Reflections

The time is drawing nigh – this dreaded series of heart-breaking, gut-retching closing pieces that I will write prior to my imminent departure from this wonderful place of magic and life-altering experiences. The die is cast; the tides have reached back from its ends and looped a knot through the vast expanses of time, to slip back past the beginning to seek out a new balance and center until the next cycle washes more relics ashore and etches new meanings again. The circle has been drawn and it is complete, and in a moment will be started anew, to greater depths and hopefully with further details waiting to be written upon its shores and stories.

In the beginning there was school and nothing but the work I had tasked myself to do by committing to the Oxford Study Abroad Program. I didn’t know if Oxford was going to happen – it almost looked as if it wouldn’t because of the logistical matters and financial aid. There were times when I was cornered for time and pressed for deadlines. I managed to jump through a series of hoops and meetings until one day, in early March, I arrived in the U.K., and uncertain as to whether or not I could manage studying abroad while taking in Oxford. I wasn’t prepared for anything else except to be blown away by merely being in the U.K., in Oxford. At the end of that exercise, I finished rather unscathed, plus or minus some minor bruises and projects, and succeeded beyond my imaginings.

School allows for a certain certainty that one can achieve something if enough work and effort go into the task-at-hand – no matter how difficult or tedious. One simply ploughs through it – passionately or dispassionately or otherwise. Scholarly education focuses one to develop certain mental muscles with a modicum of intellectual curiosity, emotional resistance, or pain – all with an end towards grades, transcripts, scholarships, transfers, and degrees, not to mention enlightenment.

The real education – that brand of education that cannot be bought, beggared, earned, or prepared for – the real education was in learning how to live, stretch, and become alive again. It came to me when I no longer had to be beholden to multiple syllabi or bound to prepare for tests, papers, and miscellaneous other obligations that come with being solely a student of school. Life happened, and I found myself not knowing, learning what I did not know, and trying to understand what I did – which shifted daily, depending on the confluence of events or the elements in play. Coming back to life again is a scary place to be.

I first learned this when I became attached to the now notoriously beloved The Corridor on Cowley Road. I’ve written plenty about it in my pieces, but there is another side to it that brought me weeks of turbulent not-knowing, painful insights, happy highs, crises of confidence, and dreary lows that ended in question marks. That education disallowed questions, preparation, note-taking, strategizing, or analyses because at the crux of it was a derivation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle wherein that which is being observed is affected by the mere act of observing it. Whatever I thought I knew, I no longer did, and I struggled in my attempt to understand the ever-pervasive “it.” I found myself in uncharted waters. The bottom line was that I found friends, a place that I felt more and more attached to, I became somewhat known, and was invited into the lives of very special people who have taken me in as their own, and walked me through the great divide between “what you know” and “what you don’t know” words of kindness.

Where things started to get mired is in a complicated cacophony of the words swirling in the back of my head to the effect that my days were marked which is highly caustic to being in the moment for whatever the moment was. This was juxtaposed with time nipping at my heels, and, alas, love – that awful thing that I want to instinctively chuck in the nearest biohazard bin and irradiate at times. Love is definitely not academic – that much I can say with a degree of accuracy. Had I not gone to Corridor, but instead stayed at The Star Pub, I would have been home right after my birthday, which was far more than a month ago and things would definitely have been much simpler.

It has been exactly two months that I’ve lived here as a “civilian student,” and in those two months after the end of the semester, I have been reshaped in so many ways I would have never imagined before setting off to the U.K. on fateful day back at the beginning of March. The world is no longer the same place I came from and I am no longer the same person I arrived as.

More to come…
Upcoming features:
Cornwall – a Week of Splendor
Brookes: Do or Die?
Come What May
Synthesis
The End of an Era
Extemporaneous Entity

Blind and Deaf, Not Mute

Monkey see, monkey do
Hear no evil, see no evil
But by all means, do tell the truth
Let me hear the words so shrill

They address what they do not see
And respond when they do not hear
And profess to knowing my nature
When they have defined the terms

I am neither blind nor deaf
But my words have long since left
Because I see and hear what is tacit
I cannot find words that are succinct

A writer and poet I am
Because I cannot speak –
These words are meant to be oblique
Because I cannot be seen or heard
I would otherwise become unnerved.

~J. L. Tornquist

Holiday

I’m going to take a holiday
Away from human nonsense
I’m going to go away
To a place with deep trenches
And tall fences…
I’m going to take a sabbatical
A sabbatical away from this
Backward life
I’m taking a trip away from hell
To find my peace
Apart from your kind of strife
I’m leaving you earthlings all behind
Leaving to find some sort of peace
Because I’m not born of your form or kind
I come from an advanced and alien race…
I’m going to find my spaceship
And find my fellow aliens not of here
And then we’re going to take a trip
Into the stars until they all disappear.

