"To Live, would be an awfully big adventure" - Peter Pan, JM Barrie
Dear Stranger,
This
seems to be an opportune time for odd lilting conversation, not that
there
is ever an inopportune time for subjectivity. I find myself at a new
beginning today and for some odd reason I feel the need to share this
one with the likes of a likeness I cannot fully deconstruct.
This beginning comes in the form of a document, emailed to me this
morning, a document in a foreign language that proclaims the finalizing
of my
divorce. Seeing as I currently lack a confidant, I now find myself
constructing
one in this letter. You might think this a morbidly rococo juxtaposition
on my part and you would be right. I am seeking attention, as loathe as
I am to admit it. That said, I do not know whose attention it is I am
soliciting and on some off tangent this anonymity awards me a small
measure of comfort.
I am twisting my mind around this loveliest of Spanish words 'Sombremesa'.
It makes reference to times spent around the table after dinner,
talking to the people one shared the meal with. It is time spent
digesting both the food and the fragile foundations of friendship. I am
unsure about whether I can classify my recent socializing around tables
as 'the sharing of meals' in any genuine sense of the word but it would
not be dishonest of me to assert that somewhat-edible or better put,
perishable, items were consumed. And sufficient time was taken to savour
them sufficiently. Perhaps classifying the subtle stringing
together of loose-ended misnomers and post-substance metaphysics as the
beginnings of a friendship may be a stretch but whatever the cumulative
repercussions of this Sombremesa, they appear to be favorable.
They are certainly compelling and jarringly, cripplingly honest. I do
not know if this is how one cultivates a friendship, by cloaking ones'
self at the onset, imbibing several social facilitators in the middle
and stripping bare at the end? Is this the basis of an acquaintance-ship
that lasts? Or is it a peer-ship? Or is it merely an
almost-recognise-her-face-ship?
One
might think of this particular variant of letter
writing as a bout of triviality but I feel that the importance of saying
things
and having them matter to someone can never really be under or over
estimated. That
said, there is no way of knowing whether any of what I shall say here
will
matter to anyone, but in some part this disinterest is also oddly
consoling. I shall never know,
who you are, who I am addressing or how you are being addressed and that
means we can converse freely. Or that I can vent freely, whatever
Kafkaesque parable better suits your purpose. I suppose in some manner, I
am setting this fictive conversation against real ones I have just
encountered trying to test the boundaries of my own limitations as both a
wordsmith and human-oid. I fear that I have indulged myself beyond my
capacity for self-indulgence. I fear too that I have educated myself
beyond my intelligence. I fear finally, that I have experienced a sense
of complacence. I fear most of all that I am enjoying it.
“They took it for granted that if they went he would go also, but really
they scarcely cared. Thus children are ever so ready, when novelty
knocks, to desert their dearest ones.”
Perhaps
you are bored already. This is, after all, a purely selfish
catharsis on my part and will afford you nothing of value in exchange,
no vindication, no valor...not even a pedestal. I have
always envied people their chance to compose long intimate letters in
films,
the kind one finds being superimposed at the preface or conclusion of a
historical biopic. I wish that I could compose these words on an aged
papyrus
scroll with a quill and scratchy, blotchy ink to preserve the perverse
nostalgia and neologism
I am attempting to bring here, while my defenses are down enough to
award me the indulgence. Silicon screens and clacking keys are so
utterly unromantic but they cannot be helped. If I were given the choice
I
would have employed pencils. This is something you actually should know
about me…I adore
pencils. Ever since I watched that magnum of romantic comedies, ‘You’ve
got
Mail’, I have relished the idea of someday receiving a ‘bouquet of sharpened
pencils’. I would write you this letter in pencil if I knew who you
were and I assure you it would serve more poignantly than those crass
love notes composed in blood by clumsy lovers.
