Tehvitan Ibele

April is the cruellest month

As she sat, alone, in the kitchen of her childhood home, gazing blankly across the familiar space of the room, tapping the heels of her feet on the grey stone tile, the audible tick of the second-hand mimicked the internal click of time passing in her mind when she sat in the library just days ago, humming with nervous energy, frowning at the slow-chapped stubbornness of the computer screen, crowded by the sound of furious typing.  It must have been for just a moment.  The rustling of bags and the apparition of warm faces brought her back.  The faint light of the afternoon filtered through the clouds, passing through the grates of the screen door and illuminated her soft smile.  

A peal of thunder rang through the air.  She tilted her head slightly, shrouding her right eye with long locks of hair, listening intently for the sound of droplets, counting the moments between each strike.  One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  The second peal brought rain, and with it, a euphoric shiver from the base of her skull down the keys of her spine.  She took her sister by the hand and rushed out the door as fast as her legs would carry--into the street, down the road--until she reached a darkened meadow.  Here, she took off her shoes and carried them as she strode barefoot into the field.  She felt the blades of grass bend with each step, the thirsty soil sated with light drink, the crackling energy above.  As she lifted her head towards the sky, she closed her eyes; it was just as she remembered--the warmth in the air mingling with the drops of rain, the earth beneath her feet.  And as she stood perfectly still amidst the sound of spring showers, just for a moment, she thought she felt the same rain from many years ago, underneath the same sky.

An old story

We had rehearsed for hours.  When she arrived at my doorstep the night before, breathless, she told me that he was leaving tomorrow.  But, she had insisted on a last dinner before he left—I imagined her gripping the cord of her house phone as she spoke with him, strangling her fingers with its plastic coils, carefully infusing each phrase with measured nonchalance.

She wanted to say so much to him, she wanted to say everything, but she never quite had the words.  And yet her simple request—Will you help?—sounded to me a powerful melody, drawing from my lips an involuntary Yes.  And so we began. 

She practiced relentlessly, and when she would suspect that I felt it required no more iteration, she would ask to repeat it just once more, to make sure she would not forget when the time came.  When we had finished, she handed me her credit card and insisted I have dinner a few tables away from where they would sit, in case she required an emergency consultation.

And as I watched her lips, two tables down, I could read the contours of our speech:

I love you.  (She let the pause wander.)  I never thought I would tell you—I suppose I always assumed we would have more time, and for a while, yesterday, I thought I would let you go without knowing, but I don’t think I could handle that.  I don’t mean to stop you, nor do I mean to change your mind—I know you love her in ways you could never love me.  (She had cried at this point in practicing, and repeated it until she could say it clearly.)  I have been your friend, I have seen you happy, and I wish for nothing more than that.  Love is sacrifice.

In that moment, I remembered the night before when she watched me with her dark brown eyes, speaking those words again, and again.

Once more, please.

The Great Halls

I sit beside you, my friend, on a warm, hard, wood bench, at a warm, hard, wood table.  The roar of chatter and drinking reverberates through the hall, the sheer sound of laughter and merrymaking flickers candles, splays light.  Four sleek men sit with us, but amongst the flagons and the solid stone floor, the corner of my eye paints them in flowing beards and larger frames.  

A feast appears before us: loaves of bread as dense as rock and as plentiful as boulders piled against a rotting cliff, staving off troubled waves from already tormented shores; haunches of meat from goats, cows, deer, and other animals unfortunate enough to cross paths with our hunters that afternoon; sausages; and flagons upon flagons of mead and beer--the clear glass before me turns to burnished iron.

And I remember, my friend, that day on the battlefield, the moment when you fell.  Your face was not peaceful as they promised, the look of abject horror, the surprise at your own passing.  I was taught to rally at your death, to flare into bloodlust, to execute your vengeance, but amidst the aura of rage and terror, I could only sit beside you and close your eyes.  In my dreams, I have saved you a thousand times, and will a thousand more. But here we sit, drinking not in glory, not in victory, but in remembrance.

