Remorse, regret, fear and ruin – melancholy made manifest, devourers of provident hope.
Romance, lust, joy and aspiration – a heart unbound, rampant and rife.
Love and grief, imbuing a certain narcissism, a subjective self reflection looked upon awkwardly by peers unable to empathise with the grievers lament, or the lovers bliss.
An oddity, is such a narcissism. Woe’d, we crumble. Bejoyed, we radiate. Both a faultless circumstance that need not be begrudged, a reaction to the temporal and spatial relativity of the object of our affection, yet both a cankle against the minds of those scratching out existence at less precipitous ends of the emotional coil.
These outlying emotions are to the picketed society a threat – to order, to rationale, to the constructed average of experience deemed as normal, as “healthy”, a perjurious reality most artfully conspired. Ironic that in these, the hours we seek solace from judgement, that we are most easily judged for daring to share such vulgar emotions. By accusing eyes placating comfortable frugalities such expressions of self — genuinely heartfelt pleasure or pain — are measured against inadequate conventions, arbitrarily dismissed as something other, something peregrine, something untrusted. A shared fear perhaps, of such experience on and beyond the fringes of temperance, of the slightest hint of fruitful chaos amidst such a painstakingly contrived notion of ‘order’.
And a fruitful chaos it is – what heights of art or science would have been attained had those that reached them simply been content with stagnation within a spirit of mediocrity? What achievements are yet denied by the merciless scurrying of the arbiters of temperance, the disengaged and dampened response of the cultivators of insufference, the ignorant wielders of lazy minds and false hearts? What greatness could we accomplish if given the mere freedom of sinking to the lowest depths of despair, of ascending the most dizzying heights of elation?
Weep now for tomorrow
For the tears not let to fall
A world without a sorrow
Is the cruelest lie of all