~J. L. Tornquist

Ode to Captain Ahab

I am an anchor cast into the great and unreserved deep
Of long ago – from all places near and distantly far
The tension that holds what lies above in keep
Are fastened below by the constellation of stars

The vessel that rests upon the above-waters that is afloat
Is in my custody – it is my duty to hold it firmly with my hands;
But for this tethered ball and chain that I am to the wretched boat
My home is buried beneath a billion grains of sand

What it is I ever possessed I no longer fathom to know
Storm-tossed and weather-beaten, said abode drifts afar
Sporadic undercurrents lift me upward in hostile throes
Thrashing sediments against my intractable despair

The journey has ended thus abruptly for to-day
A thousand storms and twice as many fair sunlit days
Have jostled the feathery ship from whence I came
No human can alter the now toughened hearts so dour –

Resolved toward some end; what “end” being unknown to all
An irreverent, thankless and merciless lot: the sum
Resisting momentum and therefore itself being forestalled
Damned be these dreary, stagnant, and putrid doldrums

A stench that reeks of death by far and worse than any carcass;
Where is that Great White Whale that stirs the souls of men?
Engage this craft towards some higher and loftier purpose
Leave me then in the deepest deep where I may be avenged

If not that, then release me from my mortal obligations
So that I may find my heaven in the depths beneath
For a meager object as myself is nothing without direction
Lest I be a noose from below for those who force to keep –

My fate in such station so as to serve what has already passed
Chasing ghosts that reside in the twilight blanket of fog
Silt slipping between their fingers, the subtle ilk of time so vast
Adrift within unrequited pasts and trapped in lonely bogs

Raze this anchor for once and for all; be done with it alas!
Set sail immediately and let your hearts become your compass
Be free, be free! And let the ocean carry me where it may
My Great White Whale awaits my due arrival, and I my fate.

~J. L. Tornquist

And the Bough Breaks

They will have their time of glory
The arrogant – consumed by greed –
Heavy-handed deeds ordained
Power lorded over those beneath…
They will have their gold and jewels
And their land and money –
For a time they will possess
Over those possessed of want
Their kind will flourish;
They will pass on their spoils
To those whose blood is as rich,
Shedding blood to advance further…
They will have their golden ages
Bought, on the backs of the poorer,
Purchased and conquered;
They will enjoy their spoils
For a time,
Before it crumbles,
As it always does,
As history has predicted…
But they will grow fat and slow,
Flaunting appearances to impress
Consumed and consigned to fire –
Of Vanity, Gluttony, Indulgences,
By any form of Drug known to all
By Sex and Substance and Vice
By Food and Drink to waste;
And most of all, possessed of Self,
Looking relentlessly into mirrors
Seeking out all their reflections,
Pining over others’ riches as if poor
Pettiness harvested by envy
While lesser people relent
To comfort themselves
With faux comforts of the same,
Emulating definitions of the rich
Proclaiming:
The measure of a man
Is in what ownership reveals
And not from within –
Not in honor or integrity
Not requiring sacrifice;
Remorseless and unmerciful…
Great empires have fallen hence
As history has predicted:
The arrogant are always overcome;
In their hubris lies reality –
In the hour of blindness
The bough will break,
Taking all the king’s men…
All is revealed –
In parts –
Until the sum of all fears
Becomes apparent;
That these realities forged
Were but the greater illusion
Reluctantly giving way
To ordinary things and people…
Then the tides of words will declare
Rebellion against the complacency
That hubris had eroded of humanity
In the name of the same;
The lowly will rise up
Just as history has predicted,
Becoming known
Challenging past status quos
Until it all begins again,
And,
Until the next golden age.

~J. L. Tornquist
(First written in March 2005 and updated in January 2009)

Completing the Circle

Now it is time to close the circle from whence I drew much strength and hope from, and now the time is near to begin concluding in the lines of the greater circle drawn. I’ve lived and have seen a new world and this new world has been very kind and accepting of my presence. Yet, life proceeds. It is a difficult tearing away of a paradise that holds a special place in my heart for numerous reasons. Time marches forward, and I’ll never be the same for these experiences. I cannot begin to contemplate the numerous occasions in which I have been the fool – the court jester – that desperate pitiful creature who forgot herself amidst the elixirs of life-giving life that will never be fully expressed or understood. For these things I am grateful and will carry back a delicate new self made strong by laughter and pain, made vulnerable through the love of all things.

It is difficult being so attuned to the world, and worse yet to be sensitive to all manner of elements that dissonance construes, and a thousand-thousand writers throughout time have pontificated upon the depths of life and living. I find myself having become a stranger to myself at times; where certainty once carried me, I have lost a little of that balance and am slightly off-center. I’m afraid I can no longer return to the self I once was for too much would be at stake, so I struggle with my newfound growing pains, hoping for the best yet expecting the worse at times. Sometimes life is too beautiful and it doesn’t take a writer and artist much to be knocked senseless by the enormity of the wonders I behold. Gratitude trumps all else.