I
am not sure if I am going about this the right way, or if there even
is such a thing. After all, how does one construct an intimacy? In
normal
situations people consider approaching a curious stranger and striking
up a
conversation, others employ that age-old art known as flirtation. Some
stalk
people on Facebook and Twitter…whichever method one employs, there is a
subtle
loss of self that is demanded of the enterprise. The twisted waltz of
socializing requires one person to initiate the exchange, invent an
approach
and meticulously cultivate an opening. There are moments in between,
where every perverse slip-of-tongue and every arbitrary hand gesture is
superimposed in the idle vignette of ones' clouded retinas and encased
in the hazy short term memory one is desperately trying to wipe clean
with a hyperbolic blend of potent substances. Each layer added, removes a
layer of self-consciousness and superimposes something about the self
one was unaware of in their own capacity. I find I talk too much, so I
try to pace myself. That pace allows me the time to think and then I
find I am thinking too much and immediately switch to talking again. I
discover I can be crass, and this is an odd jolt for me. I have always
been quiet and polite, you see, now I am discovering a boorish element
in my jip-jive conversation that occasionally leads me to question
whether my current choice of social conduits will cause lasting damage.
"Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder."
In
my mind this involves a loss of power or ego or
something that I know I do not possess in any case, but the idea of
losing it
is overwhelming enough to hold me at bay. This is why I have never
triumphed in
matters of the heart…or the libido, if you belong to the school of
thought that
prefers to distinguish between the two. I have no one to be intimate
with, so I
have ascertained that in such times it is best to muster up all of ones’
creativity and invent a confidant. It is not so difficult really,
inventing
intimacy. All the enterprise really requires is cause enough to warrant
confession. In our case, somewhat of a soliloquy wrought in affection.
The inventory for intimacy essentially rests on three things, I find.
The first involves the right number of 'others' to cloak your
conversation in sufficient banality so that the few sentences you mean
to make poignant can be identified in contrast to all the nonsense. This
is paramount, for conversations that try to be important in their
entirety inevitably fail from the fall-out of sheer expectation. The second,
is a viable target. Someone you are capable of surprising with your odd
sensibilities but someone whose reactions you are not too invested in.
This ensures that if a transient intimacy is actually struck, it will be
equally surprising for both parties and then promptly dismissed as a
serendipitous fluke. It is essential that it be dismissed so as not to
become dangerous. The third and final premise for inventing
intimacy is eye-contact...or the lack thereof. This is as much a science
as an art...one must measure connected gazes meticulously against
stolen ones and disconnects. No one should be too aware of being the
subject of your scrutiny at any given point of time but someone actually
must be the subject. It is a perverse scavenger hunt for smiles and
sibilant undertones. So here, I shall
address you as an old friend and pick up an imaginary conversation left
at the
tail end of our previous encounter, one that I shall construct as we go
along.
But where do you live mostly now?"
With the lost boys."
Who are they?"
They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain."
What fun it must be!"
Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship."
Are none of the others girls?"
Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”
With the lost boys."
Who are they?"
They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain."
What fun it must be!"
Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship."
Are none of the others girls?"
Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”
The
last time we met we were contemplating the merits of the term
‘spiritual’. You were dressed casually, as you are wont to do, sitting
cross
legged on my sofa and denigrating me for my desperate need to find
‘meaning’ in ‘meaningless things’ that I stumble upon. I suppose, in
this construction and
this particular letter, you are a man. I have known you for years, long
enough
to experience an odd, compulsive possessiveness with regards to you and
simultaneously long enough for me to be all-too-aware of your romantic
failings
to let this attraction manifest beyond the odd tingle in my toes or the
flutter
in my chest when you laugh at something I have said. One is told, that
this degree
of a physical charge is biologically predetermined and does not really
warrant
much deeper consideration on either of our parts. We are friends - in
that
overtly comfortable sense of the word that does not really necessitate
the
validation of a facebook request or a regular phone call. We are in the
habit of watching films on the
telephone after having discovered that it is one of the few television
clichés
that actually does translate beyond Gossip Girl. We do not open
conversations with 'Hello's and Goodbyes' but rather with pithy
one-liners that ensure the illusion of a stream of thought flowing
without interruption in spite of all all the interruptions that life
necessitates for us both. I find that I'm always doomed to construct you
in my head as Pan. It is a most unforgivable pathetic-ality on my part.
