Tag: on being

flash fiction, writing

Dear River, …

and yes, after Plato found his way through the fence and demolished the vegetable garden, I was angry. Because I had warned you. Because you dismissed my concerns as “neurotic.”  Now the cold weather is here. You will need to take risks that might have been avoided.

More precisely, you will need to ask others to take risks on your behalf. I was wrong to take my frustration out on you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Plato. I loved him, too.  Perhaps his name was bad luck? I never cared for the original Plato. But I loved our Plato. And I am weary of digging holes for those I love. We are either digging holes or filling them … we’re never whole.

Understanding is retrospective and usually too late to be of any use. So, no regrets. We live, we love, and then, as Oscar Wilde told us, we kill the things we love. I admit that in my distress (after the event), I blamed you. I cursed and cried that he would be alive if  River had been more vigilant. That was unfair. Blame is a coward’s balm. So, now I must confront my rage.

How does one confront something so intimate and, at the same time, so foreign? When I was a child, my first pet was a cockatiel. I was devoted to him. I tamed him, taught him to whistle the Colonel Bogey. I loved him. One day, while he sat on my shoulder, he nuzzled into my neck, as was his habit, and I leaned in slightly to acknowledge him. I don’t know why, but he bit into my ear and would not let go. I bled profusely. I recall the shock and anger I felt. How could he hurt the one who loved him most?

I closed my hand around him and pulled until his locked beak loosed its grip on my ear, and he then dug into my thumb. I nearly crushed him to death. A wave of rage ran through me and terrified me. I think the intensity of my feelings shocked me. I slipped him back into his cage. I did not know myself anymore.

It is not enough to survive, River.

self-awareness, terra incognita, writing

“Why we are never lost.”

Renaissance map makers wrote the words terra incognita to indicate land (terra in Latin) that was unknown or unexplored (incognita in Latin). By the 21st century there is little left of the world to map. But what do we mean when we say the world?

In some abstract way we imagine planet earth. However, the world is never more than the square metre around one’s feet.

We can never inhabit all of the world (unless you are a super-power) and yet we often speak as if we are intimate with all of it. We speak of how the world is when we can only possibly know how it is for us. How do we form our view of the world? Knowledge of current world events does not constitute knowledge of the world. We hold bits of data in our heads and imagine we know so much.

Other brave people have explored and mapped the globe, but to me it remains largely terra incognita.

I can only hope to know my self, the terrain within. It is difficult terrain and I am not always as brave as I ought to be. I am also not immortal. Time moves on, areas are left unexplored. I grow older, become less curious and more tired. That was yesterday though, today I could take on the, uh, world? Oh dear, it seems we do use the word a lot. It’s figurative you see, the world is an idea, not a place.

I do not know the world, and what I do know is very little. Therefore I cannot assume that what I know of the world is in any way a true reflection of the world. An apple is only knowable to me. It is never the same apple for anyone else.

Some nights I tame the beasts that confront me on the dark plains. some days they shred me.
I am of the ground, terrestrial, but I am unknown terrain. I am, in the words of Whitman – large, containing multitudes, and now I must map myself. Terra incognita was my name before my parents chose the one I have carried all my life. And everything gets worn down with time. Skin loses elasticity and wrinkles form like valleys. There are tectonic plates right under my skin. Joints ache, bones become brittle. Blood coagulates when it should not, arteries block, lungs must heave for air, the imagination weaves webs over the present, and reconstruct the past. The brain becomes atrophied.

My name is so thin in places you can see right through it if you hold it up to the light. It’s the same light I have been walking towards all my life, sometimes running to, sometimes away from but, mostly to. Once my name was new, freshly knitted it kept me warm for a while. Now the chill gets in quicker. People have been using it all my life too. My name, not the chill. When I hear it now it is like a bell clanging a labourer back to task. I used to associate my name with possibility. Now it like someone calling my name in a doctor’s waiting room, I expect bad news. So I’m changing it back to my original form name: terra incognito. Because I still feel unknown, unnamed and unformed.

One would expect that with five decades of breathing there would at least be an incremental increase of basic knowledge beyond the skill set one has accumulated through years of trudge. But no. There is no greater insight. One becomes not so much content with one’s life as resigned to it. If accepting your lot is the beginning of enlightenment, I may levitate soon. Currents still spark from the neurons in my brain. I still have fire in my belly.

There is pleasure in travelling through unknown terrain. Mapped and well signed land makes travel easy but the journey tedious.
Happy is he who can embrace the labyrinth of absurdity that is being. Being is not a set of coordinates.
One is never really lost.

https://medium.com/p/why-we-are-never-lost-b11a8eab2f6f?source=email-c99624de6846–writer.postDistributed&sk=4c7151c10c4faf7511bf6e30b6693e41