On Olives and Sake

Growing up where I did, and how I did, teaches one to remain on the silent side. It teaches you to be cautious, and skeptic. To say certain things in your head a thousand times before you put them on paper, or utter them out loud. It also turns your life into a long, and painful, cycle of passive-aggressiveness. But that’s a story for another day.

I was never as outspoken and self-confident as my parents were, or wanted me to be. It might’ve been that the chronic skepticism I grew up in had found its way back to me and turned the process of formulating an opinion, one that I would be engrossed in so far as to defend it in whatever means possible, into a recursive and never ending one.

***

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my life was to deconstruct my own complicated relationship with the place I was born in. It has been the dominating theme for most of my postings, and most of my thoughts in the last two years. I think it’s very important to run through the intricate details of that relationship, to sort out all the rational elements from those that are irrational. It’s important to go down different roads and imagine different realities, for both of you. It’s important to contextualize that relationship and to study it from a point far up in the sky in order to see how it reflects on your other relationships, with people or with ideas, and most importantly how it reflects on your bigger relationship with life.

***

I love that place, its people were the faces I grew used to, its language taught me how to laugh, its smells were the first to evoke my feelings of nostalgia, its sea and the mountains in the distance were my first playgrounds. This love is completely disconnected from the realities of that place, and the feeling, I suppose, would’ve been just as overwhelming had I been born in any other corner of the Earth.

Love is a perfectly irrational feeling, one that evokes and manipulates all other feelings for its own satisfaction. It is inherently irrational, and utterly personal and all I can, and want to, do is to simply embrace it as it is.

The reality, however, is always different. The place I know is a disfigured plot of land with people who are crippled by all the ailments associated with poverty, greed and fear. A place that borrows images from here and there for it has no identity of itself. The place I know defines itself by monuments left of generations long gone, for it has no monuments of its own. The place I know cries out tolerance, freedom and dignity while it has none. The place I know has more prisoners than scholars and more presidents, and monarchs than statesmen. The place I know is the embodiment of hypocrisy and the embodiment of the “scandal”. The place I know is a large and long process of self-deception. The place I know is not proud, but pompous, not angry, but hateful. It reeks of irrelevance and stinks of vanity. A bleak spot, in a bleak world in an impressive universe.

***

Flowers still bloom in a sea of decadent matter, and their fragrance will distract you from all other smells when you bend down to look at them. They still feed on the mould, their pollens still fly and other flowers still bloom. But who’s to say that the scent of a rose is more eternal than a septic wound, and who’s to say that the word is really stronger than the hangman’s hands.

***

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’,
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

Bob Dylan

Some days I wake up with a sinister feeling brewing inside of me. I wake up because I could hardly breathe, and I reach for my asthma inhaler. I feel shackled by the strings of my own freedom. My books and my little memoirs from times past along with other, even more trivial, lifeless belongings stare at me with a smirk. The desire for things nauseates me, depresses me and leads me to a round of foggy self-lashing. I feel lost and disrespectful to everything I believe in.

***

Some days I sit on my roof and stare at the sky. My mind races through the names of random stars I can recognize, ones that I remember and can not see, names of galaxies I’ll never see, or the moons of Jupiter. A familiar and stressful thought keeps coming back from as long as I can remember. I have seen too many sci-fi movies that the imagery in my head is completely corrupted, and any attempt to close my eyes and imagine these vast distances and spaces is bound to end with the painful feeling of familiarity, like everyday life. But the thought itself races through my mind, cripples my heart and brings tears to my eyes. There has never been anything more fascinating and awe-inspiring to human consciousness than the Universe, and Death.

The comforting thought of Death is what brings my mind to ease. The thought that I, too, will have a chance to experience these split seconds of consciousness before that moment of death, is comforting and fulfilling. How painful would life be without that thought. How painful would life be if the only thing we could do was to sit on a rooftop and let our hearts explode over our inability to comprehend the very thought of the Universe.

I know for certain that I will have these split seconds of consciousness before I die. And then I shall die. Whatever that is, I will come to experience it fully. The experience of Death has no limits. Be it an after life, or complete nothingness, I will come to experience it. I will never watch the Big Bang, or touch the outside edges of an expanding universe. But I shall die, and I shall touch the outside edge of life. Without that promise of an ultimate experience of the unknown, I would’ve gone completely insane.

***

Some days I feel like I am almost too conscious of my youth. I feel a destructive desire to exploit my body and mind until they break down beyond their limits. It gives me a twisted pleasure to stay up for days until my body collapses over the bed, to drink beyond pleasure and to smoke beyond need.

***

On most other days, I drink my coffee and walk to school.