André Gide
~
...that the roads lead to nowhere when you have walls around your heart.
There are outer obstacles and inner scars, wounds at the surface and fractures that tear you apart. There is the decision or a lack thereof, the drive to authenticity or a falling to pieces, the will to build on goodness or a forgotten painting about forgetting - forgetting what?
Then there's you and you and everything stuck in between.
Then there's me and it feels as though I've lost all my pens, as if the words perceived my thoughts as unfair taxation laws so they drowned all the instruments of expression into the realm of immaterial ink and then wrote themselves off. Thus, I now find shelter in words that describe how the old ones used to arrange their letters in me. I know that my eyes have been closed for a while, and that none of this will open them because the roads on my eyelids are flooded with apologies that never made it out of my head - unless dreamworld counts.
For now, the dot follows the patterns that match the mysterious code of identity. The dot can't always see the dot within. The dot breaks itself into symbols under which obscurity hides meaning and meaning hides light. The dot sees itself in other dots and, sometimes, the other way around. The dot has no understanding of scale because it has never met a unit. The dot's favorite geometrical concept is the infinite line it can't wish into being by itself. The dot knows of the third dimension but pretends that it doesn't exist while it enjoys the two-dimensional labyrinth. The text, the paper, and the pen, they're all predetermined. But the dot is free. The dot is how much love you're freely willing to give. The dot is the handwriting.
Different people feel different things. But perhaps my void and yours are the same. My void compares itself to the empty center of a spider's perfect web, the eye of the secret storm that sees the Nothing in everything and feels the Everything in that Nothing. Perhaps that's what I hope to understand, the calm infinity dwelling in the nothingness of this beautiful song, the calm song in everything and everyone.
But the words don't always fit the music. For between the point where symbols fail to carry the feeling and the point where the heart can no longer beat off that feeling's weight, there is a line of lonely letters living lovelessly in the blind lavender ink spots of the imagination.
I watch and wonder, wonder and watch. I watch the games at their fingertips and wonder how aware they are of the game inside, the one between the hero and the villain, the victim and the pretender, the warrior and the chess-master, the composer and the lyricist, and my personal favorite at this moment, the ego and the anti-hero.
The game is won when the big antonyms become synonymous. I don't know them all. But for now, I can recall that sometimes unreading is reading, covering is uncovering, giving is receiving, unlearning is learning, breaking is mending, dying is living, doubting is suspecting, growing is a return to the child and, more often than not, I am you and you are me.
For now, in the seemingly perennial distance between being and becoming, I see a child riding on the back of a wolf, a grey and white wolf that was born in the snow.
I wonder where they're going next.
~
“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone.”
George Gordon Byron