Bodybuilding is about a certain type of control over cell metabolism. And that material control is actually a force of mind.
Ultimately all is about beauty and nothing else.
To live or to die procures for Mankind only strangeness and suffering, or disturbance of the inner person. But to live in genuine beauty is to live or to die in absolute happiness. And to possess true happiness, one must have reached that ineffable state of the limitless. Happiness – that is, veritable happiness – also means limitlessness and endless happiness.
Thalia had met the old Indian philosopher from Bangalore quite by accident, when attempting to seek out ideas about vegetarian food – not that she herself was actually a vegetarian of course. She had merely gone to the owner of a very reliably traditional, if rather upscale Indian restaurant, to seek his insights on the cooking and preparation of vegetables from his ethnically traditional viewpoint.
And then a casual introduction to an old Sikh man sitting at a table in a darkened corner, wearing a striking blue turban and an ice-white beard, had led to her eventually following what was now her current daily ritual of sitting crosslegged in a bare room, on a plain rough woollen rug, listening to a recording of a Sikh religious song or chant called the 'essential words' - which were sung on this particular audio program by an amazing female voice, to the accompaniment of the lonely-sounding sacred Sarangi instrument. And in here, in this bare room, cossetted by something completely mystical within those exotic sounds, Thalia found her total centre point of calmness.
No disturbing thoughts from the disturbed world entered her emotions and the whole of her days wended their unremarkable individual ways to the quiet evenings each and every day. On through the hard and often painful bursts of fast reps of weights, through the saunas, through the street running, through the naps, the systematic stretching, the hydration from endless bottles of filtered water, and sometimes flower-infused water, the arthrospira tablets, the krill and fish oil capsules, the glucosamine, the unsugared cranberry juice, the rare melanotan capsules. Through the steamy showers and the cooler showers and the cold showers and the ice water dips, the regular long hot streaming pissing... To the quiet evenings and the unremarkable ends of each of the unremarkable days, and to sleep.
Little concerned most of the time about fashion, Thalia wore the very common plain clean white sleeveless cotton bodybuilders' shirts and loose cotton pants with string ties, and Mizuno Prophecy sneakers. And she carried her plain Hedgren towel bag with her everywhere she went. She was one of those girls who didn't really look muscularly big when she was just walking around. If anything, she looked like those Olympic female pole vaulters, or one of those male boxers who looked positively thin until they pumped up before a battle and stripped off into their war gear and then only took to that roped square of canvas where they put their actual awesomeness out on display.
Not overly tall naturally, Thalia knew all about the human growth hormone that secreted itself whenever you had a really good and long and deep night's sleep.
But the Sikh philosopher's spellbinding words had introduced a new thought into her very being; namely that with the holy mantras from great sages - truly, very truly - anything was possible.
Each day, when the singing woman's voice reached up, climbed, ascended into that heavenly height through its almost despairingly anguished beseeching of upspiralling notes, a bridge was crossed from the mundane into the realm of the indeed all-possible. Each night, Thalia grew by subtle micro-millimetres. She was not a tall girl, but like the mythical genie, she now had the gift of magical powers of size and shape-shifting.
And the gym was its own earthly forge of magic too. A steel bar or a weight disk banged down every now and then... And the glowing embers of muscle heat and the steady burning of willpower and determination fires, sparked and mixed their Merlin and Morgana smells of demon anvil sorcery in with the oily, slightly oceanic-odoured strong fit human body sweat. And flying embers hissed mingling with the sexual sweat. And a toledo sword of cold-steel flesh and bone, shining and metallic, was slowly being crafted by the artisanal hands of their witch mistress of her own bodywork.
But yet too, everything was about balance - the fine balance of energy and fuel and natural secretologues and the well-functioning of the human cellular metabolism.
A word like 'lipotropin' - which meant something that got rid of fat – was merely the commonplace sort of word among ordinary bodybuilders and even the professional performing sportspersons of today. Thalia was light years beyond such rudimentaries. For Thalia knew what real natural things contained what really critical things. When she ate fish lathered in coconut milk, with fennel and clove and little black papaya seeds, no one else really understood what it meant.
