Imagination is a seed to blogging

Just my imagination

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Said Stephen King the world-acclaimed novelist.

I cannot say I have read any Stephen King novel to completion; the horror genre will send my rather vivid imagination into overdrive. One night, listening to the stories read at bedtime on BBC Radio 4, I could not understand why the story took a turn for the scary, until the 15-minute abridged version was ended as an excerpt from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.

Thankfully, I was in bed with Steven, else I would have been beside myself in fright. Whoever suggested that book for bedtime reading might have done it for a laugh, I was not impressed in the least.

The terror I saw

I have dreamt up enough to scare me out of my wits and out of my own imagination came two encounters with a huge red-breasted beastly apparition that no one else saw but convinced me I had seen the devil. This apart from the voice I heard in the middle of the night.

Blog - Childhood: Ghosts and ghouls of my past

It changed my life, I was just 10 and a witness to bizarre stories shared between my aunt and our houseboy, I took them away and developed them into my personal terror. I learnt what fear was and when I eventually ended up in boarding school, I had to be ejected because I was seeing things and reciting Psalm 23 possibly a thousand times a night, no one could sleep in my hostel until I was completely exhausted. Then. I had to be up at 5:30AM.

In the process, I was taken to seers, prophets, medicine men, bathed in forests, had incisions in unmentionable parts of my body with concoctions rubbed in, wore amulets, ate the incomprehensible and prayed more prayers to last an eternity. It probably would have been better to just take me to a child psychologist, but no one knew better.

I can blog from nothing

When it comes to blogging, I am probably still an amateur, the many times I have waited for inspiration for what I should write about, then, at other times, I have had the disciplined to begin to type away at my keyboard and the blog begins to take form and soon I have a story.

The second paragraph seeded the consequent paragraph of this blog, none of which were on my mind when I finished typing the first. As I read it back in my mind, I realised there is something to relate to horror, terror, and imagination. Then with other viewpoints to buttress the process of creating a narrative that becomes a blog. I have something I can publish.

Thought Picnic: Victuals that feed the few

Inspired by this opinion piece by in Kay Musonda in ModernGhana titled, African Pentecostalism Has Given Birth To A New Breed Of Mentally Lazy Christians Who See God As A Rewarder Of Mediocrity, I contrived this ditty, emphasis on contrived.

Victuals that feed no one.

In the pursuit of the spiritual,
We have lost the individual,
As priests have taken the scriptural,
Made it into a begging ritual,
There is, therefore, no rigour of the intellectual,
For temples now inhabit the spectacle of the visual,
Therein we hone the instinctual,
From what was of the perpetual,
The clergy gains from the conceptual,
The laity left lazily ineffectual.

The psychology of the wash

A bath or a shower

When I owned my own place, it is strange that the decision to buy my apartment could have hinged on the bathroom having a bathtub instead of the installed shower unit.

There were times during the negotiation process where that was a niggling thought at the back of my mind, the place became a stronghold, a refuge, a kind of security from the things that ravaged my life and worth many years later. I spent ten and a half wonderful years there before I sold up.

The shower was a special place, the feeling of water cascading down my body, the temperature of the water set to just about bearable, but very comfortable, the floor of the bathroom heated such that the cold of winter was barely noticeable.

The wash for something

Indeed, there was something about the wash; I could adjust the showerhead to deliver the spray as a soft rain through to a pulsing massaging hosing down.

The quest for cleanliness also offered a cubicle of meditation, but there were times when I spent much longer in the shower as if I could get rid of a dirty thought or a feeling of a grimy existence not cleansable with the shower gels scented for seaward ambience and greenish blue hues.

We all have a predilection for some sort of wash, especially we of African descent, whilst those of other cultures might have concoctions to drink and possibly ointments or powders to rub on our skins to provide protection, fortify us for the formidable or empower us from some nondescript daring-do, we have the wash.

The ritual of the soap

I have prayed over waters and bathed in the strangest places, using soaps that would not pass the science of reasonableness to be applied to the skin.

Yet, the soaps, black or any other colour purported to grant powers for the favour from all mankind or defence from the dark arts are well sought for by the many who publicly appear rational but privately can be found in grottos ministered to by shamanic priests, fetishists or witch doctors.

The wash is not limited to these events, Christianity talks of the wash too, the washing away of sins as much as it pertains to baptism as a sign of faith, the Mohammedans perform the wash of ablutions before their prayers as a sign of purification before approaching their deity in submission and supplication.

Ritual purification is a function of many belief systems as Hindus will wash in the River Ganges, and the River Jordan has significance to both Judaism and Christianity.

