Reality

Silence, from inside of me, swells into a bubble. This statue and me, encircled in stillness. I have been staring at the face of a cat wearing glasses, Le Chat wander, by surrealist comic artist Geluck at Parc de Bruxelles. Suddenly it started to “un-become”. No longer head, no longer bronze, no longer lines, no longer curves, no longer colors.

I have experienced this since I was a little kid. Staring at something just long enough, and reality starts to doubt itself. A word becomes meaningless symbols, a toothbrush becomes a forced conjunctions of colors, even the face in the mirror no longer recognizable as me. Sartre’s chair in <Nausea>.

Meanings assigned stripped bare blank, context surrounding dissolved to liquid, interpretation torn down to ashes.

The past month, from Lisboa to Madrid, to Barcelona, to Roma, to Paris, to Brussels. Greetings, from Portuguese, to Spanish, Italian, French, German, I became fluid, floating, on a strange liminal edge between dream and reality. From time to time, I also consciously dissociate, becoming the camera observing life but not part of it.

Illusion indeed, but is it absolute, or relative? How much one superimposes self centered narratives onto the world? How much does society rapes our individual stories?

If we are all living in our own illusions, at least make your own, and if you try hard enough, perhaps, it becomes a novel worth reading and passing on by others.

The sound of water splash followed by a kid’s laugh burst this bubble of silence. He just jumped into the puddle from overnight rain, now excitedly stomping dirty water.

I am reminded, there are also some realities, simple and pure, requiring no efforts, no interpretation, no words, no structure, and no story making.