Memoire

I remember a frozen city,

I remember streets and faubourgs,

The detail of architecture, sublime,

The world then was a vastness unknown.

This city, frozen in my heart,

Has become a crumpled photo

Blackened by time, torn by tears

Fallen from my cheek so often

That I no longer remember

How many times I've cried

For something that once was

Now frozen, forever, not in time

But in mind - so futile, fragile,

That all that ever was to me

Will someday be erased

And the frozen city that was mine
Will be no more.

Nostalgia

Watching Les Miserables the other day managed to stir an on-going, deep-rooted longing... perhaps little more than the vague remembrance of a past life. Sometimes I miss France, but it’s more like missing something about the air, the culture, the landscapes… childhood.

I used to be so sure that nothing would ever change. I remember so well sitting in my bedroom in Paris as a moody teenager, looking out the window dreamily and thinking that this would always be my life. I remember how certain I felt. And even when my life changed overnight, it felt more like a temporary glitch rather than a new constant. I spent several years believing, or wanting to believe, that we would somehow go back to the way things were. This was of course a delusion. Things are never the same twice. With the advent of things like social media people from my past started to spring back into my life, always asking the same questions: “what happened to you?.... where did you go?... Why didn't you tell me?...”

It makes me feel cornered, at a loss for words. What do these ghostly faces from the past want to hear from me? Their adult faces now shock me: my memory of them was frozen in time and I remember only the faces of children. I want to flee, have them forget about me, this person I was that is no more. I want to tell them that this is wrong: we lose touch with people for a reason, surely. We lose touch with people throughout our lives as a sign that things change - that nothing lasts - but today all these lines are blurred. The past is pulled out from the dark recesses of our minds to haunt our present and the future is erased in favour of instant gratification. 

Seemingly useless questions like “why? What’s the meaning of all this?” come to mind often, only to be greeted by a wall of silence. Sometimes I’ll make an effort and focus on an answer, only to realise that there are as many potential answers as I can possibly create or think them. But meaning is all that we have, and so we must find one. Whichever one we pick is still better than having none at all.

I woke up this morning with a start, thinking: "Am I too proud?"

I lay back against the pillows, thinking harder about the past, forcing various memories back to the fore as though they were supposed to play witness in this silly little game of self-blame. And then I felt tears warm up the length of my cheeks before drifting back into a dreamless slumber.

Pride

Do not ask me to love the world

For I hate it.

Whatever lesson you wish me to learn,

I shall not learn it.

And even if you lavish me with pearls

Of wisdom to be attained

Still I will turn my back away.

For every sigh, for every failed sign,

I will turn a blind eye and swear,

And I will not break the boisterous resolve

That has coursed my veins since birth,

This I promise I will not even when,

Thrown out from the womb of a world

You force me to embrace,

The convenient excuse of Youth wanes.

I will make you watch me grow old and bitter,

Accused, pushed against the ground,

Hating the world as passionately as the first day,

Having learned nothing.

A Worldly Gloom

It seems a lifetime has passed since the year 2000. 12 years ago I was still a teenager, frightened almost to death at the prospect of turning into what society calls an ‘adult'...

Sick and hopeless throughout my early 20s, only to fall into more despair, bad luck and hurt, without forgetting my inability to read people properly and thus too often having surrounded myself with the worst kind… that is the look-back that gives me shivers of dread today. And as I approach the next decade of my life, I find myself half-relieved to be leaving behind this ‘youth’ people naively envy, regret, wish for or worst of all embellish to the point of grotesque fantasy... for youth is nothing but the state one must go through involving the loss of one’s innocence one white feather at a time through worldly experiences (more particularly those linked to other people).  

'Tis trully a time of loss, this youth… when one must slowly turn away from their dreams to accept ‘reality’, and in that one is often obliged to read the acceptance of second-bests and compromises.  And so as I reach the threshold that is to lead me to full womanhood – even though I feel so much like a child inside – I still clutch the tatters that once formed my dreams close to my chest…  for so long as I still hold even mere tatters and cinders of what once was a flamboyant youth’s dream, I remain with something to long and hope for… 

And as I lay in bed feeling sick and sorry for myself my thoughts lingered once more on the elements that shape us into 'who' we ultimately are. This time, the crucial impact of judgement came to the fore. Below are the thoughts I jotted down quickly on a piece of paper earlier:

It all comes down to the fear of judgement. After all, isn’t the fear of what others may think of us - their esteem, and ultimately the rank we are given by our peers - the strongest weapon Man has ever had against his fellow Man? It comes down to whether one manages to overcome or transcend that fear or not. Indeed, it seems that the outcome in terms of who we turn out to be in the end depends mostly on whether we transcend that fear, and as such the outcome can vary greatly to the point of reaching completely opposite life outcomes. This means that a man who remains enslaved to his fear of judgement will be shackled to a life of atrophy, limited in what he achieves throughout his very existence both in essence (inner life) and action - an outcome as opposed to having freed himself from the fear of judgement as day and night. And so it is that Man’s greatest - or ultimate - means of control over himself and others has always been at his feet under the guise of this fear so intimately nurtured by our very need to survive and evolve as part of a group – within societies.

