Trip in the Wayback Machine

January 13, 2000

Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler

- one of his most influential plays, The Dolls House, focuses on a woman who believes she loves her husband, but soon realizes that she is unloved by him and leaves; at the time, the play was controversial because of this aspect.

- most of Ibsen's plays revolved around certain issues. His plays are sometimes called "problem plays," and later perceived as character sketches or character studies.

- Hedda Gabler is, supposedly, a character of great depth and complexity.

- Hedda is a fierce individualist and proud of her family, etc.

- Her marriage at the age of 30 seemed quite percuilar; since Tesman approaches professorship, she desires materialistic wealth in order to be happy.

- The aunt was not upset upon hearing the death - runs parallel to Thea's reaction to Eidet's death, same with Tesman's reaction at the end.

- Hedda is surrounded with shallow and transparent characters...

- The allusion to the wine-leaves in Eilert's hair refers to Dionyesus, the god of wine and excess. Eilert represents what Hedda wants to do; Hedda is heemed into routine, at times on the verge of tedium.

- Hedda flirts with the judge, but does not initiate an affair.

- Hedda does not want to come under the power of the judge; she kills herself to escape it all - scandal, Tesman, and etc.

- Conventionally, a character rebels against society; but in Hedda Gabler, the rebel is a product of society - the dancing and glantary: idyllic conception of life.

- Hedda has very strong emotions, and the dramatic elements creates the atmosphere of its conclusion.

- Hedda and Eilert were once almost lovers. Her apprehension about society's expections leaves her afraid of her own sexual desires.

- Hedda and Thea are contrasting characters, foils.

- Hedda tries to destroy everything during the play. Her "beautiful" death at the end triumphs over everything that trampled her.

1) Why is the play named after her?
2) How does her vision of her father affect her life?
3) Why does Hedda play a frenzied dance melody before her death?

- Hedda was raised under the influence of her military father; that translated into her married life.

- Hedda's manipulation and control over Locuborg - drinking and killing - was her desire to do something to gain control over her life.

- Hedda's suicide could also be a custom to escape dishonour - possibly a final conformist act.

- Is there a psychological nature to Ibsen's plays.

January 27, 2000

Luigi Pirandello - Six Characters in Search of an Author
(Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore)


- An early twentieth century play, part of a shift away from realism.

- Pirandello is very important to modern drama, due primarily to this shift.

- He does not present a slice of life, he concerns himself with theoretical and philosophical issues - identity and reality, etc.

- He explores the inability of language to express what is "intended", the difficulty of communicating with another.

- He explores the variability of personality - life illusion to stage illusion.

- Note the relativity of perception to time, place, mood, personality, and even the state of one's digestive process.

- the play is about embodied characters who may or may not be "immortal". In spite of the author's death, the characters in the play live on, in search of another "creator". They live on as far as their author allows them to.

- The characters enter to plead to the actors to play their story, as the actors rehearse "The Rules of the Game".

- Characters found a platform for their story. They insist their story is much more significant than the one the actors are currently undertaking.

- This puts the notion of reality in question; the theatre is inadequate in portraying reality.

- Pirandello critiques the usual conventions of the play. Much of the play is a critique of the medium of theatre.

- The producer tries to produce a more sentimental scene, despite the sorrid scene involving the father and stepdaughter.

- There is a paradoxical notion that theatre is truer than life; fixed fictional characters may be truer than the ever changing real beings, the actors.

- Characters on stage are expected to be consistent and not "out of character", i.e. father is fixed in one moment of his life, with the stepdaughter.

- The author left the little girl or boy without personalities: undeveloped character.

- The characters are frustrated in their attempts to extend their fixed identities. They do not, like human beings, have to try to unify the various aspects of their personality and identity.

- It is very difficult to portray the various aspects of human personality.

- Human beings have moods, impressions, expressions, social masks, beliefs that can't be fully integrated; the problem is that we try to unify these aspects, and Pirandello believes this integration is impossible - some often try, rather futilely, to rationalize the discrepencies that arise in life.

- As the history of the family unfolds, the outer action merges with the inner action.

- As the chaos of the final scene unfolds, reality and "make-believe" blur together. The traditional narrative is partially embedded into the unconventional?

- Henry Barrackson, in his ideas regarding the immutability of human identity, and Ibsen's strong grasp of "inner life" influence Pirandello. Ibsen portrays the inner life of characters, even though the inner thoughts of the characters are not available to the audience.

- Pirandello may be seen as an influence on Camus, Beckett, and other contemporary absurdists.

- Are there ways the character can achieve independence from the author? In literature? In "everyday"?

- Think about the play "within" the play.

- Is the boy dead? In what ways is he? In what ways is he not?

- Henri Bergson - talked about intuition; he said time is an experienced duration; emphasized the creative process over the scientific process; a forerunner of existentialism?

- Even when they found an author, they never found an author.

- Their illusion is their independence.

- The "actors" are portrayed as hams?

- The characters can't escape their roles, the son tries to escape the cyclical performative.

Guinness

The Guinness sign reflects my image back to me, here in this "beer-room". The great unknown, the veritable mystery of life, lies before me, with my gaze turned upon itself. The Guinness sign reveals my inner defiance, my fire, my lack, my absence, my fear, my desire for kitsch, my eros, my playfulness, and misery...that's there somewhere...somewhere...misery that's not mine, but foisted upon me by circumstance. I slam my head into the sign. The crowd converges over me, chattering aimlessly, as I bleed over into the unknown.

Tis' better to have loved and lost...

More than love, less than lust, I felt inexplicably drawn to her. Lovelier there are lovelier ones than her. Her uniqueness savages the plainness of appearances. She is a fearsome creature, delivering me to pain at every turn. I want her punishment, a relentless stream of heartbreak, pain, and sorrow. I want to shed those ecstatic tears. I want to feel pleasure and pain in equal parts. Death by pleasure and pain rolled into one...what bliss! Misery...I want to live with misery on my head. The marks...the wounds...display my love for her.

Will

The wonky ceiling fan dangles precariously as it finishes its revolutions. It shall fall onto my balding skull and finish me off for good. Can I will it to fall? Will? What an odd thing will is. Can you decieve yourself and every one else? You have no will, why fake it? The fan shall dangle precariously for the night, but I can't will it to fall - it will do it on its own accord, when gravity overpowers its weakened structure. There is no will. Will becomes a miraculous overcoming of all human limitations in the noetic mind and rendered useless, a pipe dream.

MUST

I stared, attempting to will an impossible transformation. Nothing. Only Stillness. Still just a pathetic creature contemplating the empty universe without any means to change it. Action, so elusive, so far from convention, appropriated by expectation. You MUST, they goon. Where to then? Liberty is a MUST, you must spend, consume, dispose, fuck, spawn, cherish, and on and on and on. MUST is a loaded word. Everything's loaded.

Eighteen

In adolescence I lived according to an erroneous assumption: life begins at eighteen. To the uninitiated, eighteen years as a living, breathing, and - most importantly - consuming creature is like the sudden burst of a cocoon – the unveiling of an idyllic life free of constraints. Alas, the uninitiated, blessed with a belly-full of optimism, often grow up to be twenty-nothings smoking pot in their parent’s basement. For others, eighteen is like any other any other grey non-descript milestone marking the long winding path leading to an anticlimactic end – dribbling onto an adult bib while being spoon-fed by an obese nurse, that is if you’re lucky. For me - because my own account assuredly has an unparalleled internal significance - eighteen was an inauspicious occasion. I made love to my seventeen year old girlfriend for the first time as a legal person. And somewhere in the dank recesses of my wretched mind, she remains a nubile forbidden seventeen; pink boundless lust stretching from head to toe.

The event has significance only in the larger historical context. It was to be our last encounter; the relationship soured and we went our separate ways. She moved on. I didn’t. That’s eighteen for me – a sumptuous fantasy suspended in the cold comfort of fleeting eternity.

“Eighteen years young and never to be the same,” my father told me with his mouth half-full with partly chewed birthday cake. Somewhere at this imaginary moment, when the reader discovers the writer’s wretched word, someone on the verge of an eighteenth birthday bathes in a porcelain tub of once immaculate waters spiritised by self-inflicted crimson. Another steps deliberately onto the seat of a black swivel chair – positioned and readied for the bed sheet noose. Another chooses a spectular sudden end and empties the barrel of a handgun into their skull. On my eighteenth, thoughts darker than these disturbed the ubiquitous sense of optimism orbiting me, the ever so special birthday boy. But nothing came of it. An instinctive fear of death and a boundless weariness about the vast unknown assurances that lay beyond held me back from the abyss. Nevertheless, there are those bold, brave, and honest souls who choose to end it in the prime of their youth, on the cusp of maturity, rather than bear the lukewarm stagnation of those etc. years following eighteen. They are pure Beings, who stand defiantly against the tide of change, and destroy themselves rather than be swept along. You see, those who idealize eighteen as the completion of freedom are naïve enough to believe that freedom is simply the ability to mortgage debt, drive a car, buy smokes, buy alcohol, legally buy pornography, and etc. Alas, when you’re eighteen, sugary presumptions are hard to swallow. You choke a bit, cough it up, and meticulously examine the hideous bile of naïveté; its beauty lies in its chameleon nature, its ability to take any form evolved by an enchanted mind. Naïveté has its origin in a most narcissistic emotion, romantic love. As a hapless romantic, still dwelling on unrequited affection, I can tell you that I am at once honest and duplicitous, self-deprecating and invariably self-absorbed. Alas, that is the condition of a stubborn fool still green and in constant fear of his surroundings, clinging to a long lost impossibility - with utter disregard to present or future.

One who passes through eighteen stands before a long portentous road snaking towards an unavoidable conclusion: death. In order to distract from the omnipresent possibility of having to face their own mortality, individuals convince themselves that they are in love with someone else – their “better half”, “partner”, or “beloved” – to repress a prior and essential impulse for self-love.

Woody Allen may have been onto something: "What's wrong with masturbation? It's sex with someone I love."

What was will never be again

I dreaded being spurned and refused to take the plunge. After I mucked things up royally, I realized that it was indeed love. Years later, she lingers; ours a still-born love.

Love, as I have been told, is equal parts hatred and affection, devoid of indifference. I loved her. I really did. I still do, to an extent. But appropriately, I loathe her absence. I despise her lips, those lips I still yearn to kiss. I despise her voice, an angelic voice that melted inhabitions, because it is merely a recollection, no longer immediate, no longer a repetition, no longer a reality. I despise her laugh and her orgiastic cries, lost to me and belonging to another. Vertigo and paralysis is all one can feel when imagining his beloved in the bed of another. I hate that recurring nightmare. I hate that faceless romantic rival. I leave him without face, holding out hope that it could still be my face. I loathe myself most of all, for squandering that time with her. I hate that I still love her.

A feeling of utter incompleteness is terribly unbearable. As I hiked a trail the other day, I remembered her being there, some time ago. When I camped out, all by my lonesome, she was there in my thoughts. And as I sat on the rocks looking at the setting sun, I wished she was there to share it. Incomplete. I am incomplete without her. It's futile though. What can I do? I hate this feeling of helplessness.

Is she my soulmate? Who knows. But I suspect there is no such thing. But I miss her all the same. I don't remember her as an object of my affection. I remember her as my partner, forever lost to me. I loved her and always will. I wish I had grown up in time to tell her.

Feist - Let It Die

Let It Die - Feist

Let it die and get out of my mind
We don't see eye to eye
Or hear ear to ear

Don't you wish that we could forget that kiss
And see this for what it is
That we're not in love

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start

It was hard to tell just how I felt
To not recognize myself
I started to fade away

And after all it won't take long to fall in love
Now I know what I don't want
I learned that with you

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start
The tragedy starts from the very first spark
Losing your mind for the sake of your heart
The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start

The romanticism that stirs within

Economy of language demands strict precision. No word or punctuation will be employed without purpose. This is how I was taught to write in ESL. As time passed, disenchantment emerged. Why should I contort my thoughts to fit such rules? And in adolescence, composition was infected with romanticism. Even Baudelaire would wretch at the prose produced by a decadent youth. They were empty expressions of unrequited passion, groping for an object of "affection". This Affection concealed wretched narcissism. The object of affection summoned base desires, obsessed with perception. Alas, surfaces do betray its facility, and in doing so, wounds the inner romantic. Without the sensation of beauty, what can I have? The grotesque pulled him into the abyss. Beauty was lost, forever? One is never free from self-grandeur. It stirs within. The drama concocted within the self distracts, bemuses, and entertains the bored individual.

Never were and forever

Darling, while you're chilling in Paris, I'm stuck nowhere, thinking vast thoughts slowed by minutia. But darling, don't you see? You keep me alive. My heart races to the vision of you, with naked or mind's eye. Beyond appearance, beyond sentiment or crude arousal, you are a wonder. At the edge of an abyss, you keep me from going over and slipping aimlessly into despair. May we share an encounter that never will be, lost forever in that misty dreamscape; a dream that sustains us nonetheless...until the next. Goodbye, hello...reality/dream...me and you, never were and forever.

The demonic fruit

- Are you ready?

Yeah, I am.

- Have you prepared a few words for us?

Nope, but I’m ready.

- Well, the stage is yours.

Thank you.

I am here, but not for long. I have much to say, but will tell you nothing at all. I will tell you what you want to hear, feed your illusions, and affirm your preconceptions. I will stroke your egos and add to their massive largesse. But I will tell you nothing at all – nothing that you don’t already know. When life becomes futile and passionless, nothing is all that I can tell you. A loveless existence is interminable. Honestly, I have nothing to tell you really.

But this is my time. This is my stage. This is my opportunity to peddle trite facility as truth - to a group that sees through my duplicity. Here I stand here today not a good man or a bad man, whatever good and bad means. So what do you want to know?

- What’s your favorite food?

Why?

- Because that question that tells a lot about a person.

Oh really? Well all right.

I really liked hot dogs.

- That’s not food.

What do you mean?

- It’s not a type of food.

Well what the bloody hell have I been shoving down my gullet all those years?

- We cannot disclose that, but we can safely assure you that hot dogs are not food.

Okay, I don’t want to know.

- Was there any other food that you had a special affinity for?

Yeah, I enjoyed bananas.

- The demonic fruit?

The what what?

The demonic fruit!

I don’t understand how bananas are demonic. I mean they were tasty and a versatile fruit.

You can eat them, fry them, make banana splits and blend them into smoothies and shakes.

- Yes, all of that is true, but that does not make them any less demonic.

Okay, I love the demonic fruit then, next?

- Please don’t address us with that tone.

Hey, is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?

- We are the ones posing the questions, not you.

I thought this could be a dialogue, an exchange of information and all that.

- We know all.

Good, so fruit or vegetable?

- A tomato is a tomato.

That’s some profound shit.

- Please refrain from using that language.

You know all, right?

- Yes.

So don’t prude up like you never knew about that little word.

- Please change your tone of voice.

All right, I suppose I’m disclosing too much, go on…what else do you want to know?

- What is love?

Okay, so we go from hot dogs to bananas to tomatoes to love? I have eaten the first three, but the last one ate me.

Prada spontaneity

She glanced at him. There was no doubt about it. She turned to walk away, but he spotted her. In a crowded Granville Island marketplace, they would meet for the first time in ten years. She courteously turned around to greet him, hoping to keep the encounter as short as possible, because she still had shopping to do.

”Hey, it’s been a long time,” he initiated. She looked at him intently, trying to see who this really was and replied with a nervous chuckle.

“Yeah it has.” She stared at her shoes, as she had often done in order to short circuit conversation. But as she grew absorbed with her footwear, her mind wandered. Groceries, clothes, bookstore, shower, nightlife…but this wasn’t part of her Saturday. They stood there for while. She wanted him to say, “So nice to see you again” and shuffle off. It never happened when she looked up. He was still there.

“I know that you probably want to get on with your usual Saturday. But usual is the usual, ya know? How about accompanying an old acquaintance for the day?”

She was taken aback by his candor. In spite of the abruptness of the encounter, she was intrigued by the proposal.

“And I’ll treat you to dinner. I mean its something long overdue.” To which she replied in cliché.

“So are you asking me out…on a date?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I mean we barely know each other now. I just didn’t want to wander the streets of Vancouver all by my lonesome,” he said with sedate joviality. She started to be swayed by his proposal, but still stood there silently, devising a response appropriate for the moment. When such a response was not forthcoming, he intervened again.

“You look like you’re on a schedule,” he said looking at her grocery list. “How about this? I’ll tag along with you for the morning as you go through that list. And if you aren’t tired of me after that, we can go on from there.” The slightest of smiles appeared on her face. She was amused that he was now a willing participant in her shopping escapades.

“That sounds like plan,” as she restarted her walk through the market. “And please try to keep up.” A playful haughtiness fused with her steps, as her Saturday routine was pleasantly disturbed.

---

Elevation

Above the valleys, over rills and meres,
Above the mountains, woods, the oceans, clouds,
Beyond the sun, past all etheral bounds,
Beyond the borders of the starry spheres,

My agile spirit, how you take your flight!
Like a strong swimmer swooning on the sea
You gaily plough the vast immensity
With manly, inexpressible delight.

Fly above this morbid, vaporous place;
Go cleanse yourself in higher, finer air,
And drink up, like a pure, divine liqueur,
Bright fire, out of clear and limpid space.

Beyond ennui, past troubles and ordeals
That load our dim existence with their weight,
Happy the strong-winged man, who makes the great
Leap upward to the bright and peaceful fields!

The man whose thoughts, the larks, take to their wing
Each morning, freely speeding through the air,
- Who soars above this life, interpreter
Of flowers' speech, the voice of silent things!

- Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du Mal, 3

The dandy

A desire for the end, simple release from mortality, informs nihilism. What must I do in order to fulfill my essence, my fate? This question torments the nihilist. He does not believe in nothing. He is the prototypical liberal taken to logical limits. Cutesy, nouveau ways of presentation, the task of aesthetical sensibility makes claims to supremacy over all other matters. A romantic is simply a nihilist existing in a state of abysmal denial. For the dandy, it is how he appears that trumps all.

As he walks through town with his notebook in tow and his cape draped elegantly over his shoulders, his face betrays the disdain he harbours for those who fail to understand him - he, the master-artist, the master-philosopher, the beautiful mind, wasted amongst the degenerate mass. Purity is exclusively his domain, and only he can hope to attain it. He walks glumly through the village, still yearning for purer times, for better times. Alas, as his sojourn nears its conclusion, he encounters the local drunkard, appearing as slovenly as ever, who asks for a pence to buy a drink. The dandy shoots him a cold stare, turning his cape in an equally dismissive manner, and marches onward for home. Upon returning to his studio, he draws a bath, strips off his garments, opens his veins, and waits for purity, because life is not where genuine being resides for the dandy.

There is the life-as-expected, the long journey to the middle, a search for the serenity-as-artifice, for the banal and the safe. This is life as a road map – meticulously planned in a general way. Here are the milestones, hit them on your way to the middle. The dandy can't lower himself to the petit bourgeois. It is repugnant to his 'nobler' sensibilities; the rabble rabble is below him.

The life unexpected comes to being through spontaneity. It is a life open to surprise, receptive of contingency. It breaks through the crust of repetition, refusing the teleology of rigid expectations and well-made plans. Life is wonder, bewilderment; it is not expressible simply in words or doctrine nor simply feelings and perceptions. What life is cannot be encapsulated in descriptions or speculations about what it should be, guaranteed. Life unfolds without knowledge of what is to come. The unknown is not an object the flaneur acquires, admires, critiques, and elevates by virtue of his general iridiscence. The dandy fears the unknown, even as the last drop of blood enters the bathwater. "Anywhere is better than here..." So begins the final entry in his notebook. He expires before finishing the thought.

The story begins and ends here...

“What if I were to tell you that I am still in love with you?”

“It doesn’t matter. It has been too long. We are different people. We will always be different people.”

The story begins and ends here, I suppose. What else can be said for love unrequited other than it is absurd. Yearning lingers in the heart of the romantic and can never be fully expiated. Contentions attesting to the contrary are patently duplicitous. He fully grasps the limits of romance, ecstasy and pain. It is at these most intense points where he imagines himself and his beloved. In his mind, he lives at the margins – imagines the blissful union, but remains in fear and trembling of the distance between. The romantic needs the pain of separation. For the union of lovers casts finitude upon individual psychic machinations. In encounter he must confront his other in actuality. The torment of alienation, that ineluctable distance between lovers, remains endless. The romantic needs perpetual yearning and hunger to satisfy his desire for the boundless.

Fixation

What is fixation? Fixation can be a stubborn, atavistic, romantic, and desperate hold onto a condition that never was -- and never will be. Fixation is that unyielding worship of a perfectible object, possible through a determined decision not to confront an existent human condition. Fixation yearns for confirmation and meaning. It desperately wants to believe that cosmic unity manifests itself at single percievable point - represented by an old man in the sky, a pair of supple breasts, the pure green of virgin pastures, or a lost garden blessed by blissful ignorance. But cosmic unity, if such a phenomena is at all possible, cannot be perceived, possessed, or grasped by a single One. Unity is lived in life between us and the world -- it requires a bold and courageous move into unknown horizons, not simply passing into contemplative purity. When fixated upon the idol, the object of affection and reverence, one is blinded to lived truth. The dream inspires but satisfies only individual delusion. Dreams are actualized, however imperfectly, in the life between human beings -- driving human becoming rather than fixating on Being. For no eternal form can satisfy the need for human becoming, since becoming is a transformative address of a world in flux. Fixation is a beautiful wax figure, that will be nothing more than what it appears. It cannot move. It cannot challenge facile judgments. It only reaffirms false perception and prejudice.

Medical History

A thirty year old man visits his doctor for the first time in a decade. The doctor opens up his file and notes that the patient has never undergone a physical. He asks the patient why this is the case. The patient simply informs the doctor that he is a nihilist and believes in nothing. The doctor tells him that he cannot in good conscience continue to be his physician, citing the lack of a medical history. The man gets up, drops his pants, and reveals the remanants of a castrated penis.

"No colds, no flus, didn't drink, didn't smoke, regular exercise, semi-regular sex, but my ex-girlfriend gnawed off my penis."

"Oh," the puzzled doctor replied. "Did she wear braces?"

"Why no."

Darling

Darling, my love, I have travelled countless miles on this earth and in my imagination, but there you are, just as you were, painfully lovely and forever elusive.

Darling, I have moved heaven and earth to separate from you, to forget us. I can't. Here I am, just as I was, tragically infatuated with impossible you. Impossible you, my darling, I cannot fathom to be away from you.

Darling, I wonder, I wander, I meander back to you, impossible you. Still, even now, I hear your laugh. Still, even now, I feel your touch, I sense your bashful and elegant body pressed close to mine. Still, right now, my world has no vibrance without you, my darling.

Darling, I wonder, I do wonder, how you are, how things could be, how things should have been between you and me. I love you and that I cannot deny. Your warmth, your dreamy exuberance, your passionate lips, your ebullience, our ebullience, our joy, our passion; but now, there's only pain, pain forevermore. Every moment absent of you destroys me ever so slowly; it accelerates my degeneration, cuffs me to regression, and whittles away my soulless atrophied existence.

