On hearing that Gogol burned his masterpiece

The horror of the moment when the wind scatters the papers of a lifetime’s work over the morning tide. The table summersaults across the sand. Above me, the kites fly away like loosened veils.

In a dream last night I saw the spiked gates of a city containing all cities of all times, and beyond it the landscape of all landscapes.

I stop running and breathe.

Joy of the abandoned oar.

Joy of the endless journey in time. Joy of knowing that each time is a side of time’s prism, and each time the place where all time begins and ends; that this tide itself is the journey, this morning the waking city.

Somewhere up there: the city of souls in perpetual surrender. City of the waking dream. City of the ancient tide and breathless moments. City of whirlwinds and the breathless centre. City of wind and light. Loss and gratitude. Death and birth.

City of joy.

A cynical education

Moronic cynicism is a form of naiveté. It’s naiveté turned inside out, naiveté with a sneer. Imagine a child smoking a cigarette.
Momus

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
T.S. Eliot

When we were young, we made the earth-shattering discovery that life had dark corners, and believed that because they were dark they hid the truth. The truth was cynical, like us. The planet turned on an evil axis. Our lives simply confirmed this. In stressful moments we always showed our true colours, confirming to one another that we weren’t really friends, that we were just like all the rest. We used each other for pleasure, and pleasure was all there was.

We listened to music, watched films, read books, taking care not to like anything too much. The dangerous thing was to be duped by a certain style, idea, movement - to be a poseur. This would rightly have left one open to mockery. Besides, everything had already been done, there was nothing new under the sun. Thus we were drawn to anything with a decadent bent: we went to shows by any ’subversive’, drug-addled artist, we bought books by any writer who was called ‘a prophet of despair’, sniffing at their obvious shock-value marketing.

Our pleasures became guilty, and all the more interesting for it.

At university, we learned to put everything in quotation marks. We learned to ‘pick apart’ naïve narratives of ‘truth’. Talking became competing, knowledge became power. We were attracted to the work of other cynics, but learned by example to distance ourselves from our attraction by wrapping it in respectable conclusions and fashionable jargon. The truth was tactical after all: we proved it by getting ahead.

We were above enthusiasm, above allegiance. We had the armoury of irony and critical thought at our disposal. There was no position whose discourse of power we couldn’t expose.

By the same token we could hardly avoid turning our critical gaze inwards. We saw how and why we used irony, and secretly, cynically mocked ourselves, while never letting our social shields slip. We reached the limits of our ‘disenchantment’.

It had taken us years to begin to understand ourselves. Now we started to question our efforts to prove ourselves in this system of knowledge. We wondered why knowledge should lead to complexity and not wisdom. We cringed at the naïve use of a word like ‘wisdom’ as we had learnt to, yet wondered, if there were such a thing to aspire to, what it might be. The mirrors with which we had surrounded ourselves started to crack, but none of us knew what lay behind them.

This was when our real education began.

The mourner and the melancholic

The mourner knew what he’d lost and knew that he’d never get it back. He was caught between despair and guilt. He clasped his private night to his heart and told it he’d never let it go; never again would he be husband, lover, friend. Never again would he trust anyone.

The melancholic didn’t know what he’d lost, and thus had nothing to lose. But he was afraid of the nothingness that threatened to swallow him. He floated on the surface of life like oil on water, and asked the moon to show him a silver sea that would hide him. He had never trusted anyone.

The mourner felt like a statue commemorating a forgotten man.

The melancholic walked among people like a ghost, and saw only himself in them: distorted parts of human beings, fragments of failed pasts.

For both there was a slow accepting dawn.

For the mourner it proved to be the inescapable drift of time, which let him release his grip on the night and revealed the new life in which he suddenly found himself: new longings and losses. The statue came to life and joined the crowd.

For the melancholic it was a path only he could have found. It led through his fear to a feeling of being at home in himself. In this clearing he was shown the substance of things, shown that he shared in that substance. The dawn pierced the veil that had always covered his eyes, let him look out at the world, and take his first steps.