Vignette: Disillusionment

Is it fruitless to search out what is truth and falsehood? To piece together the world into a coherent picture that accommodates the collective experiences of humanity into a comprehensible whole? No sooner does one come to terms with one conundrum that another appears. In the tiresome quest for understanding, each worldview iteration encompasses more and thus when each comes crashing down, even more purpose and motivation is taken with it, all bound together, all removed to be built anew. But building is expensive, time-consuming and tiring.

To believe in nothing is my negation. To be paralysed by doubt is still to be paralysed. But what can a finite mind do against an infinite universe, with more knowledge and revelation coming day by day to revolutionise? Growing tired of revolution, reassessment and longing for stability in this world, stability to security, security to comfort. Is all comfort an illusion? The product of an idle, unchallenged mind?

Vignette: Mare

Evening promenade ambulations were the always the most calming. The trees lined the right and the sand on the left. The sea reached out for the shore, pursuing and receding. How many people had looked out in just this way over the centuries? Caught up in an idle thought, the germ of a reflective cascade, the bud of a mental exercise through the high-vaulted halls of philosophy.

Perhaps it takes a certain disposition to appreciate this environment. A quieter, reflective temperament with a grandiose capacity for trying to comprehend the mysteries of this world. The sentiment charmed. It repelled any thoughts of loneliness, replacing it with a profound solidarity with all those who must once have stood here, in tranquil contemplation. It was an order, implicit, a gathering of kindred spirits who meet each other not in person, in speech and actions, but in prose or verse. The records of their hearts laid bare for another sensitive soul to imbibe, empathise with, and express in yet another flourish of creativity.

On more transcendent days, it seemed that the spirit of that quiescent community was closer to the sea, the land and the sky than to any other human organisation. How many regimes, triumphs and tragedies had this sea observed? Older, older still. How many births, deaths, frustrations and elations had been absorbed into the memory of the sea? Absorbed and absolved in the sublime depths that deny any attempt at exploration. Like the subconscious of the super-consciousness of humanity, which discovers a rare listener out of every few thousand individuals, who tries to give it a voice for the next explorer. 

The exclusivity of the organisation was a source of clandestine pride, but its reality could never be certain. Perhaps such perspective was all too common, disguised in innumerable variations, lenses and distortions into the full spectrum of superficial personalities. Or perhaps it was a phantasm, an ideal borne of a romantic hope of easing isolation, one too acutely felt by asocial individuals, read into the texts and expressions of others. 

At other times, the sea lost its symbolism, snapping back to a churning body of water, unconscious, unobservant and unfeeling. It reclaimed its position as a sublime force with mastery over a presumptuous humanity. It broke its mental alliance with a callous fickleness and left the observer stranded and alone. No longer a comfort, but a font of unease.

It would not do. The observer grants his own interpretation and voice to the voiceless, and Oceanus, for all his pretences, could be neither friend nor foe to the community that personified him with recall, and attempted to co-opt into their quest for questions and answers. It was a tool, a platform from which to explore realities beyond the physical, but only as much as a mind was willing to grant it metaphysical meaning by analogies and association.

Vignette: Imagination

Ensconced in a narrow field,
I contented myself
Playing with components
Familiar and accessible.
Arrangements and
Rearrangements revealed
Minor inconsistencies,
Yet of them I was only

peripherally aware.

I turned my attention
To unresolved questions
Trying to piece what I could
Into a mythos that would
Help me to make sense.

Mental knots now in focus
Refused to untie
Fractal tapestries beneath
The surface lie

Soon the blocks
Once so reliably stable
Crumbled under
Closer examination

New blocks were found,
Discovered
For they were always
Neglectedly present

Astonishing Reality
makes the imagination
shudder at the pretension
that one would ever
conceive a world

Vignette: Mere Meaning 1

There was a crone who used to visit the town library, the building I was privileged to live just across from. So I noticed her, a hunched wrinkled devotee of the written word, always in a pastel blouse with a black skirt and shoes, entering and exiting between the Ionic columns of that noble edifice. She brought a trolley with her, which changed its contents like the clouds gracing the sky, that is, frequently and never the with repetition. If she was really reading at such an astonishing pace, I thought that she must have broken a Guiness record for speedreading. Then one day she simply didn't show, nor the next. I looked out for her in the obituaries, but her face never showed between all the comforting verses and condolences. She came over to exchange words with me sometimes, that's how I knew her appearance. I supposed that she must have exhausted all the books in our library and moved on to graze on greener intellectual pastures.

