Remember. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
I have been floating lately, amongst the weeds of essays and poems I dream of,and just like all dreams must,mine too dissolve into my eyelids,worn out from the burial of a hundred or so such dreams. I have tried my best,to write down,impressions of what I remember,and this one is written as Cohen holds my hand and guides me through.
The first time, I laid my eyes on you, I felt as if my eyes have been waiting for your reflection,like a river that bleeds through the town,waits after dusk for moonlight to curdle on its banks. It felt as if fate itself waited for you to arrive in my life, and the shaded books of Neruda and Kundera on my bookshelves lit up,anticipating your touch. You were my own private recourse against the festival of insignificance that ran through my bones.
And then came October,then came October. October swam into our life,as summer was on its way out,our fingers worked themselves to the bone,tracing the contours of each other, and the choral colours of your laughter, saturated the town. As autumn breathed in through the windows,you held my starved abominable lips against yours,I felt the shape of your warmth,outlined against mine,and for a fleeting glimpse, I came alive, hidden away in the long tresses of your hair,I was a babbling brook. Bukowski finally made sense for me, however outrageous the idea was,I believed that death would truly tremble to slither its way between us.
To this day, as I write this down piecing together shards of distraught memories,I cannot afford to take any poetic liberty when writing about October. For whatever I may come up with,will stain the taste of autumn that’s still rich on my tongue. There comes a time in one’s life when he confronts the desire to revisit the past,to relive it. Desire, is not rooted in rationale,rather it is a resistance against the rational and it’s one of many forays of the mind into the absurd,to want something against all rationale is to desire it.
When one desires to relive the past,he strips himself away from the capacity of surprise, from the space of possibility that is the present, he sacrifices what he is yet to have for what he will always end up losing. Of course,he doubts his own judgement of the aesthetic of the past and this doubt is what tempts him to make the sacrifice,this doubt is what ends up making room for his faith in his desire. He makes room for uncertainty in what he knows to be certain,he wages a war against the impending invasion of fate. The romantic,the one imbued with desire,will always remain a loyal servant to his past,and will always give up what can be, in pursuit of what could have been.The guillotine of nostalgia doesn’t deter him, it is rather a warm invitation.
Winter came to town soon after,and a special sickness started to eat through me.The belly of our love started to bleed, like a forgotten shipwreck in the pacific. You wanted me to become the man I was in October,and I could never amount to that man,not even after 4 years.
In our final moments together,you asked me to forget you. I have tried,and I have failed. I will perhaps find someone else to love again,I’ll perhaps find the burden of hope again and tread on the thin ice of modern life but I’ll never become the man I was on that autumn. We were two people, isolated and we were capable of believing in something, us, and no matter how fragile the memory becomes,it carries the capacity of hope in it,it becomes hope.
And so, October will linger—not just as a memory, but also as a reminder of beauty of the spontaneous velocity of existence,that one can permeate through.The past, even if given authority over the present and the future, is not a cruel master as one makes out to be,given one is not disillusioned by it. To remember, the times when our love reverberated even through the shadows of our existence,to remember when we were capable of belief against the absurdity of existence,to remember resistance is not the virtue of one who is weak,but rather it is the virtue of being human. One must not to be asked to forsake one’s past,for it is in my mind the most extreme and rigid form of betrayal one could be asked to enact upon himself, one ends up being a fugitive to his own memory,a stranger to his life.
There comes a point in our life where our measure of our being is amounted to the stories we tell, where we stand still because this is as far as we can come, before the thin ice of modern life cracks open under our feet. The past is all we have at that point, to look back to, to live with. In essence,one must confront the past and with it comes the desire to alter it,to change it.The burden and brutality of our existence is that our understanding of who we are, is learnt backwards, and as all mortal beings who love realises sooner or later,one also must learn to let go.The one who desires to relive his past,over and over again,fails to let go,he gives in to the tyranny of hope that’s built on top of misplaced faith,and there is nothing more brutal than hope built on misplaced faith.My salvation lies in the suffering under the weight of such hope,and its creases touch the boundary of the loss I had to endure,and continue to,when you left.It’s quite paradoxical that one finds freedom in imprisonment, but maybe that’s what Camus meant when he remarked that one must imagine Sisyphus to be happy. As one finds his own burden again,I’ll find hope that breaks into my skin,and wear it. I’ll go looking for the man from October,I’ll go where there’s nothing left to return to.