Picture yourself a peaceful public courtyard, dry leaves blowing about before a nondescript chain-link fence made opaque with vertical wooden slats stained a fading maroon. Not a lot of money went into this place, but it's nice. Some folding chairs are set up as if for a lecture. A polished brass cross is on display next to a rented-looking wooden podium. To the left of this, before a wall of divided glass leading to some dark interior, is a long black box on a raised platform. This platform's dimensions are obscured by a frilled sheet which drapes down its sides: a sheet with a pattern of little flower bouqets against a sulphurous white. If the somber drone of wind and people-far-away in this place would sing a song just barely audible, it could be no other song than this. Here is resignation and sadness.
There is a man standing before the open black coffin on the platform. In the coffin lays the corpse of a young and beautiful girl with pale skin and a mass of black, curly hair. He stands without moving, and his anonymous face is cast downward, as if contemplating the deceased. So forlorn and anonymous is this man that he may as well be another leaf or freshly-bagged garbage can-- his no-color rain jacket, his unremarkable everyman's haircut and dull black Sunday-shoes dusty from disuse. He makes no sound. He is not weeping, but if one were to be so rude as to look into his face, you might think he looks lost.
He's spent his life searching for something, and he has finally, finally found it-- here.
But the discovery is not sweet. Neither is it horrible, though, like he has found many other things along the way. It does not crush him or fill him with wrath like an unrequited love's unaffected giggle. No; no, here is home, here is what he held to be his Gnostic Light, his lovely beam and final imperative.
He chased the dream and loved it as a lost friend, a lover; only to finally find that it was but a dream after all, and inert. Its life was his life alone, its independence a persuasive illusion. It--she--the Muse-- lived once nonetheless, and it was to grieve that he knew it madness to believe her alive still.
Part of him will always stay in that courtyard, relishing forever the innocence of loving his dream that was so much more beautiful, more clean, than anything he knew in life or in other living, breathing people. When cursing at traffic or timidly calling a pretty woman's number after five days, he will also be feeling the rain run down his face as he stands before that black box. When struggling in earnest to earn more money, to get the best deal, a smaller him will feel the seasons change and bristle in the cold-- and his dream will still live to warm him with her slight, trembling body. Who in life could make me feel so? Why roll the dice? Why commence to mourn?
But so must a little Pygmalion abandon his love, and face the arbitrary winds of the world. The dazed, the disillusioned; the barren, the broken; but still possessed of the belief in other beautiful things out there to be found.
23 Oct 2010, 6:16 am