One

And the rain drops in beautiful rhythm,
Tapping the cold, cold ground,
Unearthing memories of better days.

We sat beneath the branches of the windswept willow,
Listening to the light showers on fallen leaves and grass,
Watching the mist crowd and embrace the city,
Feeling the droplets soak into our thirsty skin. 

I asked if you would stay just a bit longer,
    but I knew you could not,
        and so I listened until your footsteps disappeared into the forest's music.

 

A rite of passage

In a faraway country, the male youth, to become men, must undergo a gruesome trial.  For this rite of passage, they are paired with another boy who has also reached the age of majority—sometimes the first boy waits only days before a match is found, sometimes months go by.  They may not meet before the ceremony, and what happens during, can hardly be described as meeting.  They are brought before the tribunal by an executioner with their heads covered by burlap sacks.  The first question the council asks is “Who is the Answerer and who is the Listener?”  As you may very well guess, the “Answerer” will answer the only subsequent question uttered by the council and the “Listener” will be silent.  There is no discussion, but there must be agreement.  Thus, if one boy speaks first and is interrupted by the second, both are executed.  If one boy chooses, and the other subsequently chooses the same role, both are executed.  Thus, to survive the first gate of the trial, one must speak, and the other must choose the remaining role.   The question that follows is widely known--it is, “Answerer, shall you or the Listener die?”  I have heard many answers in my time.  A boy of war said, “I shall not.”  A boy of kindness said, “I shall.”  A boy of dark humor said, “We both shall.”  I have been asked by many what words they should utter.  Fool is he who does not know his own answer. 

 

Flowers for Algernon

There is a moment in the novel when the protagonist watches himself through the window.  Several, I believe, but the one I remember perhaps speaks to the age at which I read it--that, my gender, or both.  Anyway.  He watches himself, wishing, hoping, willing that his consciousness will merge with his body so that he can physically experience what he sees.  He eventually manages to, but, if I remember correctly, the tragedy lies in the fact that this externalizing of the self is a metaphor for the separation of his heightened mental capacity and his animalistic desires, the latter of which is fulfilled (ironically) through exercise of the former.  So it goes.

This phenomenon occurs in our daily lives in the form of the surreal, sometimes brought on through alcohol, or more frequently for my species of student, lack of sleep and constant high stress environments.  It's the engine of routine--a Promethian punishment focused through the lens of mediocrity and, in my case, slight masochism.  Even the smallest shift, however, an attempt to wake from the repetitive nightmare, threatens to derail the beautifully constructed infinite loop.  What I experienced today, however, was different.  It was something, I contend, more valuable than happiness.  Of course, there is a decent possibility that this is my insanity running full circle--my delusion forming the final corners of its perfected justification, its little realm, its perfect porcelain world.  I imagine the end of Brazil.

I was saying something.  Oh yes, something more valuable than happiness.  It was contentment.  Facing my four professors every week, the horsemen and horsewoman of the apocalypse, the worry of internships bootstrapping into worries of employment, the increased speed and workload, the earlier starts, the division of my heart and soul, it all did what I could only hope for in my wildest dreams--it got better.  Because, it had to.  Because, for so many reasons.  

Recall the ancient Chinese concept of opposites--or, common sense: the concept of light is coherent insofar as the concept of darkness exists.  Similarly, happiness couples with sadness.  (Extremes are more alike than any other pairing, but that is another ramble for another day.)  Contentment is stability, and to use a descriptor socially tinged with multiple meanings, it is sustainable.  Now, for the sake of hedging, I will say that I am unsure how long this will last.  But today was quite a day, perfect in its normalcy.

