify with your erection, and you do not identify with my bank account. or is the other way around? what ecstasy, that of not caring is.

off the grid

yesterday i checked out, logged off the internet and the gsm grid and went off for a run. my run turned into a leisurely walk along the river with a few spurts of a sprint. it was a very grey and cloudy day, it invited contemplation. the dull lighting made me more aware of nature's subtle beauty as i looked at the slow flowing river, the trees, and the bridges. life is short, they say. what a fallacy! there are moments that seem eternal and forever engrave themselves into memories. in the solitude of my walk yesterday, you were with me. i wondered what it is that inspires me, and i felt a certain tiredness of this human affliction that keeps humans prisoners of their minds. why would i need inspiration? why would i need you? i recall about one year ago having one of those moments of desperation and frustration, and thinking that if i am a writer, i might as well act like one. strange, i seldom act like one. it is often as though i was afraid of the very power of these little an insignificant words that flow one character after another onto the screen or onto the page. then on wednesday i found myself acting like a writer. it is a matter of survival, but frankly i have no other means to earn a living than as a writer, and i do not always have the luxury on the choice of topics or genre that i am to write about. but what is choice really? while in my run turned contemplative walk yesterday i descended to the river bed looking for a water polished stone to add to the stone garden. i wanted something to remember that day, if ever i would forget, then the stone would remember. the river is a good metre lower than usual, and certainly far from jumping the banks and flooding. it is an eerie feeling to walk on the stone lined river bed and look for that special stone. the one, the magic one, the perfect one. it made me think of how we chose lovers from an overbounding field of indistinguishable and yet unique beings, we want one special one. shall it have a red hue, or will it have white spots, or will it be a particularly flat one? what will strike our fancy? then after walking about for a while and not being able to decide on the special stone, i bent down and reached for the next one. it will do, it is the right one, i have made it the right one. there is nothing special about that stone, and today it is another special stone in my garden that lays just a few steps away from another very special stone that i picked on the shores of scotland. then i thought of you, there is nothing special about you. yet i have chosen to make you special, and to harbour you in the stone garden of my affection. this is the nature of my love, it is impersonal. i love that stone from yesterday, just like i love you. both inspire me.

imagine

letter to an angel i could not have imagined it. this is not the first time that this happens. i plod along in my seemingly meaningless life, and then there is a call from you. you call, you express yourself and i listen. this happens: we hold hands, we sleep, we eat, we love. yet there is something that i have learned during the past weeks away from that which is not yet routine, yet begs to become routine: the writing, the expression, the exploration, the weaving and the synthesis of so much that we share and experience. imagine that i spend one week in that place where we often had dinner together and i listened to you and your struggles. there, in the hectic of that city that we love and hate, there i did not think of you, yet you were constantly present. imagine the freedom that we share in having each other's incomprehensible touch being experienced throughout time and space. imagine! imagine ecstasy, and imagine the fear. imagine it all. want nothing. not you. not me. just nothing at all, imagine!

i thought that i had forgotten

i thought, and i did. how very silly and unresponsive i feel now after absolutely not knowing how to tell you that that i feel is total nonsense. sometimes i wonder if it is just madness. i thought that i had written it all before, and maybe i have... sometimes i just want your world into my silence, other times i just want you. then i get distracted, and i imagine that i had forgotten you. we sit next to each other and it all stops. i want more of that.

on the edge of it

yesterday. of that day there is not even a memory, but did i ever tell you how grateful i am that you ever existed? you do exist, or was it all a dream? there is no better delusion than my own! Technorati Tags: fluage

remember to forget

remember to forget and forget to remember, or how i forgot that i had remembered. archived. finished and over: complete. that is indeed one tall order of pure nonsense! between the lines of random poetry and pseudo rhyme, i find absolutely no good reason to any of this. not now anyhow. fluage remains my open letters to you only to say that there is nothing to say, and to let you know that all is alright although you have known that for quite a while now. thank you for being there, and for the experience of it all.

the unattainable

we dreamt and we forgot about dreams, and so it is with you and i. in my memoirs i had a conversation with you about those dreams that you have and those that i did not dare having. in my existence i have forgotten yours. days and weeks go by, and hardly there is a thought that goes towards you. there is the silence.

it is time to break away to new shores. yes, it is time to break away to new shores, i tell myself. i feel like i have been here many times, and i know that i have never been here. i wish that the kind bond that binds us was non-existent, and then i know that it is. if nothing outside myself can cause any trouble, then tell me, why must i have such love and affection for trouble?e