There exists a shadow heart. It has a beat that is imperceptible. The flesh is translucent. It cannot be torn from the viscera and discarded, like offal. It remains separate from the mass of hearts that form a cloud in the jungle.

A shadow heart guards the vestigial self: the Sub-System within the System; the region uncontaminated by the world and the wind; the truly coveted of The Reaper of Tongues…

You can be led to believe anything, if you set your mind to it.

The premise – that you are the lurking fiend – is what you are required to believe. If you put an ear to the jungle wind for long enough, soon all you’ll hear is whistling. It becomes the source of all knowledge; the source of every seduction. You can be charmed like a snake in a basket, trained by any fakir who knows the right tune to blow…

You may well be the lurking fiend. Waking, you feel that your mouth is a hothouse in which iguanas are bred. That there is a circus you supply the tricks for. That there is a broken language which only you can comprehend.

You may well be the lurking fiend. With your own hand you tore your heart away from its moorings and hurled it into the jungle. This is very troubling. But when you enter the jungle to retrieve it, you become aghast.

The jungle is thick with discarded hearts. The jungle is thick with discarded voices. All along, you have been naive in believing that there is a language only you can understand…

…and perhaps you will discover that these things whigh lightened your days were not as bright as first imagined, but that the illusion had more conviction than the illumination, and in the dying light and disorientation the darkness passed each of your senses through the aperture of the new: the flesh; the structures; the worn artefacts of the world became a braille for your lovely hands.

Amid everything, there is wildness and oversight: brambles and creepers that take root without obedience; sprouts that gather in unseemly places; chimera that graft incompatibly; saplings that fail to thrive in shallow soil.

Yet, there will be blossoms on the misfits; rebellion in beds meticulously ordered; withering stems which defy devotion and will not be coerced from a brink of death; hideous mutations which one will love equally with the comely.

And toil – you will train vines and sculpt branches; dwell, arms up to the elbows in the sanctifying earth, tilling; pruning, shears at the ready – for you will arrive at knowing that you are the blooming and the dying; you are all that grows and decays between tuber and canopy, and it is with this that you must rise and fall: tending to weeds; to seasons; and to life, hoping, that of all tools and artefacts used for cultivation, the heart is the most worn.

Estrangement is not jungle. It is open ground – no man’s land between the safety of thickets. To be in full view is to be vulnerable. Where once there was solace, one grasps only at the unrelieving air. There is no foliage for cover; no camouflage from the gaze of a passing jaguar.

Exposed, the heart can be torn from its cavity by any lurking fiend, and hurled to the jungle. Distances blur with plain sight. Heavenly bodies become unreliable guides. The torn heart can wander like a displaced tribe. It does not know it is lost. It is its own beacon.

A murmur from The Abyss, a whisper filtered through the damp earth: to fall completely silent is to lose heart.

The heart is your voice. The heart is the motor of the world.

This is just a little bit of fun, but I think I’ve come up with a perfectly legitimate word to describe the babbling, slurring, speech of drunks. I think it deserves its own specific word, because – let’s face it – slurred speech can come about as a result of a lot of things, but dipsolalia nails the drunk thing perfectly. I think I’ll add narcolalia to the list, and amphetolalia while I’m at it. As far as I can tell, they aren’t words, and if Google says it doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t exist. That’s not the worlds best way of accumulating evidence, but I have other things to do besides introduce new words into the language. Sheesh.

No Dipsolalia For You

Have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s Forest? I’ve been to The Forest. Actually, if there’s one lesson to be learned from being in The Forest, it’s that I’m everywhere that I’ve ever been and will be, all at the same time. And all at different times. Even when I leave, I’ll always be in The Forest. I’ve got a scorching case of quantum entanglement, which means that there are several of me, each at arbitrary distances from the other. And if that isn’t enough, it’s quite non-linear. Entanglement, I tell you. If you have a quantum eraser, I’m your freak. Or, I’m many of your freaks. It’s quite confusing.

So, there’s this superposition thing that’s been playing on my mind, this thing of being in all places I have ever been – or will be – at once. And then there’s me, on a hilltop in Kathmandu (like always), cross legged with a Whirling Dervish trying to get my silence on, when I think…it’s the tree thing as well! But, it’s so much more than that. If I fall and make no sound, will anybody say that they heard? I mean, how can we be sure what silence is or isn’t? Eureka! And I think silence came up at that precise second and tapped me on the shoulder. Either that, or my Sufi friend wanted me to shut up. Whatever the case may be, some sort of collision occurred, and I’ve found myself in the middle of the land of Oktoberfest and slap-dance. I would have preferred Oktoberfest and lap dance, but in another universe, I’m sure that things are going just fine for Roger…