My heart is longing
Though my mind is confused.
My soul is tired of sighing,
My spirit is revolted,
Time flows rapidly,
Woes disappear slowly,
I’m tired of repining,
Will the universe conspire
To reset it all anew
As if all of this were a dream
In the likeness of truth?
Is anyone out there? Although I feel like a lonely gauche scientist who incessantly sends a life signal to an extraterrestrial being across the galaxies, I am again sending another life signal in writing to express that I am still alive. So, if any accidental reader stumbles on this blog, welcome.
I once read that magic is the power of manipulating nature without knowing the source of the force. If so, then the magic I once possessed is lost, making me good for nothing. But, as observed by Francis Bacon, I am talking about the faculty of cognition that affects linguistic abilities for speech that makes a ready person, reading a full person, and writing an exact person. The satisfaction of reason, the power of expression aspiring to development of the spirit, which gave me a content elbow room, vanished into the curtains of the past, leaving me to fend for provisional existence of survival in the most primitive way. It reminds me of Viktor E. Frankl’s memories in concentration camps, where many of the inmates dissipated into the hopelessness of abandoning themselves in the stupendousness of tragedies.
I always think of my life as an inspiration fit for a documentary film about a working-class immigrant single woman who painstakingly tries to preserve a sense of purpose in life with a grasp on intellectual aspiration. Doing so makes her compare to the burgeoning careers of her peers, who seem to be of a higher station in life than she. I am not trying to play a typecast role of proverbial fatalist or unreconstructed defeatist caviling at the happiness of others as a result of their hard work and abilities to do wonders. That would be a callous and sordid a priori judgment for her unfortunately cursed life. Didn’t Shakespeare also say that our lives are governed by our stars? Didn’t Cicero believe that our lives can be read by avian augury? Come to think of it, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton also believed in and engaged in alchemy craft. The commonality of the examples described above illustrates that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in your philosophy about the world, whatever it may be.
I never told my wishes
But let my concealment,
like a furnace of fury,
feed on my eyes riveted
by ire and impudence;
I eternally pined in thought,
And with a blue and gray melancholy
I sat like Longing on a pew,
smiling at Grief and teardrops
welled in the windows of my soul.
No other Gods listened to my pleas;
No other Sun lit up my heaven,
No other star ever shone for me.
And even yet, I dared not let
my useless passion and vain hope
languish in rapturous, radiant pain;
Drinking deep of that profound anguish,
How could I find my place again?
Like a day moon seen apart from a prime sun
Like a dewdrop on the grasses in the afternoon
Sometimes she is visible with her gossamer wings
Flitting over the clouds, then the arc of rainbows.
One swirling of her wand, and magic starts:
Grief decreases in halves, happiness doubles.
They need her, and so do you, to use her goodness
as an instant receipt for your rude fat wishes.
The never-ending abundance of kindness bestows
On your insatiable needs becoming incessant demands
Because her innocent joy is your defiled jealousy
And what does she get? – Tears you can’t care less.
When a high tide roars with thunder
And my ship shakes with terror,
Queen of Peace comes from heaven
Telling me words of consolation:
“Let nothing disturb you, just let it be
Let nothing frighten you, it will pass away,
Nothing is forever, fear gets you nowhere.
The old has gone, the new has come;
Declare Hope from Despair in Light from Dark,
Follow the North Star, even if you doubt it.”
Then her words become music soft and sweet
Crept on shining waters with the reflection of stars,
Allaying the temptuous temper of the sea and mine.
No matter how many leaves have fallen from a tree as the wind of changes has been blown – sometimes placidly and many times harshly – I still feel like a girl who has refused to enter into adulthood, shunning away from the nature of things. Cicero said the ages of man have their stages of nature with sovereign rights, so anything you fly in the face of them will ask for troubles. But then Cleopatra declared to reject the forces of mortality, and Shakespeare thus praised her courage and fortitude by saying: “Age cannot wither away, nor customs can stale her infinite varieties.” Oh, and there is also Cher, now rightly revered as a dame of celebrity, and she has recently decried acknowledging her age on our evolutionary scale. So why not me with my consistent resistance against the fate of a mortal in all aspects with all my might, with all my soul, and with all my heart?
It’s not only the inevitable awareness of the passing of generations by me. With the recent death of Sidney Poitier, the eminent actor famous for his unforgettably charismatic roles in ‘In the Heat of the Night’ and ‘To Sir with Love, it has begun to dawn on me that those who lived through WW2 and pre and post Second Vatican Council are now gone with the wind to the haze of time, a new breed of generations has germinated, sprouted, and dispersed across the lands and oceans, just as mammals began to stage after the extinction of dinosaurs. It’s a nature of the universe, but still hard to accept it, especially when everything else but I change, or seems it so. The difference between the millennials and the Me generation seems as far and wide as that between the Victorians and the Flappers, so to speak. Less than 50 years must have felt a great leap of 100 years to the opposite generations, I gather. But that’s not hyperbole, I believe.
Greek gods knew too well about such a human yearning to be agrasia and played the weakness in favor of their everlasting egoism. Otherwise, why did they keep nectar made with ambrosia to themselves on the Mount of Olympus? Demeter, the goddess of harvest and corn, put the baby of her master who took the goddess in the guise of a poor woman as her baby son’s nurse in a sacred flame on the pretext of making him ageless as a favor to the kindness of her lesser mortals. And it doesn’t end with Greek gods. Jesus never became old, preserved in his prime days of preaching travels with stylishly long hair that reminds me of a famous musician or poet. So was Mary, the mother of God. In the end, only humans stand in the audience, appreciating the agrasia beauty and immortality, comparing the presence of eternal youth to the absence of it.
What with the flow of time and what with the present state I am in now, inching toward the end of the era, is already enough to blow me away into the twilight zone, where things are unlike Alice’s Wonderland but Vincent’s Price’s Haunted House. Magic is no joke and is real for sure, but you always have to pay for what you wish for. But I think it’s a mindset that significantly impacts physical reality, which is magic turning you forever young.
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