This last paragraph is arguably little more than a so-called note to self.

Hopeless

I was lying in bed all morning, unable to make myself get up. Every time I convinced myself to try I'd then stop in my tracks, my mind drawing a big fat blank as to why I needed to get up. Yeah, why do I need to do anything at all, what's the point?

Why even write these words?

I know all the bullshit answers that are supposed to be motivational or make you feel good. They all sound lovely to the ear, for sure. More importantly, they're all what you're expected to think and say to one another like good little members of an increasingly hypocritical world that cares only about the image it projects without having any real substance behind.

So I was turning and tossing in bed, unwilling to do anything except sleep the day away... I wondered how come I'm no longer able to work on stories I used to love writing. And then it hit me like a thousand bricks on the head: since I've lost any strive for success and have ceased to exist according to the validation of others I have lost any sense of reason to do anything at all.

It's not depression, far from it. I'm fighting a state most people will always remain blissfully ignorant of for their whole existence - I'm staring at what happens when you no longer are, think, or do anything based on others and the need for their validation to feel like you exist. This illusion-based need to have others' attention and validation is what fuels most of our urges to do anything beyond meeting basic needs (basic needs being fuelled by primal/survival instincts).

Remove the need for others' attention and validation and suddenly whenever you get the idea of doing anything at all it is met by a sarcastic - but lucid - inner voice that asks : what the hell for?
Ultimately, whatever we achieve as human beings beyond surviving is driven by the presence of other fellow humans, more widely called 'society'. When a society is crumbling and its very fabric is being dissolved then I can only venture that some people are more prone to see it than others and that the very ability to see it leads to that state I'm in and which leaves me observing the world with no longer any urge to ever take part in it again because somewhere down the line it felt too much like staring at something I am not and never will be.

Add to that the fact that I really don't like the world I live in and the directions it is taking, how it is making the majority of people become consumption-driven human drones, how truths and even knowledge are constantly manipulated, distorted or hidden according to the fake humanist/democratic ideology imposed on the whole world one country after another,  how the fact that we are now so many billions is making it easier to encourage intense competition and the need for most to sell themselves shamelessly in the name of 'success' and money to supposedly 'stand out' and how, ultimately, the only ones really benefiting the most from such conditions remain the exact same ruling classes as ever - the same types, the exact same ones only rebranded to blend in or be perceived as cool or simply hiding behind the faceless entities that are corporations allowed to grow to such monstrous magnitude, swallowing everything else in their wake to suck up the life of us all.

Queen once asked "who wants to live forever' but I think the question should really be: "who wants to live in such a world?"

More to the point, unless I find a new source to fuel any action I may take in life I'll be left in a state similar to  inertia, which would not be good.

Fugue

Something about the way I perceived Reality has been fractured, broken away, eroded, shattered. Patterns I started to glimpse became more and more obvious, and yet I could rarely make sense of them no matter how hard I tried. I would become too focused on trying to make perfect sense of everything - absolutely every single detail.

It all culminated in my decision to go to Peru for a few weeks. There I became further involved in the mystery I like to call the 'kindness of strangers' - a lesson I haven't yet fully processed for myself but that involves receiving unexpected help or acts of kindness from complete strangers crossing my path seemingly only long enough to offer very specific help, guidance, or simple kindness. And so all the patterns that connect every dot within my own life are becoming this ever-interconnected cosmos of their own, somehow, where everything is nothing and nothing is everything... where chaos is order as much as order is chaos. Where the threads are the same even if the image looks different.

Beside dwelling further on the kindness of strangers I also realised I could have died but I didn't realise that fully until a doctor pointed that fact out to me. There I'd been, standing on top of mountains, worrying about altitude sickness and the nasty bout of flu I'd caught, determined as I was to reach Machu Picchu... yet all along the one thing that could have killed me in the night was the wrong medication I'd been given and to which I was allergic. Doc said: "You were very lucky to escape with only a rash..." Yes, especially in the middle of a trek in the Andes.

But all this seems to vanish into the background of existence in general when I stop for a moment to connect the dots - circumstances, lessons learned along the way through mistakes, people or strangers met on the way, words exchanged, chance encounters, missed opportunities and those that just seem to pop up out of nowhere... It's not about whether there is meaning or sense, or even some 'plan' in the endless chains of events or not, it's about the fact that as they unfold they always seem to allow for further growth - or lack thereof - as part of a continuous process that goes on for at least as long as one is alive.

