That night, as it rained upon, he thought that what might come is no sense a work of art, since there were no powers of the imagination that could be gentle enough to seduce the awareness of his newfound belly, it wasn't necessarily a belly or protrusion even but the fact of having adopted the position, not of someone bellyached, but of somebody imaginarily fat and ugly, althoug he could in no possible sense consider himself either because his spiritual narcissicism would make it then impossible that he could ever sleep again with himself without the disgust manufactured by the impossibilities of physics to keep a body within the right proportions - If he would have a belly himself, he wouldn't be so worried about the belly as much as he would be, about the sweat that would run in between the wrinkles of the flesh and the hairs that would grow around his neck and all through the surface of his back as if it were corn overgrowing the grass in the pasture of a beautiful plateau. He was as slim as ever and perhaps because his ever increasing abandonment of the world, slimmer and dimmer, there was no longer a spark of light to gaze into at the height of noon with that glow of glimmer; everything had become so much less obvious, there were other places in his body and other smells that stood in lieu of what had been once a natural gift for curiosity and surprise in the eyes. It wasn't that the eyes were no longer beautiful and it is the case that the eyes of the person that is loved, are always eyes of the beautiful even if the aesthetic faculties of imagination and sensibility, would fail to reach the same conclusions. Those faculties from their part, very philosophical in nature are therefore, necessarily blind, and that's why he's always reconciled with their opinions; there's nothing further removed from his wishes than to allow the sense of things to pervert the ultimate perfection of the concept. Everything seems to have a concept for him, the most basic assumptions about reality are not to be taken for the granted, this is however not the consequence of inner evil, but a side effect of an illness so completely external to him and to his world that it becomes so manifest in the outside world that one might then it is a matter of inwardness, thus he begins to search deep inside him for the root of his pale sorrow.
It never occured to him that the world should be inspected even if only as a precaution - some questions need to be asked, enquiries are ought to be run throughout and the questionnaires must be completed in full. It wasn't having a belly or not having a belly what tortured him and what led him after all, being an adventurous young man, to a mysterious choice such as classical music, but rather the fact that being free as he was, he was completely deprived from the most basic choices in life, it could have been an idyllic life for Adam before the Fall, which wasn't a fall as much as it was a problem of uncertainty, it was perhaps Adam the first atheist, otherwise had he cared much, he could have brokered a deal with his creditor; Adam would have then loved the day we had just been told about when it began to rain: So free from any worldly responsibility, the young man arose everyday to fulfill the commandment of love toward parents and brothers, he could spend the whole day in sweet surrender to the most delirious intellectual pursuits, perhaps learning a tongue now forgotten, like Heinrich Schliemann, who is said to have studied and mastered Russian among other languages in a matter of weeks while being left on his own in a Greek villa without any chairs to sit whereon, thus the man, thirsty of acquiring wealth of worldly knowledge studied the grammar books of the most diverse languages running pacing back and forth through the house. How could anyone not find solace in this kind of life? It is a monasticism without religion and without faith of any kind, because, different from Schliemann, this young man didn't believe in Homer, nor in his own omein. What kind of monasticism was it then, that it was music, his ultimately choice?
He had thought of himself primarily as an artist although there were no specific talents that those close to him could recognize from the outside, he had some abilities for writing, he had them since he was a very young child but they were never specifically treasured as a talent, neither were they developed or pointed out anywhere; his problem was not that he didn't believe in Homer or the fact that he didn't believe but rather the spurious fact of how ordinary his life was, or at the least, how ordinary it had become, after he had chosen himself for such a destiny of greatness out of which he had fallen not because of incapability but because of the unrest fixed in the palms of his hands and the crystalline fog of his eyes were advancing much faster than the world and this caused him to become extremely anxious about being understood by people, what had to be understood, is not that he was extraordinary, which he was not, or perhaps only as a story-teller, what was extraordinary is that he, the son of a nobody, of town's folk without the slighest indication of being cursed or blessed by the Lord - they were just left on their own, without any major afflictions but also without much symptom of what people call happiness; this son of a nobody, could, in theory, become whoever he had desired. It was perhaps this transformation, this effacement of whatever the world had prescribed for him, this inability to march with the seasons, what had become entirely an art with him - the difficulties began to arise when this spiritual strength, noble as it was, failed to produce any material results; it is not only that he had never written a poem worthy of admiration but also that he had not been able to assert the allegedly self-earned position and near the age of thirty, he had no other income that some coins that his father pitily regaled him so that he wouldn't go into raving madness in the abscence of tobacco. He thought then, that night, that no art could come out of him, no art that wouldn't be manifest in the form of this transformation into another person, into another fatherland, into another language of sorts.
It wasn't that he couldn't write, but so quite unlike many of the chidish fable writers, his imagination was so very poor.
No comments:
Post a Comment