Life is Mandatory

The route that delivered me to the graffiti was impossibly complex, and I couldn’t have retraced it if I wanted to. It was a peopled schematic of relationships, intersections, economic need and longing for solitude that dropped me 3000 kms from home on a grey snow-globed landscape,  looking for groceries and coming face to face with somebody’s wall-poetry:

"Life is Mandatory"

Words embed themselves in me; often they will be forgotten and reappear months later, unbidden but in context. These words though, didn’t embed; they manacled themselves around my neck like a slave yoke, and refused the quiet subconscious intake. These words came with baggage, and it was clear the only way to lighten my load was to porter the bags where they belonged.

I spent days in the chair by the window manacled up; on this side of the melted sandsheet Time put its feet up in front of the fire, lit a pipe, and played solitaire whilst I busied and bruised myself with the invention of That Which Would Remove the Yoke and deliver the baggage: The Great Post Modern Deconstruction Machine. © On that side of the melted sandsheet, weather systems and daylight and stars and moons and suns circled and hummed continuously.

Hunger went on strike.

The machine I invented stretched from my third eye across the Canadian Shield, dissolving up and back, up and back into the Northern Lights. From its brass base, crystal word-spires numbering *exactly* one less than infinity held court, and a huge hydraulic arm endlessly lifted, shuffled, pushed and fitted the landscape into caricatures of itself.

The idea was that once constructed, I would simply let 'Life is Mandatory' thought marbles roll down from my third eye and shatter any spires that found themselves in the path. Then a simple reading of the deconstructed would give me the insight I needed for freedom.

I ended up shredding my hands on the shards.

Crimson rain from my fingertips turned to crimson rivers, filled the canyons and spaces of the Machine, and I surfed till I was I either dead or exhausted.

All was dark, and silent. You know: the light before the light, the sound before the sound:

Peace.

The understanding was borne beyond the gross, the subtle, and the causal:

Life truly *was* mandatory. Trying *not* to be was like trying to sit and stand at the same time and railing against the impossibility by trying even harder.

With that, the machine folded back neatly into my third eye, and I pondered the strange emancipation proclamation that - however briefly - set me free.