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Musings: Untitled Love Affair.
He tries to paint a complete picture. Filling a vast, white canvas with the architecture of color that opens a window to the artist's soul. Except his colors are words and his strokes are sentences that tell a good story. The peaks and valleys of ink that line the pages are flutterings of emotion that serve a common purpose - never conclude. The story is different everyday, jumping from one page to the next, each turn building a lifetime of memories that will shape the future - a crescendo that will resonate with no conclusion. That's what we all want from a good story, to live happily ever after. The hope of an incessant dream. When a muse takes us by the hand and leads us on a journey through life and with each step we profit by what we learn - to love, to care, to respect, to admire - the thought of regret, loss, pain and anguish are distant memories. Feelings of mortals who haven't experienced such celebratory journeys. He wakes to the bangs and creeks of the wood-planked shutters. It is six a.m. by his watch and the sun is ushered through the slats of wood on a cool Mediterranean breeze. He stares through the blue sky towards the sun-lit heavens hoping to catch a glimpse of his fate. The story begins... It could have been anywhere. Remembering the past. Recalling the sights, the sounds, and the smells that are inherently romantic. The hopeless dreams that fuel our ambition and promise that it will last forever. When he parted that fateful night, his distant muse was his only focus. He could not get her out of his thoughts. Out of his existence. She was part of himself. She is in every line he has ever read. She has been in every prospect he has ever seen - in the clouds, in the sun, the moon, in the light and the darkness, in the wind, in the sea and in the streets. She has been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that has ever made acquaintance with his heart and mind. Her influence has been there and everywhere. Part of the little good in him. Part of the little evil. At first light the east coast of Sicily is ten and twenty miles of fantasy. From a sharp bend in the road, a sumptuous beach snug above the sea. The air thick with the smell of salt, wet rock and sand. Two times a day one can stare straight into the sun and trust their decision. Since the time his muse has come to him, he has come to love her as himself. And with enough light to trust his decision, he says he will always be with her and he trusts that 'til the day he dies. He blinks with a smile and floats on this thing they call an island in the sea. He walks to the market and buys some rolls, meats and cheeses and fruits in season. He changes money with the shop owner. He returns home to find the world sleeping peacefully, undisturbed. He pushes a string of hair behind its ear and gently kisses its forehead to be woken with a whisper of a question. He had this conversation before. On a lunar and starry night sitting by a pool hoping a breeze would counter the warmth of the wine that was running through him. He drank and thought. What is it you want? This time he knows it could really be the moment when he stares into the fading fire and asks, who am I. He smiles sheepishly because he realizes he doesn't know the answer at the moment. He stares into his glass hoping for one to come to him but takes a sip instead. Looking over the top of the glass he watches the stillness of the moonlit pool broken by fingers running through the water. We are young, he thought. We are beautiful. We don't have a care in the world. And we could dance all night. We don't have a dime in our pockets, and we don't need one. The world revolves around us and time will stand still. We are kids and the nights are just adolescent dusk. We descend on memories and live outside the realities of our own thoughts. It is a time when the complications of worrying about tomorrow are chased away by the appreciation of today. We ponder the unfulfilled dreams that plague us causing unrest in our hearts and uneasiness in our mind. There is a distant other side of the world, there is a peaceful, hopefully eternal, bliss that we should worry about. He dreamt last night of a giant cloud that weighed heavily in the sky. It reminded him of a battleship moving slowly, plodding through the blue and white ocean of sky leaving a grayish-black wake. As he looked toward the sun to light the path he had chosen, the imposing vessel opened its cotton-steel doors and let fall a million of its grayish wet soldiers preventing him from pressing on. He doesn't think he can go back. His life began with this decision. He'll return when the time is right, and when he is ready. His family will welcome him back; the world will welcome him back. He is writing in his journal, a practice he has always been encouraged to do. It's out there. The romantic, but cosmic, presence of energy, gas and spirit that leads us through the darkness. It teases us in our younger years when we think it is so close that we could touch it and think that it is our own. However, it slips through our hands and we fight to hold on to it. We fight not to lose it, and we fight to bring it back. We call out, but realize quickly that it doesn't have a name or a face and definitely not a value. And we chase it. It is our insecurities, our consciousness. An ideal vision of what we want it to be, what we want to define our selves as, what we want to call our own. The fortunate few who have been blessed with the opportunity to cherish it, stare right into its omnipotent glow and seek guidance. Plato wrote about how the friction in the movement of the heavenly spheres plays a celestial tune that is ubiquitous so that you were born hearing it and at the same time you can't hear it. But he knows he hears it. He thinks how frightening it is how much he hears it. I
Post 12 - September'05 Back to home...
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