16 VII 2002 - 20:11 - verba24

I'll round out the Alchera term with my stabs at options three and five:

OPTION NO. THREE: If you were given a one-way ticket to any place in the world (for you and no one else), what would you do with this ticket? If you used it, where would you go and why? What possessions would you take with you (remember, no other people can accompany you to the place you've chosen to go)? If you've chosen to not use the ticket, why have you decided to do so?

OPTION NO. FIVE: Everyone has had one of those days where he or she just feels like giving up; whether you take this feeling into reality is your own business. However, if you're reading this option right now, then you've obviously made it this far. What has kept you here -- here, as in Life, not Alchera :) ?

An attempt at elegaic couplet will follow, by way of prologue:

Lords of the sea from their hills, how, hearing Homeric descriptions,
���all of the Greeks must have thrilled, so in Massilia, Kos;
far from the homes that they loved, they learned to cherish the epic
��and by neat logic the bard, who, spinning his tale, led them home.

Having read Lattimore's lines, his rendition of Homer's Odysseus as he speaks, poor man, of Ithaka -- the wine-dark sea spreads itself before me in my imagination.

I am a child of a city built on hills which proceed into a bay, one of the largest natural harbors in the world. Western culture is my teacher, and so I find that immediately, places throughout Europe suggest themselves as the idea of the ticket turns upon itself in my head, places far from neither hill nor the flow of water.

There is no question for me of not using the ticket. I am young; I do not have so many roots; I love my city but am willing to leave it, for now. I have come to be this way, to have a desire for travel, in spite of parents who spent their youth moving and fleeing from city to city before, finally, leaping here, who now have no desire to be uprooted again. Yet I got my desire for stability from them as surely as my greying hair is from them, and that stability is the form of a cottage and a garden, and my only deviation from their dream is the husband I want to share it with in a measure of constructed happiness --

(Less convoluted syntax, anyone? I'm trying --)

It must all be built, that part of my bipartite, contradictory yearning, and that building of stability takes time.

My books, music, cello, clothing, a futon: this would be all I'd really need, my childhood boxes to be sent for if I did find myself in a stability. Right now, I don't own much more than what I've mentioned, and so I would be transporting my entire life to my destination.

My friends? they can do without me, and I'm good generally about regularly posting letters and writing emails. My family -- my sisters have the same desire to wander as I do, and they would come and visit me. But no one need accompany me permanently; I live already with relative removal from direct contact. And the loss of such fine produce from my city's backyard? That I can do nothing about, but there are always losses with any decision.

So I'll use the ticket; I'm packed, and going somewhere in Europe by water and by hills, and I'm content to make the trip alone -- where to, then?

I've a dreadfully low tolerance for heat, and so the ruins of Greece, of Turkey, Dalmatia, Italy: all would ultimately be impractical, as alluring as they are. Given my deep sense of religion, perhaps Prague of the hundred spires might feel a home; perhaps Stockholm of the many lakes, or Ireland of the cool summers so like home --

What decides the location for me, then, is the blind Anglphilia which closed my eyes to the faults the society has for so long. I was made for the rocks of Cornwall, not too far from Ireland or London dear to my heart:

If I had to choose a place to begin a new life, it would be there : in beautiful country, with big cities not so remote and far-ranging possibilities for travel, possibilities enough for me to be able to settle contently.

I have a duty to my parents to fulfill, a duty also to the people around me. Who then, if I should die now, do I want to give the odious task of preparing my shroud, of closing my eyes and my mouth? Surely it is not fitting for the young to die before the old, not with such great difference in age between even me and the youngest of my sisters, not when the reversal of the order of death is accustomed to wartime and plaguetime only. I do not fancy that there should be so great a lamentation for me; I am no Astyanax, but I live from the fear that in death I might prove a great burden.

Also what sustains me is an inflated sense of my possibility, the thought that I should be able to channel my darknesses into lighter emotion -- that I am a being who can weep, write, laugh, and work against any imbalance of brain chemicals seems as if it would be something wasted were I to kill myself. And here, too, my awkwardness when dealing with the unknown, my suspicion that in the attempt to relieve me of myself, I might prove weak-willed -- these two act also as halting forces.

Finally there is language and there is music, my reason and my emotion manifest. As long as there are languages which I find interesting and have not mastered, my will in this matter remains weak, and barring a great shift in the chemistry of my brain, I will be lacking in neither langauges to learn nor in desire of learning for many years yet. So it is with music: as a listener, I find that the music of those periods uniquely obsessed with the darkness within man, of the Romantics and of the 20th century, allows me a sort of catharsis. It is this music that gives me a hope of survival; it is this music that wraps within itself, a precious gift, every human emotion. And if those composers found a way to transmit their struggles to men so far removed from them, surely I can be strong enough to keep myself going for that much longer.

This complex web of structures binds me to this earth, each connection of acquaintance and kinship fastening me more tightly to this sphere. I in living begin to try to fix my eyes on God, but men and the transitory beauty they carry do so easily distract me. I am still a creature of weak flesh.

In this case and this case only I am at last glad of my weaknesses, for with them I shall continue to live.