smotheur

[smotheur]

(ex) best-friends, drunkards, happy freaks

It’s been months.

I opened my mail a few days ago and received a notification from the Monthly Review, and as it drew to the surface old memories I felt this painful, gut-sinking feeling of hurt. I used to spend days reading their articles with you, laughing our asses off and became really excited about ecological Marxism. Those were really happy days. I had so much fun with you.

I don’t think it would be a strange thing to say that, everything around me reminds me of you – you were my closest companion for years, even as we both went through highs and lows and met new lovers and heartbreaks. You were something that’s always been stable, an anchor, not forgetting the fact that there were always times when I was so irritated by you and your antics – but that’s how friends are. It’s not always going to be smooth. I kept listening to you even on days when I nearly lost my patience, because I know you needed it, because I would always do.

Even driving through the city, we had planted so many strange, colorful, funny memories. We spent a new years’ eve getting spotted by a cop at midnight, and we sprinted away… they thought we were young teenage lovers messing around, but we were actually just two foolish drunkards. We walked for miles on a Friday night and explored around this part of the city, watched as people and vehicles go by, hunted for kitties, and acted like maniacs as we waited for a union-training workshop to start. I went through a really low point in my life back in 2017, separated with a boyfriend, fell through the black depths of anxiety and pain, and you arrived at our place at 4am, listened patiently to me moaning and crying and complaining that I did not have the strength to see the sun.

I don’t know what I should do with all of these memories. Should I erase them? Should I feel so guilty? Should I feel betrayed?

If things weren’t this way, I would have given you so much – my dear best friend, I’ve went through so much happiness and luck this year, and I only wanted to share it with you. I thought of you, first, before all of the people I am with now. On your last birthday, I offered to pay for your therapy – and I would have paved the way and dragged you to recovery, if that was even possible. I wanted to see you happy, too, and reach everything that you always wanted to. I wanted you to write, I wanted you to speak, I wanted to you demolish anything you wished to in life and grow – if only, if only, if only. If only you haven’t turned out this way.

[smotheur]

The way out of this dark place

The way out of this dark place is within yourself, solitary lover. There is always a path inside you, gravel-gray and ridden with yellow weeds, that leads back, from all the farthest places in the world, to that edge of a cliff where the rays of the sun paints the water gold; the golden river, then, falls down to a nook in a valley that has skeleton trees standing in immaculate lines on it; they say the trees used to be soldiers, and the white ashes that sting our eyes when the wind blows are the remnants of burnt skin and bones. It is an ominous place, but it is the place where Alina and Mal held hands as the firebird drove them down. It is a place of glorious sacrifice, a holy place of truth and prophecy and the future. And it is the place where you can be yourself again; with a little effort and stead of mind.

[smotheur]

Matisse leaves a nauseous taste to my tongue—or it may be the cigarette. It’s Marlboro, the black one, and we’re on the side of the road, me with my plain black tea and him with his ginger-infused milk and he’s telling me pretty bits of Javanese history.

It starts as a knot inside—something that feels uneasy, something that strokes vaguely.

I am bored: shocker! But I don’t want to leave.

Yet.

Matisse, my pretty Matisse, you are vivid and dreamy to look at. The way those pair of eyes rest on mine, oh, well! But it is a flame and flames are tireable.

And it may be just now that it occures to me, that I will always be like this, jumping from poem to poem, finding the next interesting thing.

From flame to flame. Like a honeyeater—from nectar to sweet nectar.

From star to star.

Like light.

[smotheur]

We are a wicked wildfire, Matisse, burning blazingly from a candle flame to a conflagration in the flick of a wrist. I hope that, in the future, we don't eat everything to ashes in our path. You have ignited, in me, a spark in the middle of a deep-sleeping frozen stream... I never knew I could catch fire that easily. But is this fire authentic, love? And are we, like other bright-burning flames, short-lived? I don't know.

