“For you the world is weird because if you’re not bored with it you’re at odds with it….For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.”
There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time…If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for ? Why the hesitation to change? You don’t have time for this display, you fool. This, whatever you’re doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.” **
**Abstracts of Carlos Castaneda’s JOURNEY TO IXTLAN (Vol. 3)
The actual words he had read in a book years before, appeared to him out of thin air, whispered in unison by the surfeit of snakes slithering all around him. This was not so strange. What was was on his sockless feet now bloody with bites he wasn’t didn’t have any toes.
In fact all of his dreams of late had been of vast deserts landscapes filled with snakes and scorpions, scarabs and sharks, normally terrifying creatures of earth, whom rather than being at odds with man, were able to arrest his reality within the realm of the memories kept inside the collective consciousness, from the atavistic times of pre-society when animalia held sway and dominated the feral veldts and primordial seas and we battled for the right to be. More so than all of this, these onetime symbols of sure and painful death, figured to be more so messengers of transition, bringers of prophesy, conveyances of epiphany. One merely had to get past the book’s cover. The snakes continued biting.
He had grown immune to their final -literally- biting words, the poison that seeped within him and the teeth that tore at his flesh only made him more aware of the fact that he had been so busy lying around dying, that he neglected the proverbial writing on the wall, in this case revealing itself through his own nocturnal doorway into the collective dreamworld, that he could choose to stand up, look at his hands, fly, whathaveyou, all while under the delusional power of what society referred to as “real”. He remembered the pigeons scuttling for food he had seen one Sunday morning while reading at the local coffee shop. One in particular, despite an apparent hobble, seemed to be faster, or at least more zealous, than the rest in the hunt for random crumbs from the scones of patrons ignorant of anything but their own encroaching mortality. He had attracted the attention of a overactive toddler while pecking for orts and while scrambling underfoot to escape the soft-scaled godzilla child I caught an window of perspective and saw that he had no talons, claws or whatever they were called. Wait, what are they called on pigeons? Eagles, hawks and big birds of prey have talons, of course, but what about doves? Does the supposed bird of peace sport talons? And what about its black sheep of a cousin, the pigeon? I suppose it could be said at least this one is not pigeon toed.
So what was happening? Was he awake? Losing his mind? In some alternate dimension? Merely dreaming? Suddenly in bed, sitting up and rubbing a red spot on his arm, the thought forced itself on him, “You ate that pigeon in China and now it’s somehow back to claim revenge, isn’t it?”
Falling asleep again was not easy, but eventually slumber sneaked up and took its hostage. Though this dream was almost always the same. Always the same shocking two-dimensional waves of color, bereft of depth though gradually separating into fields of blues diverging into discernible horizons. These horizons stretch and grow angularly entering into the third and fourth dimensions as they progress toward some unknowable future when, for the first time in all this, waking ego enters into the equation: I realize I am here, somehow: flying, bodiless, astrally projecting, a part of the luminiferous æther. Though I can’t glance down at my arms for example I do know of the concept the arm, skin, blood, bone and muscle, etc., though it is of no concern as I glide through, no, am part of the transition from beinglessness into a gestalt of more than mere humanity.
It is then that I realize I am the pigeon. I know I have no feet which matters little once aloft. I begin to sense depth from a heretofore unknown height. I can perceive long running lines breaking to and fro toward the ever-lengthening horizon. These lines connote angles which break into cracks and fissures of a blue purer than what seems to be a vast blue-ice-white ocean forming beneath what would be my feet, if I had them. The angles begin to run as wild winged pegasi against a backdrop of pure azure, leaping and gamboling frivolously though with an ease and inherent strength rarely experienced in the man-made. The angles eventually fall beneath the ever-swelling ocean and delve deeper than what occurs to me as the crux where my human consciousness and avian body combine, deeper than I could ever survive without pressure-relieving equipment. Leaving wide sheets of soft to hard blue gradient running orthogonally toward the curve of infinite and eventually to black I dip and swerve through the air, closer and closer to the surface of the water, shining my projectile pigeon-form reflecting back up at me, until , glancing down for a millisecond, I take my eyes off the horizon and suddenly, no more <i>I</i>, just <i>it</i> tumbling through the sky, up and down meaningless, a blinding sun flipped parallaxically here and there due to gravity’s perverse anal retentiveness. Caught in swaths between white hot light: these same blue lines angling ever closer toward me, yet now and then mixing in with shocks of green and yellow, hues of varied and appealing warmth, spectra ranging from said warmth to a cool of brazen hussy lips colder than ice. All this in a circus acrobat’s fall from a wire suspended from God only knows where onto the sudden net of a summertime lea between two arched hills not uncharacteristic of a woman’s hips enthralled, plush with breezes. I is not I. It is We.
Then quick as all that the I’m back to myself, my body, my life in Tokyo, still cycling the mean city streets, still getting hit (by cabs) and hitting on (cabs) through all the dismal gray and glass and metallic heat reflections, pushing ever on through to that bracing blue forever set in my eyes at some distant horizon that I can’t quite convince myself is reachable, and am equally unable to persuade myself to stop trying.
Keep on riding.
I am a documentary and portrait photographer, specializing in a raw approach to shooting everything under the sun. Though I travel abroad often, I am currently based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and am available for assignments throughout North America and beyond.
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All content © 2012 by Manny Santiago Photography