The wash is deeper than the skin

For the holiday, the wash is in a swimming pool or at sea, we have an affinity for water caressing our bodies with or without particular reason – we cannot deny that regardless of who we are, the wash is critical for our presentation and thereby it determines how we are accepted.

We find that the whole context of clean and being clean is defined by the wash, the health of the body, the mind and the spirit might we be affected by the wash too even though the water only really touches the body, but the effect is much deeper than what we see or feel.

Thought Picnic: Before you call him a man?

In distance and in nearness

Distant and near has been the journey from home, distant in person and near in the mind, distant in its reality but near in the memory, distant in the possible but near in the impossible, the ambiguity and ambivalence of existence captured in realities that life is changing and priorities are shifting as one becomes more distant to others and near to oneself.

It was never easy, the hold that beliefs had on all of them that led to initiations into activities that simply weakened the bonds whilst creating longings that none could fulfil as needed and left the journeyed way out at sea that there was no boat to go home.

Once of the same beliefs

What the eyes have seen that reside in the memory is no more the reality, it is far gone that it has become the stuff of dreams, dreams that relive times that can never be now but come into the now with fearful impact from the unresolved, the undiscussed, the unsolved and the ignored.

There is anger, there is regret, when they could have listened to each other, they attacked each other and now that the listening could have been of the greatest value the bridges are too tattered for a crossing that risks a plunge down into eternal oblivion, they have grown more distant and never so near.

They all once believed the same, attended the same temple and grew knowing it did not have to be hard, at least that is what the children thought but amongst them, they fought, they railed, the jostled and rivalled.

They did things

She went out to wildernesses of supplications to prophets of the eerier and the utterly bizarre, rituals of incantations derived from Psalms prayed into all sorts of liquids, candles lit to outshine the sun, there were enemies everywhere; at home, at work, amongst enemies, amongst friends, within family and far abroad, to her marriage, against her children, they were consumed in a never ending battle of Psalmist wars that they were never sure they will win, each glimmer of hope was one that was almost but never grasped.

He had his issues, always denying lechery but seemingly always compromised, a dab hand at the core animist rituals, shaved heads, tortoise shells, charms and many more things that unlike her were kept away from the purview of the kids, discretion was evident and at play though in the end you never knew what he believed, the old or the new, the customary or the fashionable, he seemed to be able to straddle both systems in marriage, in involvement and in engagement belying a maturity to be envied.

He saw things

The boy was lost in all worlds of identity, discovery, expression and impression, each path seemed fraught with danger and peril, he never found the opportunity to reach out when it really mattered, things happened in ways that brought the empathetic out of her and the sceptic out of him.

It all culminated in one fateful night when earlier in the day, the stories shared to the hearing feasted on the most fertile imagination that as the dark came, it was able to create apparitions that only those eyes could see and voices only those ears could hear, all in the presence of people who could not understand the beginning of the knowledge of fear that brought terror beyond the control of all around.

Whatever it was, he had seen the devil and that was twice in 6 hours, red-chested, horned, tall and scary did not begin to describe it, he has searched and been unable to determine what that phrase he heard in middle of the night was – Poofau! Poofau! It was terror that put horror to flight and the gateway to much else that defined a journey that has never found words.

His road made out

Rituals too many to all sorts of religious practitioners and charlatans, baths in houses and groves, in forests and in pits, with lizards and too many unmentionable, everyone brought a story, a view, a prophecy or a reading, tackling it from all corners, he ate the inedible like performing magic tricks, scarified to draw blood on all parts of the body with all sorts of concoctions rubbed in, he had become a reliquary of absurd unexplainable theologies and a living receptacle of fetish practices that were forgotten lifetimes ago.

Conflicts came with the urge to break away when they were needed and then he veered off on a tangent of religious beliefs that left them first scared, then hostile and ultimately implacable, the purposes for which one was to exist failed as this path offered nothing but the reality of great disappointment.

Cursed from the source

One Sunday, he returned from church, she was livid with rage that the order never to believe as one had now chosen to believe was defied and there and then in her room, she stripped and cursed her son from the womb from whence he originally came that if he defies her again he will wander away never to be seen again.

He never understood the significance, there was nothing to fear from that act and they never talked about it afterwards though he did defy and did continue to do what he believed for himself and with that came separation and distance unbeknownst to the man who probably would have been absolutely livid with rage with her having tolerated much of her deviation from the conventional into the esoteric.

A wilderness of the world

He has however wandered away, far from all that is conventional, proper and expected, charting his own course away from prying eyes, he has died to emotions that once made them near, nostalgia is only a matter of taste than presence, the memories are things one lives, but the pictures today are too difficult to look at, the changes that come with age have wizened them all, they are all closer to the grave and as distant as ever in life.

