The Passage

And time itself, too, will one day make a mockery of us; our attempts at grandeur, pompousness, bullying, selfishness and narcissistic tendencies.

Yes, time itself imposes on us the greatest imaginable horror, that of an unstoppable forward motion in which the body decays bit by bit and the soul fights bravely on for eternal renewal, captive within a beautifully flawed prison of delicate flesh and bone.  And I dream of the day when I will once again be able to shed a tear, because I have become immunized against the dreadfulness of our dismal actions toward one another.  I am no romantic.  I am no idealist.  I am not religious, nor spiritual.  Yet I am confounded each day how we, as a species, made it this far.  I am confounded when I look at the purity of heart of my son of thirteen months and know that I have no real alternatives to the massive pain of current relationships in the world.  I am ashamed that neither I nor my generation has managed to overcome our infantile behaviour tward each other, despite our once held wisdom of how things could and should be being just beneath the surface of our daily consciousness.  Instead, we place ownership on feelings and fight each other to the death or worse over these ridiculous emotions we scarcely understand.

But I know this - time will make a mockery of all these lunacies.  Time: the great equalizer whose consequence we can all fear equally.

How is any of this relevant?  You may well ask.  I have had a lasting fascination and adoration for decaying buildings, long-since abandoned and crumbling under the weight of both the elements and time.  They are full of hope and dispair simultaneously.  They are symbolic of our ridiculously highfalutin images of ourselves.  They are reminders of how imortant humility is; the underlying strength of patience; the frailty of our dreams; and , most vitally for me, the sheer beauty that arises from blemishes.  Each tick and tock of the second hand is an opportunity to witness the remarkable.

And the apple dangling before my ego's cart is thus - to capture the spirit and physicality of those decaying buildings in human form.  For what else produces the slant of those shoulders, the depth of these lines, the magnificence of our bodily expression when it finds honesty... if it is not time?

The Image Above:

As I walked out of my work premisis one day, I saw this locust impaled on a cactus leaf.  I have never seen anything like it before, nor since that day.  My best guess is that he was blown into the plant by the wind, as it was the time of year when strong, hot desert winds blow here.