[smotheur]

The arschloch visited me again. I didn't know how he managed to find me, here, far away from the place I usually am. I was with other human beings--and it was through these humans that I see the signs. He's here. He's written all over their face. I don't know how to explain it--it's not like they acknowledge or realize his presence, but I know him as I know my own heartbeat: I would recognize him in his footsteps, in his shadows, in his nearly-gone scent. And there he was, sitting on the bed of a room rarely occupied except at night, when it was time for these other humans to go to bed. It was dark, a few hours before the girls would go to bed. I walked up to him and sat by his side, since I don't think any formalities were necessary anymore. "The great afflictions of the soul," he remarked, when I was seated by him, with sarcastic flair. I was feeling too beat up to answer him. I just want this to be over, to be over, to be over. "In your case," he continued, "it's estrangement." Alienation. The state of being foreign, never acknowledged as equals." In your words: the demoralizing effects of Lunar, your true nationality." I kicked up the blankets and sat cross-legged on the bed. "You're not telling me what I already don't know, love." "You kept thinking of it all year, day-in, day-out. Is it my complexion? Is it the shape of my eyes? Is it the way I talk? Is it what I talk about? Is it how I move, how I laugh? Is it about my teeth, my hair, my gaze? Yet it's hard for you to even acknowledge all those characteristics to yourself. When you see yourself in the mirror, you find a stranger staring back." "The vessel is solid and resistant," I said. "It does not adapt with whatever's inside to an extent that it sufficiently shows to the outside gaze of the soul's most important idiosyncracies." He laughed at this, jeeringly. "I was feeling quite discomfited that you didn't offer me any refreshments as usual," he replied, his smile amused. I was feeling more and more drowsy. I turned around under the blankets then, and faced the walls. "I don't live here; you are not my guest, you are the owner of this house's guest." "Very well," he said. "If only you were more affable with me. I can give you knacks and things you can use to soften the blows, you know." And I think, I think, but I'm not sure--I think it was around this time that I started crying. He placed a dark, opaque object--the same thing he left me the last time I met him. He was leaving, then, and as he did, he said his parting words: "You are not like the others: however much you hide it externally, you'll always be something else on the inside."

[smotheur]

Goya dan Saturnus-nya

Di salah satu dinding sebuah ruang makan di Spanyol, dewa Saturnus tengah menyantap anaknya. Anaknya, yang tinggal menjadi tubuh tanpa kepala dan tangan, dimakan lantaran ketakutan Saturnus akan ramalan bahwa anak-anaknya akan memberontak terhadap kekuasaan yang ia miliki.

Tiap hari, seorang pria tua yang hampir tuli dan mengisolasi dirinya dari dunia luar makan malam ditemani adegan dismal tersebut. Pria tersebut adalah Francisco Goya, sang pelukis karya mural berjudul “Saturn devouring his son” (Saturnus adalah versi Romawi dari Kronos, dewa waktu, ayah dari Zeus) tersebut dan tiga belas lukisan dinding lainnya yang dinamakan “The Black Paintings.” Lukisan-lukisan yang memenuhi dinding rumah bernama Quinta del Sordo (Rumah Pria Tuli) ini–yang, ironisnya, dinamakan sebelum Goya menempati rumah tersebut, dan seakan mengutuk kondisi fisik penghuninya di masa mendatang–memang memiliki tema-tema muram dan menghantui, dan mengambil warna-warna gelap. Sebagian besar lukisan-lukisan ini juga menggambarkan figur-figur mistik dengan latar belakang warna hitam, senada dengan suasana adegan-adegan yang dilukiskan: sinis, penuh teror, pesimistik.

Rumah ini dibeli Goya pada 1819–terletak jauh dari pemukiman dan berdiri di atas bukit, rumah vila ini memang tepat bagi Goya yang sedang berusaha lari dari atensi publik. Sebelumnya, dinding-dinding Quinta dipenuhi dekorasi ceria yang menggambarkan pemandangan alam dengan warna-warna terang; diperkirakan bahwa ketika Goya semakin jatuh sakit, dekorasi-dekorasi lanskap alam tersebut baru mulai diganti, ditimpa oleh warna-warna gelap The Black Paintings.

