kulturbrille:amanuensis

I’ve bought the lens, made the arrangements, tied up as many loose ends as I could, and now it is just 3 days to go. At some point in the last week I finally ran out of steam; this year has ground me down to nothing at all. After all the dust and packing, moving and sorting, I’m now vaguely hay-feverish; I have not sat down to read for weeks, and surely this distended feeling is not going to be permanent. New subscriptions to the Economist, Prospect, New Humanist and Vanity Fair have sealed my fate; I am to become, once again, a careful word scribe and diarist, hurtling with reckless abandon to my doom. Soon, I will leave this barren mindscape behind. In the dregs of coffee and stains on wine glasses all over Europe.

In the last week I’ve completed the return journey back home, to the east, where I now live once again. For 10 years I have not lived in the same place for more than 2 years at a time, almost always moving on the moment I started to lay down roots. As I packed in boarding, throwing out a decade of churning and journeying, I am preparing for one last, final, move.

No longer the hectic, insane madness of a life lived in constant fear of being entirely, completely still. No longer lurching from moment to moment, picking up signs and cues and signals so that I might piece together a memory to flesh out the present. No longer shall I drop words, half-remember lines, and wake up as exhausted as I did when I turned out the light, each night.

And as I tie up all the loose ends, open up and knock on doors rendered unfamiliar by my foolishness and apathy, examine this peculiar and foreign self, transformed by 2, 3 years of teaching into a pedantic, irrepressibly dialectical monster, it almost feels like morning, once again, except the colors are unfamiliar. In a wonderful way, splayed out at the edges, just like how pictures taken with my new EF-S 10-22 lens are, just like how we really see the world, an expanse of curved lines and pinched perspectives, forced and bent into shape by our stumbling, clumsy minds.

There is no end to the churning, churning, churning, of the years.

By way of remembering. And hinting.

For two, three years I have startled myself by allowing myself to be consumed in a whirlwind of desire, ambition, secret hopes and wretched dreams; now that I am 27 it seems clear that none of it amounted to very much except for the ideals which remain pure and unblemished by prevarication, compromise, and shoddy teleology. I am blessed in having one shining light that reminds me day after day that there is good in this world, not just cosmically between the light and the dark, but also in all aspects of how we live, behave, connect and comprehend each other. Morality lives on; we must live as if we are more than mere constructs.

So, as I prepare for a new year, a new life, a return to the fold, and once again embrace all that was good and wonderful about humanity, I shall remember how and why, and who, helped me understand once more. It is, as was said, too little, too soon, too much, too late, but faith will see us through.

Thank you. You know a little of what you do, after all.

These were the little ones.