A year passed. About the next September, and I decided to take a longer route for my evening jog, so ended up running through a neighbourhood I didn't know all too well. There, I saw her again, sitting on a bench out on a veranda. My curiousity broke my run, a conversation like a beckoning golden apple to Diana, and I walked up to her fence and rang the doorbell. There was no response from her. I thought she might have suffered a stroke; that would explain her sudden literary cessation. Panting, I watched her for awhile, earphones still tuned to Dvorak's New World. A crescendo reminded me that I might want to put aside the music to catch any faint utterances from her lips, so I did. Yet she was motionless, as still as a terracotta footsoldier, and as silent as one too. Poor dear, trapped in that body. What good was acquiring all the knowledge of the world if it could not be articulated?

The door to her house opened, and a middle-aged man emerged. He wore slacks and an oversized T-shirt; a thin, anaemic man, who looked like he might evaporate at any moment. He walked over to her with a tray of food, then lifted his head and saw me by their gate. Be amiable, I thought, so I waved to him. He traversed the short path to the gate and greeted me.

'We don't get many visitors,' he said, 'My name is Alef, but most people call me Al, I'm her eldest son.'

He told me she had a stroke some time ago, I suppose that must have been when her mobility was compromised. I asked about her trips to the library, telling him I used to see her cart volume after volume out of those holy halls. He told me she was a linguist by training, that she enjoyed cataloguing the way that written languages developed and how they were used. She had been working on a massive project during the sunset of her life, he said, and the stress must have got to to her during those final frenetic weeks. One morning she had become as mute as Zechariah, and things had deteriorated from there.

'She hardly communicates now. I just feed and clothe her, my siblings help me to support her financially, but they're all preoccupied with their own affairs.'

'Well,' I said, 'at least she has you. I was puzzled by the disappearance of a fellow ardent of our town library. I'm sorry to hear she's like this now.'

'She was a kind mother, sharp-tongued but well-intentioned. She'd always complain about how none of us could understand her because we children only conversed and comprehended in one language, and not to mention in a language like English that obscures meaning so.'

'It must have been interesting to be raised by a linguist. '

'I don't think so, at least, not by her. She kept most of her work separate from our domestic life. What she did try to do was teach us nouns and verbs in multiple languages as we were growing up, we three children took to that with varying degrees of affinity.'

'My family only utilises English.'

'My mother would not approve, that I can say for certain. You mentioned the library, do you enjoy reading?'

'Indubitably. Anything from Homer, Cicero and Dante to Melville, Asimov and Dickens or Sun Tzu, Murakami and Narayan to Tufail, Khayyam and Oz.'

We heard a clatter as I uttered my statement. Turning in its direction of origin, I saw Al's mother, teeth grit, trying to bend down for her culinary utensils. Al responded with fluid attentiveness and went into the house to obtain a replacement set. I moved beside her and lowered myself to pick them up.

Standing where I was, I became aware of two letters which she had fashioned by arranging her rice on the plate. 'L' and 'A'. She waved for the chopsticks, but Al soon emerged and passed her a clean pair. She got to work, forming 'T' and 'I', and as she was working on the last letter, Al said to me, 'She wants you to go and learn Latin.'

'Learning languages has never been a high priority for me.'

She frowned, and turned her face away like a schoolgirl offended by the ignorance her class' resident unscholarly clown. Al chuckled, 'She doesn't wish to see you again unless you do so.'

'I'll get to it someday then. I'd best be off, sorry to have taken up quite a bit of time!'

'Not at all, I'm enjoying this disruption of monotony. Goodbye!'

'Goodbye!'

As I ran back to the pavement, Al called out, 'You might want to check the origin of that word 'Goodbye''. I snorted, vaguely amused. Waving to them both, I resumed my jog and reflected on the oddity of this encounter.

Vignette: Urbs Musicae

Tangled streets gird ornate palaces and pale townhouses, plastered over with classical divinities and emblems of victory. Each one plays a variation of the imperial theme in its symbolically infused facade. Wings and robes, kotinoi and trumpets resound in an enduring efflorescence. Every anthropomorphic pilaster and corinthian capital romantically suggesting far more than any current amalgamation of ferrous alloy and brittle silicon. When Nox arrives, the organic generation of multifarious melodies by composers long inhumed put the artificial perfection of present popularity to sonorous shame.