That distance was consolidated when he found himself in hospital with just 5 weeks to live if the medicines did not work, he was there alone though maybe not alone, who could tell, but they were not there. He fought to live but lost everything else apart from the hope that something might just be made of a life that has done much and wasted much – time, resource, opportunity, fortune and relationships – regrets that could sink a man loom but they are ones you strive daily to walk away from.

How many roads must a man walk down, before they call him a man? To them, he has not walked enough roads and to him, he is honestly past caring, he cares enough for the basic connection that has history and a past but the present brings some resentment, some anger, some bitterness and very little forgiveness – this is not even half the story but it is a start - the wander in the wastelands of the world continue as tomorrow, if it comes, becomes another day.

The Churches of Strange - A short story

There they stood

“What is all this?” He said in amazement almost bordering in stunned amusement to his mother as he made to leave her room. It was one of those bizarre events that would almost read as too good to be true, it had to be the figment of an imagination in overdrive looking for the incredulous to offer as fact.

Somehow, there seems to have been a disconnect between mother and child, for all the tradition and culture she knew that she hoped to instil the greatest fear and dread in her son, one can only say she had cried wolf one too many times already.

The church of the bizarre

The boy had his problems, many could not be attributed to the usual adolescent issues, they were much more troublesome and she had resorted to remedies in African-initiated churches to deal with possibly mental, maybe psychological and generally termed spiritual problems.

The raison d'etre of these churches were of an almost macabre ritualistic creed that bore very few similarities to the established church which Africans generally never felt tackled the vague dread of the supernatural and superstition that held mind and reason hostage to agents of demonic and devilish persuasion personified in some close blood relation who was either envious or jealous of a person’s circumstances.

It allows for every misfortune to be blamed on some unnamed enemy or some hapless powerless victim that cannot fight back against accusations of sorcery or witchcraft.

The hold and the sway

Much as the bible appears to be their source inspiration, the powers of the churches derive from seers or prophets if you like and people convulsively possessed of influences that portend to prognosticate or exhibit telepathic or clairvoyant tendencies. This provides a great draw that one might well find of the terror of shamanism.

In the process, people who have bought into this religious chicanery are literally fleeced by these “false” prophets whose church establishments have all the trappings of some outward show of holiness and purity but are bastions of the occult gaining some Christian legitimacy by excitable references to God and Jesus along with even more violent exertions in battling Satan as the prophets operate like modern-day Levites and the laity recite the Psalms repetitively with Christian numerological symbolism of threes, sevens, twenty-ones or forties.

Many religions of Christ and others

You can imagine the confusion of “Christianities” the boy had, as his mother took him to strange prayer meetings before he was 5 where the family friends were bedecked in flowing white robes and red sashes, candles taking a prominent place in the homilies, those were seemingly secret liaisons.

Publicly, the family was Anglican though his dad had dabbled in bizarre animist rituals for protection and other life needs. However, every religion was tapped from medicine men through witch doctors to Islamic mystics. In the case of the Islamic mystic she used an episode in the boy’s life of terror and fear to warn him off telling anyone they had been seeking help there.

It was a nasty thing to do but with hindsight the boy felt mother hens will do anything to protect their chicks and this was just a personification of that justification.

The boy deciding

By the time the boy left home, he joined up with what was at that time termed an extreme Christian fringe which brought quite a bit of friction with his parents because they were at variance with other Christian practices.

Meanwhile, in that boy’s life, he had been cut many times, incisions made on the scalp, on the check, on the face with all sorts of potions rubbed in, he had bathed in forests, drank the most dastardly concoctions, seen the indescribable, experienced a lifetime of Steven King kind of horror and to culminate all, had eaten and swallowed razor blades; all in the name of protection, safety and help.

Then came this day as he returned from his church, she called him into her room and after much railing and agitation she cursed her child telling him, if he returned to that church again, he will not find his way back home again.

What is right?

It could have been literal but elements of the child’s upbringing meant that this act will hold less significance as it might have held for someone else steeped in their culture. The rationality of doing this unclothed never dawned on the child for his Christian persuasion at that time put him on a trajectory that gave him a sense of safety from that episode.

The child is then left with many questions on what really is Christianity from the established versions through the African-initiated ritualistic establishments to the ones steeped in dread of evil and a brand of ultra-evangelical exuberance whilst at the same time, he is yet to find his way back home – all because the conflicts in doctrine that govern all these congregations sometimes persuade people to do the most unlovely and inhuman things.

That is the story of a boy and the many “Christianities” that vie for his soul and claim to offer him protection.