Darling, you hurt me so, you left me shattered, you left me groping for impossible hope. How can I go, my love, without you? How can I go on without you my darling?

Darling, darling, I love you so.. I await your impossible return and I know I shall come to grief.

Closure?

She laid there, as if daring me to do what that I knew I shouldn’t. I wanted to succumb so badly. She bit her lip in an irresistibly flirtatious way, as I made a half-hearted grasp at composure. Off came one strap, then the other, and she started to shimmy out of her dress. She knew full well that my inhibitions had been shattered, and that she was in full control. She smiled. It was a command more than a smile. I went over. It was too much for me to bear.

As we laid in an intimate, expended embrace, she whispered those things I had longed to hear. When morning broke, the whispers were forgotten. I looked over and, as always, she was gone. And as expected, the note was there: “Thanks. Love, T”. She had to get to the church for preparations; her groom was waiting.

I drove past the church and stopped across from the street. I contemplated it. I really did. I walked up to the steps and back to my car. I stared at the cathedral, still contemplating it. Then the passenger door opens. I swiveled my head around to see who it was. All I could only make out was a blur of white. Of course, it was her climbing in. Off came one strap then the other…and it ends.

The fantasy-nightmare never holds the same details, but it unfolds in a familiar way. It ends as quickly as it begins, because dreams reject the constraints that govern conscious life. They are liberating and debilitating; feeling eternity in an instant is to have nothingness and totality meld into the other. After waking up from it, an anxious arousal surges through my body. It is only in the shower, after I have assuaged the need, do I experience serenity. As I stood in the shower with water pouring over my head, I realized the utter absurdity of it, the absurd idea of her. And it was then, pleasuring myself to a familiar fantasy, did I realize that the dream was liberating once I accepted its absurdity - the impossibility of a girl whom I never encountered but seemingly understood so intimately. Following the climax of a morning shower, I would think no more about it...until her inevitable return.

Failure of the Romantic

"Sometimes I feel that I have failed everyone who loves me. I have let complacency rather than dogged determination define my life. When I look back at the quarter of a century that I have spent on this planet, I see nothing but failure – potential unfulfilled. The runner who constantly looks over at his fellow competitors quickly finds himself lagging behind. I measure and compare myself to those around me, all the while layering mask upon mask, until I do not know who I really am. Although I put up a brave front, the fear of relegation is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a teenager, I experienced the deepest scar – genuine heartbreak. The heartbreak was the product of timidity more so than of bold arrogance. It was a massive blow upon my budding masculinity. Rather than growing up, I was stunted. I found the stereotypes far too easy to abandon. An arrogant, brash, and consciously negligent visage desperately concealed a profound disillusionment with the world and with human relationships in general. I could not trust myself, much less in others. Friendships were strained. My ego grew seemingly larger, while truthfully my self-esteem neared annihilation.

Emptiness was all that I felt. I could not see beyond a moment in the past, and a penchant for superficiality emerged. Things, things, and more things are what I turned to in order to fill a void that seemed boundless. I could not see an end to the pain – apart from the auto-destruct button. Where would I go? It all seemed to have passed me by. Once, I sat alone in the playground, reminiscencing about the lovely joyous excursions as a child. I was wiser back then, I thought, as that young boy swinging on the swing, without care or neuroses. He ran side by side with his peers without direction or telos; the joy was in the act itself. There was no concern for measuring sticks, no persistent fears about failure. But even childhood is romanticized beyond recognition; recollections are unreliable, the product of a melancholic mind. If better times were behind me, what could I look forward to?

Even now, as I type this meandering collection of pathetic recollections, I still think of what might have been. It has paralysed me. I have made bold manifestos in the past. “I will turn things around now!” are how they usually go. But the singular gesture, the monumental moment of epiphany burns out quickly once things ease back into the status quo. How to turn things around? I still do not know. I just know that I want to change. I just haven’t found out how."