Interpretasi para peneliti karya Goya akan lukisan-lukisan ini tidak ada yang pernah setuju. Sebagian pengamat mengaitkan motif lukisan-lukisan ini dengan Spanish Civil War pada 1820-23 yang memang membekas pada diri Goya, mengubah karakternya menjadi lebih pahit dan pesimis. Lukisan-lukisan ini, jika begitu, adalah refleksinya atas pandangan yang sinis terhadap kemanusiaan, ekspresi dari sisi Goya yang lebih gelap dan dalam dibandingkan manifesto anti perangnya yang disampaikan lewat lukisan “The Disasters of War” beberapa tahun sebelumnya, dengan gaya dan suasana yang jauh berbeda. Beberapa pengamat lain mengaitkannya dengan umur tua dan kondisinya yang hampir tuli akibat sakit yang ia alami–dan sehingga lukisan ini adalah ekspresi akan ketakutannya yang tiada akhir bahwa penyakitnya akan menyerangnya lagi detik kapanpun; histeria, teror, dan kepanikan atas mortalitas dan afliksi fisik.

Dilukis di medium yang terisolasi dan imobil, lukisan-lukisan ini juga memang tidak pernah diperuntukkan untuk audiens publik. The Black Paintings Goya lukis untuk dirinya sendiri, tidak pernah diniatkan untuk dilihat siapapun selain dirinya; mereka dibuat sebagai dekorasi Stygian yang menghiasi dinding Quinta–latar belakang warna yang gelap dari lukisan, diterangi pencahayaan remang-remang rumah, menjadikan figur-figur teror dengan tatapan antagonistik ini seakan-akan muncul dari gelap bayangan–serta manifestasi nampak dari keresahan sang penghuninya. Black Paintings juga baru ditemukan publik pasca kematian Goya, yang tentu semakin menjadikan Black Paintings lebih sulit diinterpretasi: lukisan-lukisan ini tanpa nama dan tanpa tanda siapa pembuatnya. Mengutip Licht, seorang peneliti Goya, “never before and never since, as far as we know, has a major, ambitious cycle of paintings been painted with the intention of keeping the pictures an entirely private affair.”

Janquera punya teori lain. Baginya, lukisan-lukisan ini bukanlah karya Goya. Lukisan-lukisan ini dibilang menghiasi dinding tingkat dua Quinta, namun dari hasil penelitiannya, lantai kedua Quinta baru dibangun pasca kematian Goya. Janquera pun berhipotesis bahwa Black Paintings dibuat oleh anaknya–seseorang yang bagi saya, tidak memiliki latar belakang kredibilitas dan motif. Anak Janquera mendeskripsikan dirinya dan digambarkan oleh orang-orang yang mengenal lebih sebagai seorang pebisnis, wirausahawan, kapitalis, dibandingkan seorang pelukis dengan emosi intens dan obsesif. Bozal dan Glendinning juga menolak teori ini: teknik goresan-goresan kuas, ditambah figur-figur manusia vulgar yang ada di Black Paintings, identik dengan karya-karya Francisco de Goya sebelumnya.

Lukisan-lukisan ini telah dipindahkan ke kanvas dan sekarang mendiami Museo del Prado di Madrid.

Tentang Saturnus

“These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother’s knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods. For he learned from Earth and starry Heaven that he was destined to be overcome by his own son, strong though he was, through the contriving of great Zeus.” - Hesiod, Theogony

Saturn, saya kira, adalah karya paling terkenal dari seluruh Black Paintings. Dilukis dalam spektrum warna-warna bumi, aksen satu-satunya dari lukisan ini adalah warna merah dari darah yang berlumur-lumur di tubuh anaknya yang sedang ia makan, kontras dengan nada-nada gelap yang membentuk keseluruhan lukisan tersebut. Memang, Saturn memberi kesan ganas dan kanibalistik yang mengagetkan ketika orang-orang pertama melihatnya.

Dibandingkan dengan Saturn milik Rubens yang sangat Baroque, lebih dipoles, sugarcoated untuk mempertahankan elegensinya, lebih sesuai dengan konvensi-konvensi masanya, Saturn Goya tidak meminta maaf dalam potretnya terhadap mitologi tersebut, jujur dalam kepiluan dan absurdnya suatu tragedi. Dimana Saturn Rubens terkalkulasi, murni berniat jahat dan rakus, Saturn Goya tidak memiliki tatapan antagonistik di matanya–ia seakan sedang menyebrangi jurang antara kewarasan dan kegilaan, dan di tengah-tengah itu semua ia berjalan tanpa tahu arah, takut dengan aksi kanibalistik yang ia lakukan, walau di saat yang bersamaan, ia menyukainya. Saturn Goya adalah Saturn yang menikmati darah dan daging anaknya, walau di sisi lain ia menyimpan penyesalan (yang tak sebesar ketakutannya untuk dikalahkan, tentu saja: "Apa lagi yang bisa dilakukan?”), dan dua emosi ini menyetirnya menuju kegilaan.

Walau seperti yang kita tahu dalam mitologi ini, Saturnus tetap kalah oleh anak-anaknya pada akhirnya, dan karena itu, bagi saya, Saturn Goya adalah simbol impotensi melawan takdir, dan kegilaan dua-lipat yang menjadi konsekuensi subsekuennya: teror akan memakan anaknya sendiri, dan kekalahan yang tetap terjadi setelah semua usahanya. Saturn Goya adalah kesadaran yang menggila terhadap ketidakberdayaan manusia, layaknya the despair yang ditulis begitu gamang dan keringnya oleh Sartre (yang kemudian, dalam eksistensialisme, berujung pada penyebrangan kepada kesadaran yang lebih autentis), atau bahkan nada pesimisme dalam post-modernisme, atau seorang Jacobi, dengan argumennya–“Untuk apa mengejar rasionalitas, ketika semuanya akan tereduksi pada nihilisme?”–Saturn Goya adalah manusia di hadapan tiran-tiran Atropos tersebut, dan dalam diri Goya, nenek-nenek licik pemintal benang ini bermanifestasi dalam bentuk penyakit dan Spanyol pasca perang, kemanusiaan yang memakan dirinya sendiri.

[smotheur]

I have visitors at night

Nighttime has always been the exact opposite of what I feel during the day. I never knew why. Sometimes it reminds me of Gansey, having trouble keeping his eyes closed and deciding to walk out of his bed to look at his miniature Henrietta instead of mulling the thoughts his visitor gave him.

I don't have trouble with sleeping to be exact. Sometimes, if it's really bad, I won't be able to sleep at all, but it's mostly the absence of sun--which is strange, because I've always considered night time to be more beautiful than its warmer counterpart--have you looked at how the scarce light from the moon played at the slopes of things, as if they're entirely new things? These shadows on the grass, on the leaves, on the road. These lights filtering off my window shutters, painted on my bedroom wall when I turn off the lights. I've always like reading better when it's dark, too.

But instead of its romanticization, what had came from the start of two thousand and sixteen was a faceless visitor (or visitors?) with ill intentions.

I can't stop the thoughts. I've stopped reading as much as I want to, since the things the visitors told me had took over my mind and there's only a small part left for my books.

Oh, these demons.

(Written a few weeks ago by the time this was posted)

[smotheur]

I feel so sad last night, and tonight. I'm trying to target the root problem: which part should I get rid of? Which part should I keep?

Now, Sylvia always gets me; she is, at her deepest core, like me: violent and passionate in all her emotions. She has me. She's thoroughly disenchanted with the immutable status quo, and even more: not just the existing state of affairs, but with the condition of how her life-source, her innermost being, has always been. I, like Sylvia wanting to be horizontal, am a Monet wanting to be a Gerome. I am a thing-for-itself wanting to be a thing-in-itself. I love Monet. I love consciousness. I love, with all the scarce capability of this finite soul, that I am a conscious Monet. But I am thrown in a world where it's hardly acceptable to be one--it ain't immortal, like a tree, or startling, like a garden bed. It, instead, just is.

The deep source of my biggest problems are always, I've found out, jealousy. The disappointment surrounding me finding the fact that I am this instead of that, and that instead of this. The act of me, or other people, comparing a fraction of my being to another fraction of other's being was, to me, something remarkably detrimental. I've seen, though, how I always was without all these inconclusive, subjective, misleading acts of comparing: gently self-compassionate.

And always, always I have been: a lunar anomaly.

[smotheur]

Janus.

I'm thoroughly disappointed right now. I get it, now. My strong sense of individuality should be the only truth for me, for "truth" is only the one chosen color in an unlimited spectrum of infinity--and the only self-defense mechanism. Emotion: half the time a manipulative tyrant, the other half the Savior, the Redeemer.

What doest thou truthfully love, Herr Klimt?

[smotheur]

I had several pain-inflicting thoughts today. Mostly on myself, and mostly caused by an irrational, weirdly uncommon self-hatred. Me, hating myself? Absolute falsehood.

But why would you leave me, darkling so? I have nowhere to go, all I know these days are only the callous texture of your hand, the soft scent of sweat mixed with cheap perfume, musky with a tinge of spice and sweetness. I am drunk now. I feel drunk with grief and listlessness. A few hours ago it had hurt like the perdition, I thought I would kill myself to numb it. Should I?

[smotheur]

I am a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I am a girl sitting on a street restaurant, empty small cheap coffee glasses in front of me on the table, and I am hit with a Prufrockian dilemma.

I feel like I'm falling into a deep, dark hole of helplessness: like Prufrock, it is imposible to say just what I mean. Would it have been worth while, to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball? I am an opaque, black box inside, but my external display sends out messages and people think it's all that's on the inside. But it's impossible just to say what I mean.

Klimt, my love, say what you want about me, bring all your friends and all your attempts at deconstruction as your revolt at my structural, oppressing, complex systems of organizing the physical and the metaphysical (here is a cognitive dissonance if contradictions make you feel better and resonate with me: I am a believer in post-structuralism that organizes my attempts at instating my individuality with hierarchial, structural systems) but you, and even myself, can never understand what I feel on the inside.

I don't think you feel the way you did anymore, and I am mourning, day and night, for that.

And it's still impossible just to say what I mean.

It's been months since you've asked your Question, and in the space of months, millions of years have happened.

And it's still impossible just to say what I mean.

I am dying from jealousy. Yet you said that you are, too, and we should get out of this together. Why don't past ghosts ever hunt you? Or do they? Past ghosts don't hunt me; like your friend said, they became me.

But let me just tell you the day I ride a minibus to our college hometown and saw the sky, spoilt watercolors in soft hues of pink and blue and violet, and I thought of you, and felt a deep pang of sadness. I don't know what it was. I wanted to be near you. I am never sure of one thing: I don't want to live alone, like I thought I would want to. I want to live with you.

And do you, still?

We can talk about all the possibilities of how a snowflake can mean one thing, or another, or how we both long for that day we buried ourselves in these white, forgetful magnificence we've never seen in person: all is subsequent, and I don't care what these snowy weathers in the future may bring. I just want to spend my life first, with you, in snow or in the most scorching desert in the world. In lonelinesses, in quite lives or in the crowded spaces of third-world countries. All is subsequent; the only thing that matters is that I get to spend mine with you, and with you only.

I've been sure of this for months. I hope you'll do, too, (though there's a great chance that you won't...) and in the next year, and the year after, and the year after.

Your little Camus

[smotheur]

We played chess, too.

Last night the arschloch I'd managed to run away from years ago--he hadn't catch up with me in years--knocked on the door of my rent and visited me again for a brief, joking reunion. He laughed when I opened the door for him. He laughed a lot, as always. "We will always catch up with you in different ways," he said to me as he stepped into the living room, chuckling. "Run, love. Run away from me. I'll always manage to find you again, wherever you hide."

He came to me in the cloak of a romantic heartbreak--which is something I've rarely seen him wearing. The last few years he was listlessness, frantic disenchantment, and some kind of apathy to one's self--now he came to me telling me that my love doesn't really love me back, my love is going to leave me, my love is going away.

So I served him a cup of hot, black tea and a few date palms, and asked him to sit with me.

And we talked.

"I suggest you to start with several tales concerning your past whereabouts," I said, pouring the tea from the kettle to the cup. "I've been missing some tales about you."

So we drank our tea, eat the palms I've served for us, and get down to business. I thought a lot about what I've been doing and saying for these past weeks. Have all my attempts at reinstating my ego been the results of a false scrutiny? I don't know, and he won't answer it. One of the things I remembered most was that, echoing my own lover's words, that I was Hephaestus rejected of Aphrodite, kicked out of the heavens because I was "shrivelled of foot," because of the grand monstrosity that is my body.

"Though calling you Hephaestus would be inaccurate in its own--since you have double his appearances and none of his bright mind."

And Ares probably have both, and none of this bad luck.

It was the same old tiring problems I had years and years ago, when finally the dominant force of my individuality kicked back in and told me to find beautiful things in this landscape of monstrosity. And because me, being on my own and looking at myself without the help of any other people, I do look damn good to myself.

How about seeing your body as a representation of the waste-land that is this cursed patches of land and sea? How about rethinking about these values of "beauty"? How about actually not giving a fuck about all these and waste your efforts on things that actually matter, like Peter's last letter to Tiger Lily? Or the Battle of the Creek?

The arschloch handed me a mirror. He said, "Beauty and wealth is spread arbitrarily. Don't mourn."

I, though, am a believer in the existence of social and cultural construct and think that what he said was bollocks. I would mourn, instead, for how my lover sees me in such a different light as how I see him.

"Well, it doesn't matter anymore, does it? In a few weeks, months at most, it's going to be all over."

He left a dark, opaque object on the table and left at two in the morning.

[smotheur]

In Reverence

The fog parted for them in his noble welcome--they lift their heads to see. Dark, shadowy green mountains are under their feet, it's almost as if they're floating on the sea that is the branches and the leaves of these silent evergreens. None of them made a sound--they just held on and face, with reverence, the grand and glorious scheme.

Luca feels so small in front of the imposing mountains, until she saw Lar, sitting with crossed legs on the edge of the ship's figurehead, his head raised in perfect complacence.

One monarch, meeting another.

[smotheur]

Jealousy and Flirtation (1874) by Haynes King

IAGO: Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger, But, oh, what damnèd minutes tells he o'er Who dotes, yet doubts— suspects, yet soundly loves!

OTHELLO: Oh, misery!

I would heartily sell my soul to the daemons, to get rid of this loathing creature, for she haunts me despicably day and night, in reality and in dream, without respite, after the first, slightest, sometimes even delusional, sign of abandonment...

Yes, that insecurity is the root cause of it I would agree, but who isn't insecure? Nobody has perfect security; varying degrees of insecurity are what they're actually seeing. I grew up with a boy who constantly kills my sense of self and bring it up again and kills it again, repeatedly, for eight fucking years, in a vicious cycle (in fact, this was why I have such a huge, for some even ridiculous, sense of self now). I believed him that time, for he was some kind of deity to me, a personal god, and nothing incorrect could come out of his mouth; he makes me feel worthless so that, somehow, I lose the desire to live by my own rules, frightened to be out of his, well, "hypothetical sight"--in short, I never wanted to leave him because I thought, wow, how lucky am I to have him! I am lowly and not worthy of his love and I should never let him go for it would be the stupidest thing I'll ever do. Lately I just discovered a scientific term for that: a destructive mate-reticence behavior.

So lowly I had seen myself that at every sign, everything that approaches that can be seen as a threat, I went berserk. I was that psychotic, obsessive, crazy, yet miserable lover (I probably still am... minus the miserability). I didn't, don't know how to be otherwise. It's a mess. But I can't stop it. Then come the self-defenses: harsh criticisms! Reminders of my Panthalassically grand castle of Self (--"I never loved anyone as much as I do myself!"--)! Threats! And of course, my sweet friend revenge. All, Rembrandt--how you so skillfully taught me all of these!

