City of Imagination

On the darkest days trapped within the epicycles of thought I enter the City of Imagination.

Leaving behind measurement, data-capture, with an eclipse of image-speak I follow the stony way to the beauty of my daybreak.

There’s a shift in consciousness, a certain kind of understanding, a mental upgrade which knowledge would keep secret otherwise but sings the light like a newborn babe.

A hallelujah sunrise!

A nagging sense of risk at the living center of creation dismissive of patience reveals rather than completes a compulsive reproduction.

With a swallow’s loop there is a felt relationship to the City of Imagination. I come into it when I disappear. Storm instructed my mind lives in a lightning flash. Awakened by the wind, I rise up against the obelisk of hours.

Invisible exhalation seizes me wide and free.

A gate to an ancient location. I travel on a light beam.

Unbeknownst, I am self-annihilating. Spit out of darkness resonant and porous.

I am a source rather than a product.

In the City of Imagination, the visible relies on the invisible.

In the City, in its in-betweens, I hear somnambulant songs cut from the fate of yearning that sing of the end of night.

Folded memories of feverish dreams show me cool streets and burning corridors, a widening of naked walls without direction but leading to ripening worlds at the edge of my breath.

I set my compass facing the Deep. I climb ladders on which angels forever ascend and descend. Toward the Center where storm lights are placed without sense of logic.

I am prophet to myself. I am poverty ennobled by vision.

People enclose themselves in the steely ratio of the material world. Rationalism dominates mostly as a bloodless affair. I embody the hemisphere of night where the beat of the crushed heart is stronger and where the realm of the City of Imagination is irreducible. I seek multiplication, not subtlety. But like the satyr hiding in Imagination’s Park, I am madly in love with fugitive trees and sundial fish.

The City of Imagination is not make-believe nor without fulfilment. To enter, I simply break out of myself into that immense landscape which is other and beyond myself.

Work in the City of Imagination is never fixed, finished, and unchanging even when completed. It is a waltz of mirrors, a dialogue in a void. It will never be capable of being fully and finally understood. It is forever evolving and ever-expanding.

I cannot imagine all that there is in the City of Imagination. But I can close my eyes to reach its speed on condition I erase all words and figures, names, dates and sentences, the snares of wishes and anxieties.

Seized with laughter I no longer turn outward, petrified against the infinite, exiled, and disembodied, limited to surfaces and filters, cut off from thick wads of joy.

I engage in the Work of the City of Imagination. Reality has become an inflamed throat, hoarse, calling for milk. A world and work which has been drained of its life and spirit by habit, familiarity and what I tell myself what I know or what others tell me what I should know.

I want a City of Imagination that is astonishing and extraordinary, that seeks an outward appearance as it reflects back the inner forces with the flesh of silence, the heat of the newborn, where each house is a season, and I am its secret unshed.

The City of Imagination is not a ghost city, not a state of mind. It is human existence itself, an essential part of our being.

Here I sing my bliss, reclaim its flower.

Here I see things as they could or ought to be.

Here it is not a question of mind but of heart.

Like a comet to other planets, I am self-transcendent, creatively buoyant, and curious within the suffocating smallness of purpose.

In the City of Imagination all streets lead home.

The City of Imagination is the suture between matter and spirit.

It is as close to me as the lines on the palms of my hands, the space I occupy before the whiteness of a palpitating canvas.

The City of Imagination can be thought of as a helix, an infinite rotating sequence. A Fibonacci sequence which uproots itself in a single jolt swift and powerful, inward, and expansive, beyond argument and doubt. Never a question of “what is it” but “whom does it correspond” that finds the heart through the eyes.

We shrink from the City of Imagination like a worm of so many winters. The City shines on all sides with light immeasurable but we cannot see it. To see what is difficult to be seen is an act of love as it is choice. By way of flux from shadow to substance, from moony night to appearances churning.

An ocean of enrichment from many tributaries.

The water that lives the fish.

Within the blood vessels the sear of every metamorphosis.

To play out my affinities, I am a thousand eyes on the fingertips.

Shattered jewels, an intact tile.

In the City of Imagination all things else a mind to see.