Mammalia, Regalia, Bacchanalia

To slip between existences, between cultures, with open eyes and ears…and all the senses fired up, as they probably once were…that’s true adventure. Hemingway knew it, knew that there was fire in this life besides the sun, and he never stopped looking for it.

Numbing routines sustain us in a half-life of passivity. We panic at the bare mention of adrenaline, danger; a reminder of the base animal sleeping beneath our neocortex, in the forgotten folded maze of our grey matter.

Nostrils flare and catch the scent of a cigar, slowly burning on a shop window sill. Light glances off glassy-eyed fish, staring open-mouthed from their icy graves at the fishmongers counter.

Supine worshippers sprawl across the sand, baring their flesh to the midday’s inferno, melanin dancing to the surface of their darkening hides.

Dawn breaks with the thundering of hooves and the pounding of hearts.

White and red.

Lets paint the town red. Basquiat said “Let’s paint the town Black”.

I saw them paint the town with spectral light, cut with Chinese gunpowder.

I feel I have regressed. I feel I have evolved. I feel exhausted … and encouraged.

—

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway.
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard.
The artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat.