Credulitatis

The deafening whistle in my ear—which most recently has become a pleasant addition to my chronic migraines—screeched in my eardrum like some ignorant feminist bypassing gender double standards and yelling for better rights for her sex. Same old swill, different day. This is what happens when you betray your universal rule, your code, your desperate appeal to higher abstracts. In the most ideal form of justice, this was true balance: pain, melancholy, and darkness, which expectantly is what truth is like.

I wanted to believe in things, in more than the tragic underpinnings of inevitable sorrow proceeding a moment’s hesitation. Since I had no choice but to acquiesce to the melancholic tones my life has taken like a greyscale movie, I was forced to wish I could believe in abstracts, in faith for the truth, in the symbolic overtures of risings suns, and it was these beliefs in false abstracts that became the apex of my destruction. Alas, like all beliefs, I had to learn the hard way how wrong I was.

Plato, Hume, Kant, Phyrro, Mill, Spinoza, Aristotle: all useless unless you lock yourself away in a room for many moonless nights and study what you've deadlocked up in your pretentious mind: the things you really feel, not the sanctimonious platitudes you're told to feel, and when you've studied, when you've shed a little light on the dark recesses of your soul, that is the time to consider the abstract beliefs that philosophers try, and ever so subtly fail to describe. 

I always wondered why some buses have those peculiar seating arrangements where you're forced to face the guy sitting across you. Not that I mind when it’s some gorgeous dame sitting across me, but the engineering of the buses seem rather banal. 

Beyond a doubt, this was a first for me, looking at some majestic babe with sunlit hair and pearly skin, and being unable to pinpoint her eye color, and it wasn't due to lack of trying. I couldn't really see her…what I assume were seraphic orbs staring into the wretched smartphone that’s disconnected us from each other, its crimson silicone case matching her smiling lips. And it was in fact her ever-subtle smile that beguiled me, and not her appearance that fiddled with the border between perfection and angelic. I couldn't look away, it was like looking into those optical illusions that suck you in and never let you go; she was having an effect on me I’d trained myself never to have: to yearn for a human connection, all with a simple Garden of Eden smile. It took every ounce of willpower I had to glance towards the ‘next stop’ bulletin, and rather than the feeling of dread that should've washed over me when I realized I’d missed my stop, a newfound feeling of relief warmed my body towards the sky, a symbol that perhaps my inquisitive nature had once again taken over like it did when I was little, and withheld assent to all things until I was sure it bore a resemblance to truth, until I was sure beyond any doubt that such truths, such beliefs were abstracted from time and space. Mozart’s Fantasie In D Minor grew dimmer in my ear the second she looked up and caught my gaze with what I knew was a stupid looking smirk on my part; my pretentious white earbuds creating a distance between us much larger than the feet or two. 

Her eyes were uranic, and looking straight into them, I still couldn't pinpoint what color they were: a combination of oceanic blue, forest green, royal purple, and sunset orange. I’d been here before, years ago, during the short time when I used to believe in things, and my reward was nothing but dread…. But again, it was her smile, hopefully directed at me that vibrated my eardrums like someone had screamed the answer to an elusive question in my ear. She was a candle on a windowsill on that moonless night I sat staring at the sky, cigar smoke hazing up the air just as the clock ticked midnight. When a moment like this strikes me, a moment that I know will haunt me to the bitter end of my psyche, the prose that results is inspired by passion, never of purpose: to write so I could later boast that I’ve written about it. Notes rise from a misty foundation in my head and progressively give rise to a Nocturne breathing slower than a heart forlorn at the loss of a beloved. Ironically enough however, the heart endures; it’s the mind that’s never as resilient. There was what she’d want me to be, and then what I was, and Odin’s joke? These two people were nowhere close to each other. Perhaps it was Loki instead; I’d always had this feeling that universe was cheating anyway: churning my heart one way and driving my mind insane another in a comedic battle to see which could endure more pain, and the answer was obvious. Recognition of it is an instant after having been postponed, I can't acquire it like a banker’s fortune: penny after penny, and never all at once or once at all. Hence, each ambition is triumphant with a single lucky stroke, and I see that now. The odds were in favor that I'd find truth by sheer chance. 

Mozart’s fingertips landed on the keys of a piano to the tune of her smile. In a perfect world, she blushes, but I can’t be sure, and I want to wave, I want to feel something for this person, to get to know her better, to elucidate a belief I had on only one other occasion. But no matter how hard I thought, how much I knew I was blind despite my 20/10 vision, and how…insane I was despite my high IQ, I couldn't shake the lamenting feeling of inevitability. No matter what happens, even in a perfect world, the one where I smile back, or wave, and she waves back; I stand up to get off the bus and she grabs my hand and slips me the 10 digits which denote the mathematical truth of her being, or I start talking to her and we hit it off…. Despite all that, I couldn't shake the feeling that tragedy was all but a sure thing, even if it progresses at an adagio tempo, hovering over you like a ruthless storm cloud. Even if I saw her, met her, got to know her, loved her, and by some miracle she could stand me, and she loved me, and cared for me; the suspended feeling that eventually, somewhere down the line, tragedy would sit…waiting patiently, to inflict immeasurable pain upon us couldn't be disregarded, and right there, I realized I was really doing a cost-benefit analysis: would it worth the pain that I’d, or she’d suffer in the future, no matter how infinite it would seem, versus the short-term gain that we’d both receive from unconditional affection for the X amount of time we’d be together?

Nice work…reducing something ‘as grand as love,’ as my friend Winkler describes it, to a denotation of disengaging logic and frivolous detachment, which runs contrary to the concept in the first place. But I guess knew, deep down, even if I didn't want to admit it in that split-second moment, with our eyes locked harder than America’s thirst for free oil, that the real question I had to ask myself was: is it worth it to believe again? Or better yet: are you strong enough to believe again? 

Poof. The systematic calculations of weighing one versus the other, the pedantic breakdown of this fleeting moment no longer troubled me; pain is real, lesser pains, greater pains, the degree of it is arbitrary, if I have to choose between two inevitable pains…I’d rather not choose at all.

I waved slightly with a big stupid grin on my face. Next stop: a sunrise.

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Angel (An Angel Prelude); Mikalojus Ciurlionis; 1909

Poesis

Heat waves mirage in front of me and allude to water. Mirages are purer than water nowadays, since corporations have justly done what they do best with things that have even a veneer of purity: raped it, consumed it, and turned a nice profit.

There are moments in a life abstractly selected as important, mirages if you will…. They're etched forever into your mind and form your identity. They show you who you are like some supernatural mirror. Every second in her presence was like that, only more so. 

Still, you can’t outrun a curse; I felt alone, as good as alone, in the sewage-filling metropolis air, breathing what felt like death in and out, I remember things I want to forget; dream nightmares you can’t help but remember; imagine things I can't control. Imagination is the genus of curses for the truly afflicted. I got lost, step after step, even in a warm moment in winter or a cool breeze in July, with an angel’s palm keeping mine warm… I’d lost a kilometre, two, three, forgetting I’d been walking. 

Every man considers himself a charming gentleman, even if all his actions, thoughts, memories, and beliefs are the complete opposite of what an angel would deem as gentlemanly. 

I laid down next to her on the couch, wrapping my arms around her and trying my damndest to fall asleep; I didn't even want to ‘bang’ her like the movies brainwash you to, no, shockingly…and unbelievably, I didn't want to have sex with her. I would've wrote her a sonnet if I was a poet, a serenade if I was a composer, a deceptive contract if I was a lawyer. 

I wanted to sleep together in the most sophomoric sense of the phrase: to watch her sleep, sync my heartbeat with hers and listen to her breathing. Even to myself, even while it was actually happening, it seemed like a fantasy too far, and the loneliness I felt, even when I was with her, was so hard. And finally…more realistically, things stopped happening the way they do in your head, or in my case, worked out exactly as I thought they would; the unabiding, ruthless truth darker than my heart: I was rugged and she was gorgeous, I was hopelessly ineloquent and she was endlessly captivating. I was irascible and she was tranquil, but above all else, she was gone, and I was still here, even if I didn't want to be. So I walked into the bar and collapsed on the stool, thinking that if people were music, I was a Chopin Nocturne and she was Vivaldi’s Spring. 

As the scotch burned, but then simply warmed my throat, I was reminded of an argument that Dickens once had with Poe: that the art, is to write the ending first and work backwards, trying to demonstrate that Poe’s writing was mediocre and overdone.

“What are your requirements?” Dickens barked at Poe. 

“40-50 lines per page—standardized publication, 150-200 pages,” Poe responded, a little drunk or high, or maybe even both. 

“Motifs? Symbols? Themes?” Dickens whispered.

“Beauty.”

“Tone?”

“Melancholic, poignant.” 

“Okay, so points have been established, we consider the chorus,” Dickens jotted things down in his little leather notebook, “A storm, whistling of trees, a bell, the sound of pattering raindrops on the concrete, snow, flowing water.”

Poe leaned closer, waiting until Dickens was finished writing…whatever the hell he was writing, “Repetition should be brief if not original. Consider my most famous work, using one word that repeats throughout the narrative: ‘Nevermore.’ 

The difficulties of any writer stem from the belief that words must be spoken by a human. Naturally then, I had the idea of an unreasonable creature…able to speak, and immediately, I thought of a parrot. This however, was soon replaced by a raven, as capable of speech, and as a bird of death, infinitely agreed with the tone intended.”

“Ha,” Dickens chuckled, moving the bottle closer to himself in the burning candlelight, “Despite the sadness in you, do you deserve a drink of this scotch?”

“Who knows?” and Poe took a big swig of the bottle, wiping his mouth with the drool of the liquid courage that flowed down his lower lip. 

So did Dickens, “Apologies for the interruption, please continue,” his pen hovering over the paper, waiting for the words of wisdom he could reject. 

“And so I wondered, ‘which of the melancholy tones according to the understanding of humanity, is the most tragic?’”

“Death,” Dickens answered after little thought, his pen slipping out from in between his fingers and rolling on the wooden desk.

“Mmmhm,” Poe nodded, “And when, is this most tragic among all the melancholy tones, most poetic?”

… Dickens leaned closer, pushing the bottle to the side of the table.

“When, again, according to the understanding of the way humans think,” Poe whispered, “Beauty is involved. And ergo, the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world. And undoubtedly, who more able to develop this poignant truth than the man who loved her?”

“And the repetition?” Dickens asked.

“Ah,” Poe smirked, moving closer to the candlelight then immediately leaning back, “Combine, if you will, these two ideas: a lover complaining of the loss of his beloved, and a raven, constantly repeating the word ‘nevermore’ in a poem, of only a hundred lines. ‘Nevermore’ is the end of each stanza of the poem, or chapter if you like, as the actualization of the melancholy tone most heeded.” 

“Okay,” Dickens nodded, reaching for the bottle, “And how do you find the ending?”

“The story is tragic,” and Poe blew out the candle.

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Woman with Raven; Pablo Picasso; 190