Four Horsemen

The invention. The maker of the modern world. To move, smoothly, over vast stretches of ground, heavy loads and human bodies, wheels were fashioned. The vehicle of vehicles and the force-converting engines for the birth of human industry, turning, spinning, conveying and converting, matter, from one thing to another, from one place to another, the very symbol of the individual and the illusionary mandala of freedom. In Latin, Volvo means I roll.

There was a time when I’d imagine. The cars. The people they carried. The service station attendant who turned the little plastic cap to check the air pressure, his hands, the callused nubs of his fingers, the men who made the rims, the source of the rubber, the roads they’ve seen, the places, the gravel that crunched beneath their treads, Route 66 and all the lonesome highways, families perhaps, truck drivers, people who are dead. And how they got here, to this place, this beach where I found them at the very end of their recognizable thought-forms. Already they’re in a state of advanced physical decay, but psychologically they’re fresh as daisies. They still bear the meaning I assign them, that I project onto them. That I see in my fantasies.

Now I just see circles. And circles within circles. It’s as if the older I get the more my vision, my perception, becomes abstract. Everything seems to blur. It all becomes a reduction. Concentric circles. Orbits. Universes. Wormholes. Portals, not to other places but to higher concepts. Nothing I see is real. But there are parts of what I see that contain sparks of a truth that has been long eluding me. Form itself holds no special magic, no answer. The answer lies within, where the body’s eyes have no power, no shape, color, texture. But there are times, and places, and objects outside of me that sometimes reveal the inside. Light, it seems, can reflect something true and what I see with my eyes can function as a sort of mirror.

It’s not the story that I tell about what I see, it’s what I see that tells me the story. And it’s wordless. There is no plotline. Time is linear, but there is no time in eternity. And I am eternal. These things are like time chisels that reveal the infinite. But I cannot tell you how. It just is. I’m a writer, but now I understand that most of what truly matters, and most of what is true, cannot be written or described. To think that I can is hubris.

I give you four tires lying in the grass at the bottom of a hill. There is something aesthetically pleasing about this arrangement and there’s almost an evolutionary quality to how they are laid out, as if we’re being shown a lifecycle or a timelapse progression. We look for order where there is none to be found. I just like circles. Give me a pencil and a piece of scrap paper and I’ll find myself mindlessly doodling circles, happily, like a child with crayons. I am still a slave to form.

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