[smotheur]

Le double secret (1927) by René Magritte

HOW TO FUCKING HIDE YOUR LUNAR ATROCITIES IF YOU'RE REALY BAD AT IT THAT HUMANS ARE TURNED OFF BY EVEN THE SLIGHTEST SIGNS.

1. Don't. You don't have to and never will be able to.

God knows I tried, the fucking length I've gone through to hide these lunar atrocities. Apparently, yes, that's how these two-legged, mamal, oh-so-superior earthlings around me consider it, an atrocity. They avoid me like a plague whenever I show the slightest signals. I, on the contrary, think it's wonderful. (It's really a species thing. Most humans won't probably get it.)

Not my fault if some lunars are better at hiding and adapting than others; I'm definitely the latter. But humans, I'm tired of you giving all that Sartrean hell on me. I will fucking show my lunar atrocities and I will fucking own it unapologetically.

[smotheur]

Me, mourning the death of my transcendental soul.

Lenore, Edmund Dulac’s illustration to the poems of Edgar Allan Poe

I feel strangely miserable when I wake up a little too late in the morning. I don't mean ten or nine; hell, seven o'clock makes me feel like I've skipped everything good in life. The later it was in the morning, the more miserable I feel.

I've also been losing interest in the things I usually get drunk to. Like reading fiction. I still can love fiction... but it's not that dream-driven, passionate thrill again--I don't stay up all night because I can't put it down or even forget to eat, forget to drink--drunk, the way I like reading. It's like something's wrong with myself.

I've been addressing this too many times with one of the people I love in the world, and I think he's getting a little bit tired hearing me that.

I feel dead. I know the problem though. I've been having too much of the world inside me and it's making myself filthy. I was too deep inside the world, I think, and I find it hard to get back.

I feel dead without fiction. Specifically, spending a lot of spare time without a fair amount of reading it.

Also, I’ve been developing lactose intolerance—which is weird, because I thought you developed it early when you’re only a toddler or a child, and become lactose intolerant your whole life. Turns out I, at nineteen, felt sick and dizzy for the first time in my life after consuming milk.

[smotheur]

To Mine Saturnine Rembrandt

Do tell: Was it 2009 or 2010? Or even last year, or the past few weeks? Was it yesterday that we sat side by side, I fullheartedly choking on the smoke of your “Proust’s madeleine” for the sake of getting brief, rare moments of sublime visuals—for I idolized you that much, and it didn’t seem fair that I got to see the least of you—and you, the way you always were, seeming to be drowning in your dreary shades of contemplative blue; for all I know, in your head, you could have been in Murakamian 1984 Tokyo, with your crazy cats and your fishy rains, or an early foggy morning on the shores of Corsica, waiting for the arrival of a certain seagod as a company to smoke a madeleine with (and while you’re at it, also going down to the business of disscussing the environmental complaints of both your and your seagod’s myriad, omnipresent water-nymphettes: “Mortals made our rivers alike themselves: filthy!” “So many disgusting, unindentifieable poisonous things nowadays!” Though I can relate.), or somewhere in the depths of 1940’s Pacific Northwestern highways, cold mountain air and the sweet scents of evergreen all around you, with your beat generation friends and your beat generation zeal... and I’m just right there, on the side of the body you’ve abandoned for Elsewhere, feeling deeply, just feeling. Ah, my dear Saturn, you taught me the ways of your Kerouacs and your Nabokovs, that it would be a shame for me not to write in long sentences (though I must say it’s also a pleasure I’m guilty of; wordplay I’m an amateur of). So was it yesterday, or was it that we see time as just a stupid, mercurial successions of fixed stills, like your Bergsen said it was?

Because if it’s true, that it’s as subjectively mercurial as your personal undercaffeinated ex-nymphette is, then it would explain how after years and years, I am still madly in the hell of, you know, whatever that thing was that Plato and his buddies discussed so passionately in Symposium. For it sure was an eternal hell for me; almost ten years now and I never quite found a way out (I’d like to believe that ten earthen years are much longer and more painful, in a way, then ten infernal years). Do you know that I believe there is a part of you in everything I see, I feel? You used to be some kind of an all-encompassing deity for me, and I searched for you in every single person I see. I’m not quite sure of what I’ve found. But I looked for you everywhere, and I’m never satisfied.

