E-zine 1
May 2005

Soul Foraging:
Searching for self

H
e was as graceful as a cat. A perfectly tailored black suit and a snow white shirt, so matter-of-factly unbuttoned at the neck, concealed his age beautifully. He didn’t quite belong in the dusty classroom, addressing twenty-three idle faces that couldn’t care less about poetry.

Why couldn’t I concentrate? Why would I rather look at the stark white walls than at this marvel of a being? What was wrong with this picture? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I forced myself to look straight at him. My attention was temporarily caught by a single dust particle on his shoulder. It must have fallen from the chipped ceiling. My mind wandered off somewhere and my eyes gradually descended down the man’s sleeve to a finely sculpted hand, intensely gripping the side of the desk upon which the rest of the body was casually leaning. Startled, I stayed focused on the thing. It was throbbing with life. Anxious fingers clung to the rusty steel like stubborn roots in a nearly hopeless attempt to dig into a foreign surface and suck even the tiniest bit of life out of it. Bulging blood vessels streamed under the clear skin. Their slick silhouettes all swayed in the same direction in a manner of seaweeds caught in a current. The skin exposed every imaginable color, shade and tint of rose petals known to men. The softest of peach variations were balanced by splashes of near-vulgar reds, which were tastefully blended into deliciously white creams that so delicately caressed the cool blues and violets of the veins underneath. The sight was overwhelming, to say the least.

Slowly crawling back up the sleeve toward the face, my glance dissolved in the soothing black of the fabric. It felt as relaxing as dipping exhausted feet into a bucket of cool water. I took my time getting to the face. Naturally, I expected its expression to be just as burdening and intense as the painfully dedicated hand. To my astonishment, I found nothing of a kind. The head crowning the graceful black and white composition of suit and shirt projected as much energy as a plaster mold. It bore no intensity. No pulsating web of veins and capillaries graced it with life. Not a slightest hint of rosy flush stained the porous skin. As a matter of fact, the skin covered the head like a thick white linen cloth. The eyes, clear blue, stared into the distance further than the room would allow the rest of us to see. That color, I thought, could have been as brilliant as a mountain spring, had their owner allowed them to shine; but instead they were trapped behind cold placid film, which seemed to grow upon the eyeballs like frost on windows. The hoarse white hairs on the chin, upper lip and most of the scalp peeped from within the harsh skin. Nothing appeared organic, not even the voice.

He spoke of poetry. Intense, passionate, mind-blowing ideas and words of dead writers came out of his mouth in little white cages and dropped to the floor. The Hand picked them up one by one, shaking them off and caressing every precious syllable with all the love borrowed from the rest of the body, and set them free to flap around the locked room.