A perpetual, perennial itch to save and savor the act of loving rather
than the person I am loving. The irony, of course being that, of perhaps
all literary heroins I have never loathed any more than Wendy. She is
the constant touchstone of every woman's underlying need to rescue and
rehabilitate a man or woman or beast, and for lack of opportunity, to
construct a Pan that needs saving in every stray that crosses her path.
Wendy is Freud's very own thing-that-goes-bump-in-the-night of tremors
and testosterone.
“I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind.
Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map
can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of
a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all
the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a
card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is
always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here
and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and
savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves
through which a river runs, and princes with sex elder brothers, and a
hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.
It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day
at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders,
hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting
into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth
yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are
another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially
as nothing will stand still."
You
are in a habit of pointing out my sentimentality as a fatal flaw.
You warn me repeatedly that my romance with the idea of romance is more
doomed
than any star crossed cupidity available on a book shelf or to be found
on
screen. Spirituality, you tell me is what people call their need to
connect the
inanity of their existence with the majesty of the stars. “There is no
connection but we want one. So we have made it up. Whenever we find
ourselves
boring, we fake ourselves some majesty like pixie dust.” I can never
seem to argue you away but
I know I disagree with you. My mind knows you can be dis proven but only
by someone who can articulate my own arguments far better than I. I
resent this charge of plagiarism because I fear there is an obvious
truth in it. And while I am willing to be proven wrong, the idea of
being 'obviously' wrong grates against my skin.
You tell me one doesn’t need any of these labels and that life can be
spent merely on the peripheries of the events that live us. We can just be,
you say. There is no cause for spirituality
in that. There are times when I feel you are a nihilist who only
associates
with me because you find my fanciful nature amusing. Or perhaps you are
lonely
enough, to want to live vicariously through someone who feels as much of
everything as I do, so you can keep numbing yourself and retain the
upper hand.
I find that I miss our conversations after they end and therefore I am
trying
to plagiarize the tail end of them in this exhibitionist venture.
Naturally
this is a misnomer, considering there was no conversation to begin with
and you
(who read this) are in all probability, not the person I am trying to
speak to because I am not trying to speak to someone but for them.
This is through no fault of your own but rather because of my colossal
failings
as a perennial verbal and emotional fidget.
“Peter: Oh, the cleverness of me.
Wendy: Of course, I did nothing...
Peter: You did a little.
Wendy: Of course, I did nothing...
Peter: You did a little.
Wendy: Oh, the cleverness of you.”
I suppose for this letter to be truly two-sided and honest, neither of
which it is, I am obliged to ask after your health and general well being. I
hope for your happiness. Moreover, I hope that you are one of those individuals
who do not expect happiness in general and are therefore pleasantly surprised
on the odd days where you find yourself contemplating the meaning of your
existence in a good, strong cup of coffee and find your faith, sitting at the
wheel, waiting for a traffic light to change in the middle of the rain. I hope
that you are not the narcissist I am dreaming you up to be and I hope that I am
not in love with you already. I hope you are a firm, solid, stable quadrant in
this dizzy world and I hope you resist all of my melodramatic ministrations and
not-so-subtle manipulations on this forum to render you otherwise. I hope you are able to forgive me my
desperation.
"You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”
"
I pray, dear Stranger, that you will excuse my clumsy attempts at
keeping this archaic romance alive, not with you per se, but with the idea of
you. I am afraid that most of my ideas are the dying legacy of some long-lost
antique cousin and that I should let them pass peacefully but I find that I am
not quite prepared to lay you to rest yet.
You, who speak in sublimation's as I do.
You, who struggle with premises and prefaces alike,
You, who also, are forever incomplete.
And wish to remain so….
“There is a saying in the Neverland that,every time you breathe, a grown-up dies."
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