PRIDE : Гордость : Orgullo : SVPERBIA

I. PAPER MEMORY AFTERTHOUGHTS

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”

The circle of infinity. The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. Eternal return. Welcome to the haunting spectre … that everything is absurd. Two shots bourne in your back – the first one, a brunette called Serendipity – the other her polar opposite, a natural blonde-but-dyed-brunette named Betrayal. Appearances can be deceiving, indeed. All nine Muses would descend upon your half-alive corporeal along the way, floating in the endless sea of the forever night of memory. They are your Virgilian guides, breathing the other half into you, as you ascend the ledges. The wounds ‘that will never heal’ are given temporary comfort by their confessional surreal – after all they both shot you, enemies or not. No fiction is stranger than the truth, indeed. Now if only the truth would run about the world in the same way lies, like flies, do! Who knew? You do. Who is you? You, who never arrived… never say never… except never give up. Have sympathy for the devil you are. Buy the ticket. Take the ride, and never look back. This is our story.

Encoded within the comedy of life are vices and virtues and universal laws that defy any religious explanation or rather, anthropomorphizing, as is the human ego’s want. Through the ages, from the court of the ancient city of Troy, where I was surely Cassandra, the cursed prophet of doomsday, to whom no one ever listened. Dante spoke to me in my dreams, since adolescence. Blake gave me the notion of contraries. Milton coupled with Beethoven were the ambrosia and nectar of the mortal experience. Zarathustra showed me how to drunk dance with joy. Marcus Aurelius spoke to me like a whisper in the wind: “The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.” Rilke manifested in my most hopeless Romantic: “Would she ever arrive?” The nine Muses visited regularly. Ourania most of all. The tenth Muse is the hero of every story. I cannot tell you her name, butI know she exists.

“Thank you for existing, dear Muse.”
J’existe.

Staring into the austral half-clouded twilight – a flash in the night – a shooting star streaked across the circles of infinity. Hope never abandoned there, standing at the gates, dancing the purgatorial waltz with that elusive one. Stretched rubber on the escalator of caprice. Eternally we are spinning as long as all is forgiven. Sitting on the roots of the Tree of Life, staring at the tawny / amaranthine sunset, in dreamlike awe for one particular moment. One kiss to sink the near-miss into the abyss. The vision that haunted me endlessly; the source of my daily ritual crepuscular chase. Thus the denial – the endless longing for an immortal idea to fill the forever void – the 20+ year Odyssean quest to find the voice speaking to me in my daydreams. Eternal return, ad infinitum. The weight of eternal return was most often unbearable. The only catharsis came via ink-spilled confessionals, prose incantations echoing my mind with resplendent radiowave telepathy in the most surreal of locales, everywhere and nowhere at once, but always in exactly the same metaphysical space – that metaphysical square meter of space, for all time.

Whatever it takes, this dream must never die. The quest to find the voice speaking to me in my daydreams became my ‘raison d’etre’. Her reflection appearing to me in all the windows of the world. I do not mean denial in the normal sense of the active and personal – something conscious, but in the less common sense of the passive and wanton – to wit, being denied. I could never reconcile reality and imagination, because reality was not so interesting. Quotidian banalities involving basic human necessities such as shelter, food, sex and sleep too often encompassed the whole. The shallow pool of lost souls rippled… como la luna en el agua. The inner world was much more interesting – a dizzying array of languages spoken, airports, train stations, mountains and sea – the panoramic painting of my poetic memory.

So thus began the cycle of the wildly imagined. Imagine being anywhere at all, much less your favourite place or somewhere you have never before been – be that a park, a bar, a playground, a remote mountain lodge, a sidewalk café – when one fine day you run across that one who will change everything: the ever-elusive and forever sacrosanct Muse X. Imagine all the emotions and passions long forgotten suddenly swirling into an Infinity loop. Time fleets by like wind through the pines, coupled with the clichéd murmur of a gently flowing stream, until one dark January day… you’re at an airport. ‘Home’ is 8,000 miles away, and there’s an ocean between you. Imagine your despair at having that part of you ripped away. Imagine continuing, through whichever means available, to melt into each another more and more with each passing day, her whisper echoing through the swirling winds of your electrified synaptic highways. Imagine her becoming so woven into the fabric of your being that you sublimate her to a transcendent being – no longer real, but constantly inspiring. By some miracle, the knowledge of her existence persists through many expeditions into the abyss. Your fatal error, this… or at least this is what ‘they’ tell you.

