For quite some time, when I lacked the awareness to understand my peculiar dispositions, I wondered about my inclination to repeatedly watch particular TV shows or films, to listen to specific songs for what seems like an eternity and then, suddenly, to depart from these desires towards others. Consistently, I was lingering with a few obsessions only to leave them towards others a desert of difference away.
And then, as the epoch of wondering departed, the age of wandering arrived with a sudden flash. I began to perceive trends and patterns that tell a story. There was a coherence and subtle movement that tied together these various inclinations. It was not an adherence in terms of content, but style and visual rhetoric. During this time, as I was investigating my internal self through the mirror of my external ether, I was also distracted by a coercive perception … an effigy of false desires.
I finally came across the spirits of these desires. I traced the scents of their steps until I found whirling in the magic of the darkest of nights while the moon in the fullness of its glory gazed upon them. The entire spectacle seemed to convey to me the subtle plot that these spirits were hearkening, with love, to the kingly moon’s beckoning for companionship. Meanwhile, as I observed this fairytale of my own world unfold before my heart, I safely stayed within the comfortable walls of my own being.
I discovered that the contentment found in gazing at the unknown from within the warmth of your own endless abyss emerges as a special marriage between contending movements. In this state, there is truly no shyness or fear, only a merciful fortress that embraces you while you relinquish your bodily, mental and spiritual defenses in order to sear through all that lies beyond you. The distraction here is always a luring form without a spirit.
The true artist, the one who has entered this cabin of tranquility in the most stygian of nights and witnessed the spectacle of the moon’s kingly court, is the only one who is not in need of sending forth these distracting effigies. They are freed from such a prison simply because they have encompassed the limitless true forms of actors, dancers, painters and luthiers who are granted an audience with the king.
These true artists do not contain or own forms. They merely seek to encompass them within the shades of their gazes. They never make any of these forms move through direct commands, because they know that this would only result in artificial love that itself does not know how to love. Instead, true artists seek to discover the moon’s presence in these forms. Once they perceive the journey of the king’s light from its abode to the spirit of the form, they find life.
In other words, these true artists listen very attentively but not intentionally or artificially. They continue to relieve themselves of expectations until they transcend any separation between themselves and audition in order to become the singular hearing of existence. They hear all with a passionate clarity. And yet, they are not motivated to entertain this ability to themselves, within their own court. They are simply in awe and this is enough for them.
There, I found my desires. As the spectacle of the kingly moon unfolded in my eternal night, I slowly began to understand the secret which all the actors sought to convey to my illiterate heart. Of course, it could not convey this hidden knowledge, which it received, to my literate mind. With which words can an illiterate organ write its biography? The resulting discrepancy was another wonder for my wandering soul.
What emerged is an illiterate heart that contained that which it could not describe, while my literate mind spoke for artificial stretches about that which it could not imagine, much less have. It was only then and there that my heart was given permission to begin breaking apart its seal of silence and unleash insignificant oceans of the secret which it carried. Since it could not speak directly, it opted instead to dance quickly upon an endless procession of fleeting metaphors.
At first, I tried to decipher the metaphors. First, there appeared a favorite film. Then, it was followed by a timeless song. Next, I was visited by an evocative painting that marketed itself in hauntingly beautiful colors. I was left dumbfounded by my own inability to perceive a connection. Then, I began to wonder whether these symbols were sending breaths of translations to one another. Is it possible that colors were seeking music through my contemplation?
That alleyway in the empire of my imagination delivered me to the shore of a few pearls of conviction, but I could still hear many other ones all around me. It is the most surreal experience of the body, mind and spirit to feel and taste your answer in the very air you breathe but still lack the power to grasp and contain it. What exactly was I hearing? With which ear or listening act was I receiving the ink of these entities’ words?
I continued to linger in the solitude and anxiety of that moment. All the while, the spectacle of the kingly moon was still ongoing, with no end in sight, as I watched from the liberating freedom of my tight embrace and comfort. Slowly, the magic of the holy marriage between the night and art overwhelmed my surroundings. I saw the layers of those walls tighten their grip into a tantalizing contentment, while the forms of the actors on stage dissipated one after another.
These twin movements then met at an unlikely juncture. It was a deceptive acquaintance, similar to the illusion of stillness emerging from an ever-increasing act of whirling. There, the metaphors and my desires lifted their masks and revealed a ‘me’ that I had never known. An identity familiar yet fleeting like a fugitive of love. The desires were a movement and that was enough. The destination and final act of the kingly court was the play itself … never ending and always unfolding.
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