Not with a bang but a whimper

We are in a perilous situation, my friends.  But before discussion moves forth, let me pose a scenario.  You are floating at sea during a thunderstorm.  The sky above you shudders with each bolt of lightning, each peal of thunder.  Momentarily paralyzed, you gaze upwards in terror and wonder as the light of the stars stretch toward one another, forming rifts in the heavens, cracking the dome of the world.  This situation falls squarely within the realm of Fear, one of the grander deities in the hierarchy of psychological constructs.  Imagine further, that while you are at sea during this thunderstorm, there appears beneath you a long and wide shadow.  You do not notice it, but it is there.  It consumes, not out of necessity, not even necessarily out of pleasure, but out of sheer ability.  It is unstoppable, it is absolute, and it is coming.  This is the deity of Foreboding. 

This is a terrible situation.   I wish to be clear; when I say terrible, I do not mean it in the colloquial sense of “bad,” or “unfortunate,” but rather the incarnation Yeats used in Easter, 1916—terrifying, without connotations of good or bad.  I have been taught by legends, fairy tales, and morality tales, how to confront these constructs of Fear or Foreboding, but what we are dealing with, my comrades, is something far greater.  We are dealing with the deities of Apathy and Routine.

I believe it was Mill, who, at the beginning of his treatise, Utilitarianism, stated that he had decided to write this book after he was at a point in his life when he had time to sit and think; deconstructing his previous beliefs, and fashioning those still-standing truths into a more ideal form of thought and consideration.  This is not that time.  Perhaps when we were younger, perhaps when we are older, but there is not time enough now, nor will there be for a while. 

Are we, then, to simply resign ourselves to the command of these “lesser” deities?  As a clever man once put it, “the question hardly survives its statement.”  Perhaps, flowing with the stream of bleakness, our power of defiance lies within a narrowly defined box, much like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.”  Or perhaps, we steal precious moments away, bit by bit, from their dominion, keeping our selves hidden, keeping our selves safe, for a day when there is time enough, and world enough again—this, at least, we must do, for as it goes:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends...

To which the old man replied

Eternity is short when love is destruction; moments expand, but not by much.  Flares and sparks, fires and flames, but time tempers all things.  The strength of love, then, is not to be measured by intensity, but rather by patience. 

When two souls breathe together, the earth does not shudder--it sighs.

As for the quote, I believe it is, "What is it that a lover cannot accomplish when resolution is on his side?"

And the young man said

It is a terrible thing to be in love.  When lovers are together, the romantic may speak of harmony and counterpoint, the sound of two souls breathing, forming a sort of gestalt perfection.  When they are apart, he may speak fondly of longing, but the reality of separation is far worse than mere dissonance.  A tamer word is passion, a truer one is fire.  It lives and breathes to burn and consume--in the darkest hours, it binds and suffocates; love is a many-tendriled thing. 

At the very least, it varies in its torture.  At times you feel the strands of your sanity unravel, inch by eternal inch, until breathless, mindless, you pray for sleep.  It is little wonder that lovers are mistaken for madmen.  It is as a wise woman asked, "What horror is a lover incapable of when he acts in the name of love?"

Shadows

Near the end of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Chihiro and her floating friend, No-face, board a train to a far place.  I say “far,” and not “faraway,” precisely because the latter, through its sound and rhythm, gives a false sense of lulling comfort, rocking, and swaying, while the former is truer—it mimics the reach of a sullen gaze, a length that stretches just beyond the bounds of the familiar, and just before the realm of the mystical.  The rest of the patrons are shadows.  Shades identified solely by the outline they carry (briefcase, hat, cane).  They are remnants of their former selves, now wandering in the shape of long-forgotten memories, etched into existence.  Echoes.

 

At the lowest point of arguably the most hopeless week of my life, this scene sprawled before me on my way to campus.  I laughed.  I find, in the darkest moments, it is all you have left.  I was on my way to a far place, a place that inflicted torture in the subtlest ways imaginable, five days a week, and I was paying them to do so.  It is truly rare to find an analogue that approaches even a semblance of Humbert Humbert in terms of implicating an audience.  I laughed.  And when I was sufficiently satisfied, when even the last of my laughter had run out, I found myself at the correct stop.

 

In the depths, the dark seems eternal.  It is not.