I called her Muse X, invoking the ancients, with one caveat: this is the Muse with whom you can actually speak, but not only in your native language, adding to her mystique. Imagine that. Time causes those memories to slowly fade as days, weeks, months, years pass. No matter how far away though – you never really forget. You blaze an existential trail to your inevitable happiness. I could never give up the quest, or I would convulse into existentialist panic. Never ask ‘why’ – that is to say, why exactly do the Gods or Fates or whatever keep her away? The reply would come when I least expected it – that much was clear. Serendipity’s rules dictated that also, when I was closest to giving up, she would appear. Also, most certainly somewhere I was not supposed to be, to where I was not planning on traveling – a plan gone sideways. The Portal of Twinfinity could only be opened by inversion of time, inertia and space to allow the two of us to be reunited. Because somewhere, Apollo and Aphrodite were in a corner, conspiring and conjuring a plan to reverse the course of history. Time and again, star-crossed love stories ended in tragedy: from Homer to Shakespeare to Dante and beyond. Not this time – this story ends with the twin flames reunited, drinking wine and dancing around the fire of post-modern dystopian absurdity, laughing together for all of eternity.

Thus was my vision of time spent with her, that when I found her, I would just know. That time and space shared together would be like returning to our eternal home, the house that contained both of us, that ground zero of ‘comfortable’. With her, the external world would just disappear – we would be free of its impositions, its stress and anxiety – free from the artificial constructs of the human condition. No borders. No money. No illusions or lies, to each other or ourselves. There would be no need for any of these things, only the embrace of the other. The embrace of two long-lost souls, having found each other after a journey over several continents and ten or so generations – like Odysseus returning to Ithaka, but after ten lifetimes. Truth, covered in security – what I came to call ‘Finding Nirvana’.

The half-life of my tour through Purgatory followed a childhood of Inferno. The final cycle began at Machu Picchu, and it was there I realized what discipline it required to scale the final ledge – the first brick laid in the fortress of my mind. I would have to build that fortress in my mind and live in it, one of emotional destruction when confronted with any more false actresses. Build a fortress of decay, so every other one that crosses your path of interest is held prisoner in the castle. At some point, you forget how to really feel anything. So, then you just turn away… from everything. But what you fail to realize is that the one thing from which you cannot turn away is yourself. Obviously, that’s not an option. So, then you pine away… alone in the imaginary castle of your mind’s chaotic divinity.

Imagine one day you wake up and you realize it is all actually true and happening to you, simultaneously. An arbitrary series of events that leads to the chance meeting with the one who does not exist. That magical moment lasts forever etched into your memory and every last one of all the pieces suddenly fit: the legend of the 10th Muse is not a legend after all, and you are staring into her eyes for the first time, under the moonlight on a breezy rooftop… talking about places where we can see more stars. Where was that magic carpet? I would ask her and the winds would gust her hair to look like one. Every good story begins with a story, indeed. This is no exception.

It begins just over twenty years ago at an airport, naturally. A parting gift from an ex-lover… wrapped in brown paper. I stared at it in my backpack for days that became weeks trekking from the desert across so many Roads, hesitant to open it before I arrived to the Great Red North: Загадочная Москва. It took six weeks to find the perfect moment for ripping open that brown paper – sitting at an impossibly posh Tverskaya St cocktail bar in front of my All-to-NYC cosmopolitan and neck-breaking stunning Ice Queens everywhere I looked. To this day it boggles my mind how like tightrope artists they walk on the permasnow in stilletos. At precisely that moment I remembered her words when she parted to her flight:

‘Write in this to the one you love.’

If only I knew who ‘she’ was, but write to her I did, indeed. I ripped open the brown paper and discovered the most perfectly compact journal with a cover on which were written the words ‘Travel Notes’, on a background of replica postmarks. This became the journal of my most Sacred Muse X, to whom I would fill its pages with invocations for just over a decade, until none of its pages were any longer empty. For years, it has vexed me endlessly – just who is ‘she’? Does she exist in the flesh? How could I hear her sweet voice so clearly, yet nothing else? Her voice whispered to me in the winds of my Odyssean quest to find her.

