Fictocritical Innovations. Pawel Cholewa

ill-equipped, undisciplined, stifling goggles that we wear. Stake your future on or in these reckoned experiences, forcing the soul to expand as the dust never seems to settle, and we ignore certain choice cuts, words, shabby looks or commentaries being made, whilst continuously shedding skin.

Going Home (2014)

      Canyons of thought whisper through the stillness of their depths and predicate a secondary madness.

      You need time to stop, and then more time to stop again, in order to then have the free time to actually think for a while—to process everything: homogeneity. The vagabond sits and stews, desperate to get away from the slow-paced cluttered group.

      Something ‘funny’ happens and some fit, clucky middle-aged women come along asking me to take photographs of them. At least they’re not taking ‘selfies’. I like this generation. I don’t think too much truly fazes (or ever fazed) them. They belonged to that whole Fleetwood Mac era, after all.

      Finally, a focus comes in like a stream, and all plans come together as I sit atop this mountain, sniffling, in the sun, momentarily happy because I can see where I am, and I like it. I can also literally see where I am going, headed back down the coast this time.

      I am a boy. I grow up in the southeast. I travel from east to north to west, and now I’m headed back down those southern plains, to the end, to the finish. I am “hurtling towards it” they tell me.

      This is what I came here for. The end is near. The directions and the internal compass are making some chronic and chronological sense for once. As you may know, my personal compass hasn’t always been on par with my intentions, directions, focus or attempts at control.

      But now we are headed on course together. There will be a detox, there will be sanctity, and there will be closure and clarity and no more destruction. It is time to climb south, downwards, back, finally, before I die.

      I may not necessarily uncover a “Key self” (Woolf 397) in these meandering motions, but I may complete a cycle at least, and close a chronological loop in the form of a written …

Tiers and Towers (2014)

      To reach the ultimate and final tier—a Babylonian tower, where no one sits or stands. There are but two champions on the tier beneath the final one. One old and one young, and they stand and compete against each other, drawing in/on every single game, for years, until a true victor wins and can ascend to that final highest lonely tier-podium.

      To reach the second last tier, one cannot climb there but rather one must walk through its gates and up the stairs hand in hand with a lover, a soul-partner. When one does so, the world is crushed and flattened so that the tiers fold, recess and the next become accessible.

      As soon as one enters the second highest level one of the two champions takes you and handles you and throws you around absent-mindedly but in a professional manner, and you swerve and fold and fall and spin back and forth, becoming a pawn in these rolling games that are being played, but/though not being an actual player.

      The sky here is always dark and overcast, smoky and steamy and stewing in ominous colours of dark grey and a hellish blood orange tinted with magentas, purples and maroons.

      Our visit was not long. The place was nonsensical: the inaccessibility, the foolish champions, the brooding sky, the pointless matches and games.

      Though, I have all but forgotten the lowest tiers. This tower is a high one (obviously, as it reaches the skies), and a fall would certainly shock and kill and neutralise. I can’t even recall how many levels and layers there were, and what kind of games and players belonged to those lower functioning and neutralised boundaries.

      What keeps me here is an intrigue and a fascination. Still, it doesn’t hold me there long, but long enough to recognise a riddle being painfully played out ad infinitum.