Contemptuus Mundi

I am fine.
I really am.

I dunno why I am telling you all this. Must be that insane possessed urge to tell the truth that has been the undoing of the cleverest of men. I who am a mere jester cannot pretend to have more power over my tongue than to let it loose as a snake without a charmer.

I am disgusted with the world. If it’s not a malady, if all of us from time to time have that sickening world weariness, then there’s nothing more to it. Disgusted by almost every person I see, meet, hear. If the world were a glass ball, I could easily dash it on the ground, see it crumble, without a heart beat’s regret.

Disgusted with forms. Repulsive, those forms that promise all, and deliver nothing. Hungry gaping faces yawning for a kiss, needy hands roughly tearing apart a shirt, gestures without meaning, acts only, mindless habits, a geometry of meaningless want.
I am disgusted with every face I see, I want to bury myself as it were in endless horizonless snows.

There has never been a dearth of people who have liked me, some who have liked me passionately, spouting the most inane words of emotion that would have been laughably clichéd if they were not so morbidly interesting in delineating the hackneyed phrases that define an epoch more than its famous artists or authors. Words. Words. Words. Ghosts of forms, ghosts of turpitude, swollen like the engorged member of a syphilis victim.

The latest was/is a girl who has been saying the most emo things to me for some time, telling me how she misses me when I am not with her, how she is fond of me, likes me, feels a connection with me, is angry with me when I spurn her (or so she imagines) to talk to others……. You know the drill. Passion has its drill no less exacting than the schoolmaster’s, so I played along. But I was naughtier this time, or just wanted to finish the game faster. So I scratched beneath the surface, itched and scratched, scratched and scratched (all the things barred in foreplay that is) and out came out the fact that I was lower in her hierarchy of affection than the cats and dogs she keeps in her ménage.

Much the same can of course be said about most of my other professed friends. They might like me, feel some images of passion while recollecting me in tranquility, miss me when I am not with them, feel a knife in their heart when I flirt with others……… but at the end of the day, most would gladly give me up for a sip of afternoon herbal tea, or a film they like, or some such trivial dainty.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. It is my vanity to believe that I can ever be more precious to someone than the piece of porcelain in their drawing room, a blue Ming to be cried over if the cat broke it, to be exhibited to fawning neighbors for its peculiar talents, and simply to be kept and missed at alternate intervals of meaningless reverie.

It is my vanity to look with pure and unadulterated disgust on all such people.

A relationship ends not with a bang, or a sudden betrayal generally. It erodes languidly when the urge of passion turns into the monotony of duty. Duty, that heavy word that makes us perform a relationship, and carry its pastoral burden long after all interest in it has ceased, long after it has become for us the drinking of a mirage. We carry on (some rascals don’t) , giving answer for answer, advice when sought, and solace when necessary, but our heart has long left that place.

We are birds that thirst for love. And if you wish to keep us in a gilded cage, you know that you have already lost your battle. For though we are in this world, we are not of it. We desire something more than the drill of forms, this march past of one affair after another.

I could have carried on playing games with that girl. That peculiarly wonderful game of one-upmanship that some misconstrue to be genuine affection. Advance, retreat, advance, retreat, that contredanse, that show of love followed by a quick coldness that leaves the recipient with her or his tongue hanging out much as Pavlov’s dog would wait on its master. We have played that game many times before, we know how to snatch desire from the jaws of boredom. A game is won when you are no longer interested in it, much as in tennis, love is only loss, some would say.

They are wrong. Love never loses, it alone remains long after you are disenchanted with puerile sports. Love of a dream. Love that doesn’t appear as games you have to win, where you lose if you show too much the throb of your heart at a stranger’s carelessly thrown words. It appears as an yearning and a weariness, a quenching and a thirst.

A fire that makes ashes of the world, and makes us run after rocks. a rock. A shoulder. A simple sun warmed blanket. Call it what you will.

Laying down on a green field blooming with violets and myrtle, and roses with dew on their cheeks. Resting one’s head on someone, in a peace gentler that the grave’s, and more immortal than heaven.

The end of desire is only the beginning of love.


~Scio amo.