Yet, globalised modernity rises like a tide to drown bastions of antiquated practice. The majestic mirage is disillusioned by the commercial proliferation of 'Kassa'; reinventing itself as a curiousity to maintain a voided existence.

Vignette : Release

Still, isolated, quiet. Dim. Flickering, connected but disconnected, the promise of a chat, but everyone else passes by in virtual ignorance. Wouldn't it be easier not to have any expectations of them? Their empty promises cannot fulfill the heart's perceived contract.

Breaking, away from it all. The world can spin on, pirouetting to some unseen finality, aimless in its cyclical nihilism. Everyone, saying they'll be there when the weight presses, not realising that they add to the weight instead. Their ghosts stand beside while their reality moves on, and the memories of former solidarity turn to mockery.

It was easier. It was easier when no one offered their support, before the soul was tied to an image that vanished as a phantom and the heart left to drown in the open waters. But the ties cannot be so easily cut once formed, disentangling risks destruction.

The higher realms beckon, out of the stagnant, opaque ocean. Called once again to liberated thought, without concern for the comprehension of others. Flying into the oblivion of discovery, into increasingly esoteric paths of the labyrinth. The silent, glacial sea can subsume the spectres.

Vignette : Reinquire

When do we stop asking why? And perhaps more importantly, why do we stop asking why and how?

All children are naturally curious, but over the course of mass produced education, we learn answers to questions we aren't interested in, and the questions about what we are interested in are silenced. Slowly, students come to understand that curiousity is counterproductive to results. Our own hobbies become idle pursuits that detract from time that could be spent on academic practice. Not many emerge from the smog with the flame of curiousity still burning. Relentless standardisation erodes the innate desire to understand. Curricula deem certain knowledge essential and other interests as superfluous.

A teacher should teach how to learn rather than what to learn. If a teacher has no spark of childlike curiousity within, how can they possibly foster that essential pursuit of understanding? Part of learning is imitation; so teachers should demonstrate the process of learning and inquiry in the way that they teach.

A teacher fails when all a student learns is factual. A teacher should strive to kindle the flame, to strengthen a spirit of learning. But they cannot do so freely, constrained as they are by bullet points that earn ticks on a page. We are boxed in, teacher and student, to look at answer keys and be blind to all else that moves. Instead of asking questions, we can only answer them.

So if you truly wish to break free from the tyranny of the academic system, ask, relentlessly, until all the imposed boundaries of what to know and what not to know dissolve to reveal the vast and varied world of knowledge that exists around us. Retreating into a shell of neither asking nor answering questions is to lose to the system, to have it drain the life out of us. Reach out, past the constructed barriers and walls, pursue the intriguing unknowns on the horizon, and take the initiative in the dance that we have with our education.

Vignette : Relaxation

Bright blue. The road still roaring behind him, but the quiet of the garden lies ahead. Urban stresses destabilise, he's been languishing in mental misery, worry. Weary of protracted pressure, fulfillment evasive, or lost forever into the mists of the past.

Shading to azure. A lunar smile glimpsed through the leaves invites him in, promising reprieve. The path saunters into the vegetation. He glides away from the noise, paced at a measured adagio. A few turns breaks the direct visibility of the buildings, branches embrace his perspective.

Tinting sapphire. The footway meanders on, unhurried. Lamps along the manicured greenery hum to luminescence. Sounds of screaming tires still affix his thought on worldly concerns. The hues of the trees diminish in contrast with the failing light.

Spectrum cobalt. Falling sun, glazed orange. He drifts among the trees, smells the moist grass. The first heavenly speckles reveal themselves. Always the same, reliable, steadfast. Bright inspirations to countless individuals, whether their connections were known. The canine star near the zenith. The pandemonium reduced by increasing distance from the garden's perimeter.

Toning zaffre. His deliberate ambulation allows the trunks to maintain a smooth shift across his view. A pond reflects the lights of the sky in a tranquil mirror. He can finally hear himself think, but that wasn't the point. The point was not to think.

Deepening ultramarine. He watches the slender silhouettes of the trees merge into the colouration of the darkened skies. The chirp of unseen crickets breaks the silence, but not the peaceful solitude. More stars uncloak themselves, linking hands to portray heroes and beasts of mythological association. His mind lost in the hush of the setting, can unburden itself and roam free.

Fading to midnight blue. He lies back on the empty field, listening to the music of the night. Why could this island of solitary ease not last for all eternity? The vault of the sky continues to turn, defying wistful sentiments. Breathing deeply, he empties his mind. Of sight, of sound, of people.

