James Cummings
Bio
Improvisation is the truest form of artistic freedom
Stories (10)
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HERO
The castle beckoned. Lonely and bleak, slimy gray walls mocking Him, it stood. The Hero gazed from his perch across the abyssal waters at his target. There was but one flimsy bridge that connected the island of which the castle stood atop to the greater landmass where He stood. Huddled inside the deepest keep of the castle was not a man, but an idea. An idea masked behind altruism and a strife for the “greater good;” an idea that called for the subjective moral disposition of the few to command the actions of all. Are there those among the order of man that would benefit from a sense of moral authority? Without doubt the answer to such a proposition would be in the affirmative. However, the Hero had yet exercised his natural intellectual freedom as a man enough to recognize when a tyrannical imposition was on the horizon, and had authored a personal conception of self-realization that allowed for the direct control of his animalistic passions. He was a balanced human. His sense of man brought him from his family and his home to this castle; the beast inside is what will allow him to turn his principles into action.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Fiction
Man v Beast
The ridges surrounding the open mouth of the cave dripped with last night’s rainfall. The smoky embers of yesterday’s fire thickened the air. The soft whimpers of my Daughter complimented the drip of the water, muffled only by the gentle hand of my Wife. I stood about midway between my Family and the beast, a distance of mere yards between the creature and my Family.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Fiction
The Captain
The Captain was no stranger to the insides of men. He had seen the darkness, the hatred, the heroism, the love. He had seen the intestinal cavity torn about with grape, he had seen the veins spewing the maroon elixir of life onto a field, mixing with shards of bone and brain to create an alchemical concoction that was once a man. He remembers the glistening innards that peppered his moustache, the smell of feces, and the ungodly wails of the dying that would have unnerved God himself. He remembers it all, every night, when his subconscious paints beautiful portraits of blood and death as he sleeps. He claims that his sanity is kept anchored with love and drink, the two things that temper the fires that rage behind his eyes. His drink is dark and oaky, textured with a nutty flavor that burns his throat as it passes his lips. His love is dark-haired and fair-skinned, an Irish beauty with no mortal match. Her body moves with Shakespearean passion, her warmth melts away the horrendous walls of ice that would otherwise keep him locked in bloody conflict with the demons that house themselves within his psyche.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Humans
In the Year 2567
When the Bantara came to my planet, I was not frightened, nor elevated at my potential “rescue” from the loneliness of my solar system. I was repentant. I had enslaved the entirety of New York City; eight and a half million of my former species members, all treated me with as much deference as they did the deity that had stripped them of their humanity. I saw what God had done, I saw the blank stares, the nakedness, the filth, the animality. They were truly godless. So, I thought, if they have lost the ability to perceive a symbolic deity, maybe I can be their physical deity? These demons were just the extremity of my very own primal half, surely I could know how to control them using the other half of my soul?
By James Cummings3 years ago in Horror
The Art of Undercivilization
MANKIND was given a gift that no other earthly animal has ever been given: that of self-awareness. We are aware that we exist, aware that we will eventually not exist, and have the ability to philosophize about our mortal existences in the third person. That gift, I would argue, is what makes man, man. For thousands of years, man has used this gift to elevate our species above that of the groveling apes and into the spectacle of specialized societies. For thousands of years, man’s struggle has been the fight to temper their animalistic passion with human reason. In recent years, the beast inside many men has grown quiet.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Futurism
Cold, rainy, night
Cold, rainy, winter night. Apartment windows glisten from the wetness and jazz emanates from the piano. The air feels sharp and rigid, the sounds of the urban jungle echo through the streets. Sirens, whistles, calls, voices, whirs, revs, and rolls. All abstract noises that can have no meaning individually, for they could never be contextualized, so they coagulate into the primal hum of the jungle. Here, in my sanctuary, I have nothing to do but to think. No tasks beyond self-imposed ones that my mind needs tending to. I am a monkey in his tree, listening to the sounds of the jungle around him and doing nothing but thinking.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Poets
How many licks does it take?
I awoke. Where was I? Ahead of me a vast, symmetrical array of incalculably massive glass pyramids. Surrounding the faces of each of the pyramids, a staircase; the stairs at the bottom more worn out, the stairs at the top pristine and glistening.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Fiction
The Desperation of Religion
What is religion but a desperate attempt to create order in an eternally chaotic universe? Of course, science has granted us rational insight and provided quantitative structure to parts of the universe, but mysteries elude us. Consciousness, the boundaries of reality, other dimensions, etc.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Poets
Freedom
FREEDOM is a fickle thing. If you hold onto the idea of freedom too tightly, you become a slave to your own desire for it; if you forget about it completely, you find yourself a slave to masters you yourself are unaware of. To be free is to live as a free man would without fear of losing your ability to do so. A man can be a slave to his animalistic impulses just as easily as he can be enslaved to his desire to not be a slave.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Poets
Drifting Wordlessly Through the Urban Jungle
Drifting wordlessly through the urban jungle. The faces of strangers come and go forever, each person dead and never to be seen again. The foreign interactions of people passing, the protests, the panhandling, the homeless, the ambivalence of the veteran city-goers. Nothing feels real; there is a dream-like haze that echoes through the grey hallways between obscenely large buildings. Invitation for adventure, there are odd people wherever you go, those are always are the quest-givers. There are the swaths of unreal characters that aimlessly roam throughout the city and phase out of existence once passed. But they contribute; they are part of the environment around you, they are one with the buildings, sidewalks, and cars. It is a frothing, obscenity of a jungle. The sirens, whistles, screams, calls, horns, conversations. All make up the jungle’s audial ambiance, amalgamating with the behemoth buildings and rushing pedestrians to create a living, breathing, single entity. The city is one organism – you pass through it not as an individual, but as a brushstroke making up a greater painting, a mere atom within its structural makeup, a perpetual stranger to all those around you. Interactions mean less, but that means they have more potential so escape into novel circumstances. No one will ever see each other again, so why not have a conversation about a giant robot cop? Why not say something off-color, something that goes against social norms and have someone get mad at you – who cares? You’ll never see them again. There is a certain freedom to being the stranger, to being a mere grain of sand in the grand scheme of creation. Your individuality sends waves of color to whatever minute circumstance you find yourself in, waves of which are then overtaken and thrown to eternity by the advancing tsunami of the jungle’s overbearing presence.
By James Cummings3 years ago in Poets