Looking around the bar that night, I was stunned to realize that I was attracted to none of those I could see. Instead, I was lost in a future memory… imagining what it would be like to meet her, indeed what she herself was like. The future memory of the Immortal Beloved – the one who had no rival, who checked all the boxes, including the ones I did not know I even had. The bar was extremely high, the solitude of the quest was often unbearable.

The vision came to me like an entire sky filling lightning storm – thunder that would make the entire city jump at once. At that moment, I could see her silhouette quite clearly, and I could feel her presence as if she were right next to me. The energy was intense, as if there were a telepathic link between us. When we locked eyes, we would be spellbound. The rest of the world would just disappear. You can only imagine what happened when we locked lips… when our bodies became one. A tornado of lightning would shoot towards the sky. A cosmic fireworks display that gave us Immortality, Immortality in finding Infinity… Infinity only bourne from the rarity of our Intimacy. So it must be, and only thus.

But don’t worry, Dear Reader – this is not exactly a hopeless romantic’s love story, though it is about those most romantic of all things – that the secret to life, is living… as Kafka once remarked:

‘The meaning of life, is that it ends.’

No – rather this story is about eternal return, the essence of the human condition, the belief in the ‘beyond’. When two souls are ripped apart from each other early, in one of life’s iterations as flesh, they spend several cycles of eternity seeking one another again – the lost are always returning to the earth again, after all. This déjà vu je ne sais quoi haunted me endlessly, and at times quite vividly. The flashbacks included some wild nights at Cabaret Voltaire, with all of the big names present – where we both imbibed heavily and danced the night away, but somehow did not cross paths. The flashback came to me in a dream, where upon walking past a mirror on Spiegelgasse 1, she whispered a message to me in Italian. Though in this life I had not yet learned Italian, I remembered the message verbatim, as it was encoded in Dantean:

Ricorda ‘La peste’
Allora che per salire ti dome… te stesso.

It was year XXII when I began to search the streets of ancient Neapolis for the clues that would lead me to her. You see, our story actually began in 1657, during the Naples Plague. I was forever haunted by these flashbacks, where I could see her so clearly, but the ‘her’ of 1657, not the modern incarnation. None of this was clear to me at first – it took 22 years to compile a database of visions and signs of the most bizarre Serendipity. The more ledges I climbed, so the more the winds howled her name. I could sometimes hear her voice, calling my name, most clearly when on a clifftop overlooking the sea. And sure, I’m well-aware that this all sounds bloody insane. That this wretched consumerist dystopian black mirror could not possibly reflect anything genuine or real… but I always wanted to believe, my galactic rebellion to the dystopian terrestrial always well-intact. But she knew how to turn that black mirror onto itself, to reflect its darkness in a tornado of alchemist magic and distill it into wine, which would we drink as we read to each other. She had to be an alchemist sorceress of darkness into light. The one I sought was a fireball of light, and no matter how brutal the quest became, her voice echoed in the caverns of my chest. They were the whispers of my never-lost beloved twin soul flame, echoing through my wanderlust. Visions of her swirled through me at the most unexpected times – they were the zephyr winds gently advancing my quest.

That quest led me to explore as a way of life. It was my sole ‘joie de vivre’. It led me to prefer enchanted forests under the laser beam disco balls to ‘the greatest city in the world, and then on to a beach in paradise, to every temple top in the pre-Columbian world, to the ‘city of 10,000 spires’, hanging out with moviestars past and present, to the techno capital of the world, where thrice I danced with over a million people, to the ancient Agora, to flying mere meters above the Colosseum, and the spark that lit the barrel : metre-high treks through Moscow permasnow on my way to nearly perfecting a tragically rich, yet fatally impossible language and culture that would, ironically enough, prove ultimately irrelevant to my quest. True to epic form, it would take a gathering of over four million to ultimately lead me to her, and on a different continent. If irony were near-misses, I would own the patent.

Somewhere off in the distance, one of the drifts had deviated from its predetermined course. An avalanche would follow, and then the eerie tranquility that follows such destruction. As my mind’s eye surveyed the scene, I realized that there was no debris, no casualties… as if the whole thing was imagined, though I knew it not to be so. It was as if the river below had swallowed up everything. It was not a river at all, but a vast ocean, and just then I noticed the crashing of the tide on the rocks – soothing, undulating, and more frequent. But wait – where did my tenth muse go?