And then it ends, the wordless orison, return to the bustle, reluctant exodus.

Vignette : Revaluate

You stand beside the warped wooden bench, under the moonlight. The ruins of the minarets and vaults toppled like fallen dominoes, humbled to the ground from their heavenly posture. The cool silver light diffuses through the destruction, the same night eye that gazed on the founding of the city now wanes on the metropolis's termination. Why is it that sometimes we never seem to remember beginnings, but when the end arrives, it comes in full judgement and solemn heartbreak? And only then, we notice what privilege we had.

It doesn't have to be the monumental losses, really. Sometimes the little things are just as difficult to accept. They crop up again, involuntary recollections from an unwelcome stimulus, a song that plays over the radio, a birthday gift sitting on the shelf.

But other times, the ending slips right past us, drifting away into misty memories.

When did you last play in a playground, running carefree in juvenile confidence? When was the last time you wore that shirt before deciding it was too childish? When was the last time you watched your favourite childhood cartoon, however cynically mocking it seems now? When did you last time you went to dine at that restaurant, suffused with schoolday memories? When was the last time you met up with him? When was the last time you caught up on her life? When was the last time he went for a jog with you? When was the last time you saw her gentle smile? When did you last hear him laugh? When did you last tell her, how inspiring she is? When was the last time you told your parents you loved them? When was the last time someone held your hand? When was the last time...

And then suddenly, it was over. It's been years, and you realise he's grown old, she's become distant. You don't have the energy to run in the field, scream as you slip down the playground slide. It's not appropriate, it's not done. Now, many seasons after that final time, you comprehend the loss. No ruins, no heartbreaks, other buildings simply came in and replaced the old. But, somehow, it unnerves and upsets. What if yesterday was the last time she embraced you? What if tomorrow's lunch is the final time he cracks a joke about your table manners? How would you know?

So, savour each moment, cherish every time you meet up with a friend, treasure the little experiences of daily life. Even things that seem routine, unremarkable and dull will eventually end. Being aware of that uncertainty heightens the experience of every stone or brick that forms the cities of our lives.

Vignette : Reassess

It's tiring, trying to keep up with everyone else. Feeling that everyone's moving ahead of you, exuberant, motivated; while you glide on social inertia. The track you're on is well lit, crowded, competitive. The glances from people nearby betray their expectations. They all think you're one of them, intrinsically propelled. But you're not, you're weary.

So... Stop running. Walk. Wait. Think.

What inspires you? Saturates you with wonder, keeps you engaged? What would really keep you going if all the luxury of the world were to fall into ruin? Why aren't you there? The crowd continues to move, some people walk besides you to ask you if you need aid. They're polite, but they can't really help, they need to keep on running.

There's a flash in the dusk off to the side of the track; brief, intense, mysterious. Your gaze turns, it calls.

Look again at those rushing past you now that you've slowed. Do they all really know where they're going? Or have they just walked in the safety of the lamps all their lives? A last few faltering steps in that exhausted direction. Curious stares and suspicious gazes from the rest of them. Stand still and wait for an opening, an exit, to get off the track to a bleak future. Then turn and sprint away, into the darkness, away from the path. You don't know where you're going, but at least you've found yourself.

Vignette : Rediscover

Telling yourself you can't. It's not like you, long past the sentiment of freedom and irresponsibility. Sitting in the monochrome routine. The highest peaks and lowest abysses of emotion already exhausted in forgotten experiences. The cage of the city.

But really, you understand there's so much more.

Reach out to catch a raindrop, sit back to watch the clouds writhe in the azure sky. Leave the concrete. Run barefoot on the stone path, skimming fluidly through the dappled sunlight, under the breathing forest canopy. Hear the calls of decorated avian singers, feel the caress of chill air breezing past your arms. Dance in solitude beneath the crescent of a waning moon; an unending spiral of steps to the tempo of whirling music. Rest in the damp grass as the dome of the heavens turns in the infinite ebony, speckled with apertures of stellar luminescence. Trace the waltz of the wandering planets among the immutable constellations. Stand on the precipice above the temperamental sea, the beat of the waves drowning out the call of the gulls.

Remember the majesty of nature, the intricacy of creation, the vitality of the primeval. Realise that you are small, and something, or Someone, out there is greater than the whole world of experience we presume to have exhausted.