“There’s no life I know to compare with pure imagination…”

I feel something strange, a stirring not just in my heart…but in my feet. It’s the call of the road I suppose, the dangerous siren song heard and answered by the likes of Jack Kerouac and Bilbo Baggins. I feel the need to experience, to taste the fruit of every tree in the garden.

But I can’t, I am a captive; living chained by the accepted lethargy of post-modern world. I am hemmed in by my youth and my finance, but nothing it seems can imprison my mind.

A man’s mind is his greatest tool, it sheds light on truth and shuns the false into eternal darkness. Imagination slips through the tightest shackles to walk free and boldly into the clear, crisp light of day. It raises the sun in the darkest night and gives colour to a dead world.

The coffin cannot contain a man’s dreams, even death does not rob him of his ability to inspire and create. For the artist that dies inspires the ones that live, to dream great big, colourful things. There’s is nothing of this world that can separate a man from his imagination, his dreams and his mind.

We are, I believe, who we choose to become; a product of the colours we paint within ourselves. So let the walls of our heart be colourful, let the windows of our minds be thrown open to the streaming sunlight. Let us hold up a purple tinted mirror to the world, revealing its grotesque compromises with creativity and love. Let us answer the call of the road within our minds, boldly forging new paths through the uncharted lands of the orange peel.

Let us live in pure imagination.

A Dreaming Orange.

De Profundis

I am right now working my way through an incredibly old (first edition, published in 1926) version of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.  I am only about forty pages into the ridiculously long letter and already I have decided that this is perhaps one of the most important books ever written.

Oscar Wilde lived a lavish and extravagant life, but one with dark secrets involving Europe’s underground Homosexual scene. He was, in my opinion, the single greatest writer who ever lived and I have thrived creatively, and emotionally off of all the work I have read by him. Oscar was a genius, a brilliantly witty man with a realistic taste for tragedy. He remains one of literature’s greatest joys to read and with each page one discovers yet another dimension of this multi-faceted man.

And yet all of his other works seem to pale in comparison to the forty pages I have read of De Profundis. It is a letter he wrote from prison when all his scandals and secrets became public and he fell from the throne of modern art. Oscar Wilde fell far. Yet from reading De Profundis one realizes that Oscar knew how far he fell, and blamed no one but himself. It is the most honest writing I have ever read, a realistic and brutally true reflection on his own tragedy.

I believe that any artist can be seen in his work, much as Oscar did. He once claimed that a true portrait is a reflection of the artist, not the sitter. I agree, in any great piece of art one can find the soul of the artist. Look at 1984, one can almost tangibly see Orwell through the pages.

But De Profundis is a different examination altogether. It is an artist posing as the sitter and the painter. Oscar Wilde reveals all of his dark, yet witty, soul to the pages of the book, and I have encountered his spirit in a very new, and different way. He is the greatest writer of all time, a man who lived a beautiful tragedy more severe than ever one he wrote. Oscar Wilde was a fantastic man, one of integrity, mistakes and honesty. He loved often and much, usually passionately and with all of himself. He is a man to be admired whose dedication to his art is to be replicated in the hearts of every one who calls themselves an artist. Oscar Wilde, you inspire dreams, De Profundis.

 A Dreaming Orange

A Dreaming Orange

Orange. It’s a colour of vibrancy and life, energy and youth. It’s a colour of passion and danger, a refusal to exercise caution or be hemmed in. It is the colour of my dreams.

An orange is organic, juicy and sweet. Concerning the inspiring title of his novel “A Clockwork Orange”, Anthony Burgess stated “meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up…”

Orang is the Malay word for person, therefore a clockwork orange is simply a play on words to insinuate a clockwork person.

But I will not be a machine, I will think and dream. I will be an orange, not one with a beautiful outward appearance and a network of gears within, but an orange full of life and truth. My soul will be orange, inspired by Christ it will live beyond this earth, beyond the dead machine post-modern society tries to turn it into.

The truth is orange. It is sweet to taste and pleasing to look upon, it seeds dreams and denies chains. The truth is absolute and absolutely different. It is vibrant and proud. The truth is orange.

In this life we have a choice. We can live as clockwork or we can live as dreamers. We can hear the truth or we can mechanically blind ourselves. We can be orange or we can slip into shadow. The title of this blog is certainly strange, “A Dreaming Orange”. But it’s beautiful; we are all called to be dreaming oranges…no more clockwork for my soul. I have tasted the machine and found myself wanting. I have tasted Christ’s love and found myself alive.

I will be a dreaming orange.