Toys

For Matthew

 Your hard boiled scrivener of all that is not fit to print is at times is at a loss to refit the recombinant pieces of  far flung debris into an appropriate arrangement, like a collage at times it seems that appears to me afterward to be a whirlygig made out of recycled hubcaps. How do you capture a white rabbit by inference, well, that is the tale of the paranormal..In these times of sinking under the weight of a gravitas that is my own invention, I reach for a toy. This sexless duck is poised on a tricycle that is furiously peddled in a circle once he has been as they say, wound up. He has a propeller growing through his head that acts as his spine that twirls furiously as he pedals and of course, he never lifts off. It is a sort of soothing meditation on one's own certainty as well as a doorway into what constitutes a toy, then again, think of the definition of a toy for a moment and then ask yourself to exclude what is not a toy. Rather odd isn't it? What wound me up, well, I don't know know, do I?

I held up my bicycling duck and looked deeply into it's eyes. At first glance toys are rather purposeless, especially to what is termed an adult, whatever that means, but anyway, I looked into this toy duck's eyes and thought to myself as I was stuck in the quandary of conceptual toys anyway, and thought to myself a toy is a material sort of mediumship for what are called children.  In the "collecting" venue it is said, "he who dies with the most toys wins" How odd this phrase and how true from the perspective of gathering icons, trinkets and objectifying a certain valuation that is well..lopsided to say the least. When I was younger some sage advised me that you can have all the toys you want as long as you are not "attached" to them. Well, by the isthmus by which station and state we transit we are all sort of attached as living metaphors, or perhaps mediums for seeking the true nature of toys. Are we living toys? Pinocchio comes to mind. I sat the duck back for a rest from his journey I had set him off on as well as setting myself. Enough toying, or is there never enough? The desirous grasp for autonomy when the key is wound, we seem to have been spun by an equally desirous hand, which of course we call That. All that's left is the play of self and non self in the reintegration of a persistent amnesiac state where the toys and the play are prone to the frailty of our attention spans. The rediscovery of a cast off memory, a faintly familiar face, a reopened box sealed by moths often reveals what is an essential part of us whether it is our personal or global histories as revealed in play things, those mediums of dreams left on the wayside awaiting our rediscovery of a lost footpath. Could we speak to our younger selves or those close to us that have now vanished the linkage of psychic impressions linger in that which has been left behind either by a presumed choice, or a sort of arbitrary sense of self survival against transitions and transits, perhaps what we discard is more important than what we chose to keep close at hand.

In praise of the toys, in praise of the play of dreams wound on a mainspring by birds on the wing..never to return this way again. Then if we left all of this to the recycling bin, to the scrapyard of the impractical, I sense we may lose our sense of enfoldment, which as an attachment, I have found is crucial to a life, perhaps more so than that ATM card we keep close at hand.