It was days later, and there was still no sign of her. Surely the gods could not be so cruel as to do this to me yet again. Nonetheless, I saw her everywhere – even in my dreams. Never, of course, in my nightmares, which had become nearly extinct anyway. As I cleared the most thickly wooded part of this forest, and after so many wrong turns down impassable trails, only to have to endlessly backtrack, I finally spied the bonfire, raging in the winter night, crackling against the hiss of the swirling winds of my mind. There was a ravine that circled the fire, which itself was slightly elevated. The fire glowed in the winter night, illuminating the evergreens above red-orange. I saw her reflection in that fire, and knew I could finally sleep – so then the fire became my Muse, and I knew she would watch over me through those first bitter cold winter nights.

I had no idea that it would take this long. Maybe just perhaps… this was my recovery, or… I am just remembering my skin. Because it was all just dead air, blowing through the exhausted tunnels that sporadically line the synaptic highways of my mind. And, somewhere along the way, the guide eventually does get lost – not the kind of lost that is… enjoyable, but the kind where I am all too aware that the vehicle has come to a stop, and the surroundings are no longer discernible. Resisting the temptation of nostalgia becomes difficult there, because nostalgia is like an undertow. This existential crisis is such a recognized and thus loathed cliché, but you still ponder it whilst observing the passersby. That is, until they become a blur of varying shapes, devices, and annoyances of variegated degrees of self-consumption. All that is left behind is just that blur, that thin line of smeared unconsciousness, halted notions, and the constant headache of hyper-over activity, making it intensely difficult to focus. Yes, the headaches are the worst… and even if I could manage to focus, there is the blank stare, the empty window, and the streaks of light… but there is never a destination. There is no horizon, even, and the circuitry always got crossed, right as the sale was underway. It is even worse than driving with no destination… which actually, in fact and by the way, is usually the best way to drive. Just then you rediscover the will to fight… but for what? Whither, then? The soul was marinated and prepared for the feast of the sale, but then the devastating realization – to whom, and for what end? Infinitely curious, all that. The quest moves on in a perpetual swirl of nameless faces and unknown places.

Stand clear of the revolving doors, please. Those doors propel organisms, spitting them out into the streets like a spinning top. Why did I ever exit here? This question played on repeat in my mental radio, like a service announcement echoing through the walls of my mind in the shrill shrieks of a thousand spirits of Inferno. That will have to be a different walk, however. Standing before the globe, I decided to keep moving. The surroundings always answered the question, sooner or later. Misadventures abound accumulate, and I walk through the gates of my memory all around me, trying so hopelessly to just stay with it, to try and forget the damage wrought by the storm. The sole comforting thought was the the Muses were all the daughters of sacred Memory – the eternal light at the end of my tunnel. I must move on.

It was everywhere I looked, everywhere I went – any time I saw a child, every beep at the markets, every sight and every sound – the storm was everywhere, seemingly visible only to me. Like the fickle blades of grass in the park blowing in the wind, so also was the persistence of regret – that convoluted procession of swirling events that would invade my mind every five minutes until another useless distraction caught my attention long enough for me to forget the details before recording them in digital parchment permanence. It was never something important, never anything poignant or enthralling – always just a trifle of no consequence, but more than enough to distract. The whole process was similar to the life cycle of the oak tree in hyper-speed: I would be petrified before I even noticed the emergence of a single root from the ground. * blink / wink *

Memories of trekking through the endless snow on a frigid Moscow winter night, or back home… where the winds only howled her name, and the leaves ruffled in heaps under my feet through the autumn magic of Olšanske, Kafka peering out from his corner… leaving no one left to blame but my own foolish caprice, the infinity in the palm of my hand, newly hung upon the wall for all to see. And thus, also, the reminder – wherever a given path might end, all the words would evaporate like mist, and I was left there, standing – the fool foregone, and so slowly not moving on through the eternity of those hours. Oh yes, I was the very same clod as at 18, ‘wallowing in the mire’, forever lost in the forest bog. It was not the time for the remembrance of things past, but deliberation – how to distill the positive from the negative into the spirit of the future… how the bloody hell to fix the leak in this ship before once again drowning in myself. Was there a gesture or phrase to seal the leak of disenchantment? No, and there never would be. Not would… just wood, and nails, and sometimes concrete – of meaning, of sincerity, of purpose, and, of course… of her name. Just what was her name?

