All we have left in our hands are archaic ideals, second-hand trinkets. For every delicate rose groomed in a garden, a rainforest is being mowed down acre by acre. Everything is transient: When I leave this spot of grass and return to it five years later, it will have become a block of cement, or a jungle of weeds.
⠀
Rothko once said, "The artist can abandon his plastic bankbook, just as he has abandoned other forms of security. Both senses of community and security depend on the familiar — free of them, transcendental experiences become possible."
⠀
The fragrance of rich coffee tickles me awake on weekend mornings; each day welcomes me with an auditory river of classical music, abundance of food, and my future is, like the hardwood floors of my childhood homes, always warm and clean of dust. These things are now as familiar as what was once unfamiliar: the grief, the tragedy, the hate, the pain. Am I free or a victim now? A bird released back into the wild, a goose migrating through autumn gold? Where is my transcendental experience — is it to swim in the subterranean waters of suffering, turn from a shooting star to a common boulder; is it a rainbow of overtones without a fundamental, its hornlike feet unanchored, no cornucopian glory on the other side?
⠀
Trapped in an ouroboros of endless executions and reincarnations of knowing concepts, I wonder, who are we in the midst of it all — this entropic process, the blooming, the dying, the rebirth? We live in symbols, surficial images, a world blinded by ideals, against which we rage in an eternal war, despite crumbling against its teeth. But one day wouldn't I want to give up, accept the hand of Aeolus and let him take me wherever, submit to the force — and free myself in the process? Is not transcendence also transient, a mere utopian promise, a ghost of the very victory that war promises?
260122 (050422)