Thinking about the 'kindness of strangers' makes me wonder about my own self, and how perhaps the world or 'universe' is somehow showing me through these strangers a better way of projecting myself when it comes to dealing with other people... because let's face it, I've never really been good in terms of human relations. I used to dream of Love and Friendship but all I knew was based on imagination and fantasy, and in reality I had never learned to love. It's hard to explain. I've always been so self-involved, so very focused on my inner world and thoughts that the rest of the world became a stranger I failed to relate to - but only because I let myself grow increasingly cut off from the source.

It's been a strange, eventful year... but it wasn't all the travelling that made much of a difference in the end because by the time I was on to trip number 4 or 5 I'd already grown more aware of the fact that Beauty, or what some may call a 'heightened sense of perfection', can be found anywhere in life... it just depends on the perspective or angle we take or that we choose to adopt. Perhaps the same goes for Reality itself as well as people and how they (but also our own self) manifest themselves, and perhaps if I understand the deeper ramifications of such things - namely that I am the master of a reality in which the universe I seem to experience outside of me is but a direct response to my own reflection/ways of manifesting myself - then I can hope to reach something far more meaningful than so-called happiness or fulfilment in material terms.

Maybe I'm just dreaming again. But then again maybe the universe as a whole is really like an ever-expanding elastic band we can choose to neglect, keeping it forever twisted on itself in a knot, or to stretch out with both hands to see just how much it/we can grow.

Meander of Thoughts

Do we exist outside the gaze of others? We can try, but if there is no one else to validate our actions, thoughts or mere existence can we still maintain a sufficient degree of care and self-consciousness to continue behaving like humans?

I remember being in high school and having to write a dissertation on a question just like that for my philosophy class. I also remember getting the highest grade. Shame I don't remember my arguments so well now. Back then I was far better at focusing my thoughts and I could delve into topics with such depths and yet without much effort at all... it was like a flowing river, no big deal. But as time goes by the mind seems to get increasingly cluttered, and then memories grow fuzzier to the point where one is left to wonder if what they remember is really down to what happened in the past or mere imaginations.

Last night I was reminded of the all elusive and ephemeral aspect of 'memories'. I found myself reading back a page written in French a few years back that told the beginning of my own story as I moved countries as a teen. All the detail contained in that one little page was what struck me. It was so sincere, so simple, so... authentic. It was a perfect example of a piece of writing that had truly come from my heart, from me. I finished reading the page and my heart hurt with regrets, tears swelling in my eyes as I thought to myself: "Why did I stop there? Why didn't I keep going with this story?..."
It was written so long ago, at a time when my memories were still fresh, all of them retaining the depth of thoughts and feelings, the touch, the smells, the sights and even the sounds... all of it was more or less captured within my mind and heart and had allowed me to translate it into words on paper/screen. But at the time for some reason I could not go on. It felt too raw, too recent or 'close' to my person, and I naively told myself that in time, some day, I would feel 'ready' to write that story..

Well, 12 years have passed and last night I realised that all those precious memories I believed would always be engraved in my mind have all but vanished for the most part. All the precious detail, the trivial things that could be dismissed as insignificant in daily life but that instil life and depth into a story - authenticity and emotions - most of it is gone, leaving me clutching at vague recollections of events or moments stripped bare and rendered useless, empty, vapid... 

O Memories, why have you betrayed me so?

As I lay in bed last night, haunted by that realisation and unable to stop the ruthless work of Time as the memory snatcher that it is, I tossed and turned, sobbed and sighed... 

"It was all in vain!" shouted my mind from within, twisting the knife further into my heart. "All in vain!..."

And then I propped myself up on on elbow, startled by a new line of thoughts that had suddenly gripped my mind as I sobbed over the pointlessness of it all. It was about life in general, and then Love, and what an intrinsically unattainable ideal it really seemed to be ultimately. Most of us spend our lives getting attached (biological/instinct based)and being social (herd-like behaviour and needs)- neither of which is love.

Christians are often mocked for basing their religion/faith solely on love. Many a time a non-believer will say things like: "Is that all, eh? That' just too easy and convenient" , and the same mocking tone might be taken when told that asking for forgiveness is all that it takes for anyone in the wrong to be forgiven. But to be truly repentant is no simplistic affair or the matter of just putting a fake smile on one's lips. It is one of the hardest things, because it requires feeling the weight and torture of a conscience first.  As for Love...  the ability to love seems to be the rarest thing, and the ability to nurture and preserve that feeling is even rarer.