That was when I remembered… if I only knew her name…! Каждый пять минут (every five minutes). Somewhere along the twisting and winding corridors of my soul, there existed two ideas divided between two separate corporeal entities, yet hopelessly intertwined. At any given moment, the ideas might converge or diverge, depending on the context, depending on their perspective, just as you can choose if the wind will blow off the sea at your back or front or side, depending on which way you face – the only certainty is that the wind will blow. Just then came the thought to the idea’s wind – it can blow you over, or aid your journey… thus, too, the two ideas, each foot on the ledge of the other. They can construct or destruct, inspire or deflate, encourage or discourage each other… and the flame will either rage like a bonfire in the forest of the night, or be extinguished, and provide no heat or light. Such is my eternal dilemma – finding just one who understands both idea(s). So many people err precisely there, in trying to find some ideal instead. They do not understand that ideal does not exist in the human condition, only in its complementary idea. I understood the distinction, and thus I manufactured ideas en masse. Welcome to the Idea Factory: a tour will be provided later.

At present, though, I sit there calmly staring at the serenity of the sea, wondering where all of this will someday lead. I had never feared the unknown; I embraced it, in fact. I understand all too well that life is but a never-ending conflict between the want and the need. The same principle applied there as equally as to the never-ending quest to find the idea companion… to wit, the Queen interlocutor, the mirror of eternal conversation, the sacred 10th Muse. One idea is the Self. That much was clear. The other is the elusive one – that mysterious Other. In her, there could be darkness, or there could be light… but I so preferred twilight – eternal twilight! – the symbiosis of the two, the convergence of ideas and conversation on and through those sacred nights. This was how an idea was formulated – history was not comprised of facts and knowledge passed down over generations, but of experience – experiential knowledge was the key to everything, for knowledge is useless without any conception of what to do with it. Else, the knowledge we have accumulated just rots away on the dusty parchment through the centuries. Thus, experience had become my skeleton key – it could unlock any door, and especially those sacred doors of perception – the gateways to truth. She, then, was to be the anthropomorphism of the complementary idea, of that Other, the amalgamation of experience accumulated across oceans and time zones and languages and lands, and the idea of her conjured forth in the waves crashing on that shore… the complete tranquility that exists as she fills the very void in me. At that moment the vision came to me, shining through her glistening reflection of the sun on the ocean’s vast waves – she was the apotheosis of the idea in corporeal form. The time for conversation was nigh.

The story, well… it begins all over, and so again. A forward plunge into the deep and that blue… the wondrous abyss. I had no recollection, not even a memory of how exactly this all began. I only knew that I must keep going, keep exploring until the very end. The pages are different now, though the idea remains the same. The quest is never-ending: to the edge of the land of never forgotten, staring off into the sea at the sunset of her every blissful memory. Those waves crash off the shore again, and the winds are all coming back to me, calling our names into the twilight of night… to the sound of all the debris being washed away. Thus I awoke nightly in the cold sweat of her dream… thus the blank stare daily, with nothing as it seems.

A lesson learned long ago was not to tempt Fate, not to bend the universe to my will… or attempt to, that is. Everything always happened precisely as it was meant to – it was best to not ask those questions. My mind was a synaptic superhighway with all the autos (trucks are forbidden!) going at hyper-speed but very rarely colliding. Only self-driving autos found here.

At times an ambassador, at others a spy, often a fugitive or refugee, but forever not for never, a hopeless romantic with one defining constant: wanderlust, born of incessant curiosity, childlike wonder, and driven by the seemingly endless quest to find her. It would take me through all the circles of hell and give me many glimpses of paradise, lost and found and all over again. Each misadventure transported me to a ledge, one or the other. Here I find myself on the first ledge of Purgatory – pride must give way to humility. The ego has a defense mechanism, projecting one’s flaws and insecurities onto any other as a way of not confronting itself. Here first could I sense her presence, a whisper in the dark, speaking softly: ‘bury the ego. Ascend the ledge with humility.’ Naturally, I circled around this ledge many times too many, as is our wont. Those proudly frenzied oscillations of ego eventually dissolved into paper memory afterthoughts, echoes of her whispered words onto the parchment of my humility. Each one ending another invocation of her future velvet memories, another ledge ascended.