Until these last days. Though I’m not quite sure. I think, Rembrandt, that I’ve found a piece of you in someone I just got to know recently—I can point out so many similarities. Although he’s quite like a more of those contingent ones. It’s starting to seem desperate. Yesterday I saw so many little signs—I interpret so many daily little daisy things to what I’m hoping to find. I’m hoping to see you in that drowsy, peacefully hanging branch of a tree filtering four o’clock sunrays, and I thought I did. I’m hoping to hear you on the breaking, cooing voice of the morning thunders—my favourite!—and I thought I did. It rained for a while as I went out of my front door to the perch, leaning my body on the steel fences so I could look up, as further as I can because I’m desperate, desperate to find something although, really, what was I hoping to find by looking up at the sky while it’s raining in the morning? An Argoan spaceship, piloted by you, whose crews hope to get me to elope and bring the glad tidings of my secret space-dragon-slaying fate, all Gabriel-like? “Our Illustrious Warrior Astika, come hither, aboard the ship, joineth us and embraceth thy heroic, universe-commanded space-warrior fate”?

Yes, because that’s what happens daily on our universe—oh, honey, how we long to escape! How we sure long so painfully to get away from the arschloch , our lovely enemy reality, that our souls lean out of our bodies, becoming a lusty, juicy sight for all the devils in the world that they like so, so much to be around us. That’s probably why hell followed us wherever we went, my dear Saturn, especially with you trailing all that black dusts reeking of anger. Anger. How fallible you were you to anger—or are you, still? Like Rembrandt, dark and festive it was: dark, for it was saturated with so much violence, and festive, for it was adorned with sparks of your downturns—you were an all-star.

I love you for all those faults you are, violent and all-starred. I love you in flames. I still love you even though I’m far deep and lost into some other soul’s wild alleys, disoriented, still thinking that I’m in the same lane of a city I once visited, years ago. I love you despite and because you brought me into the black, lightless place—Öd’ und leer das Meer, I love you despite and because everything. They say it’s not love. They say the right kind of love will only awaken you, impregnate you with the zeal of living. But I do! It has its own kind of sufferance, but how I do want to live, Rembrandt! I never felt so sure of myself. I don’t want to live—I already am! I am as alive as young Achilles in the Mount of Pelion, vowing to his lover Patroclus that he will be the first hero to live happily. Though dying is only another great option—something more peaceful, where I can love you even more without complexities, without the silly burdens of the world; while all the world is loud and bright and busy with itself, I am in rest, finally unattached from anything that could rot and stink, and in love.

It is not just to destroy; it is to enliven through destroying the self.

I don’t believe in those versions of God(s) who punishes and prizes with Heavens and Hells, but if God(s) truly is, or are, like what they conceive him to be, then heaven would be filled with those hateful, envious, mundane, insufferable creatures with ungodly tastes of living and a flair to hate everyone in which they see nothing of resemblance to themselves, and I don’t want to be anywhere near them, especially in a very long time period like eternity.

If what they consider to be “good” deeds are the prerequisites for heaven, then I’d rather lose. If God truly is like what they say, that those things are sinful and those things are not, then we’re irredeemably marked and reserved for hell, for if I am only one thing, then it’s that I want to live the way I want to. Fascilis descensus averni, the descent into hell is easy; to unfitting lowlifes like we were, it was not even easy. It was inevitable. We belong to all the nine circles of Dante’s hell. If God truly is what they wrote on those books they clutch so proudly to their chests, then let this imminent, transitory world be my paradise, because only in this part of all the existence of my soul was I allowed to hold your hand. If all of those bigots are true, then this: let us meet in hell, if this all-righteous God permits us to. My love, my Saturn, my dark and festive Rembrandt, let us hopefully have our reunion in this God’s hell.

Have a good “sinful” day,

Your coffee nymph