The incessant beauty of the world

I am one of the proponents of this crazy ‘theory’ that beauty can also be found in grotesque spectacles. Even our grotesque masks, our grotesque melodies carry notes of genuine, unspoiled beauty. This is how the world casts spells on us. The universe plays around with our brains, leading us to believe that beauty is only what pleases the eye-beauty is also felt with the senses, it is a warm breeze offering a summer day to our body, to our existence. Now, enough with all this embellishing lexical choices. What’s the core of this ‘theory’?

Even in the urban heart, this heart that deadens all the veins of human existence instead of bringing them to life, beauty is to be found in the ugliest of places. In the parks, where the grass is dying and most of the playground structure is destroyed; still, there, there may be a kid that STILL plays, even when it’s raining; there may be a couple kissing and letting go of the artificial, phoney world; there may be a group of people drinking and discussing and laughing. Liveliness beating the urban misery. The urban heart may intend to deaden the veins, but there are these notes that comprise the sweetest, most familiar melody that pleases the heart; laughter, the image of a kiss, the sound of it, the sounds of loud words put one next to another, those melodies beat death; they beat oblivion, they beat everything that’s harmful and poisoning in the urban heart.

Sometimes, in the darkest and most squalid walls of the city, you may come across the most beautiful and inspiring graffiti art. Is it about love? Is it about politics? Is it about our emancipation? Is it about freedom? There are always colors that shape our very inner desires, our most strategically concealed thoughts. Feelings, opinions, the ink of the soul, are all to be tracked down in the urban heart. This heart that devitalizes the veins; but revives them in the most peculiar ways. Urban hearts; their mysteries, all tales of happiness and decay at the same time.

What are we to do, then? Come to terms with the fact that beauty will forever be hidden under the wasteland of the cities? Or should we create the conditions under which beauty can flourish uninterruptedly and inspiringly? The decision is yours to make, but the most proper choice for me would be the second. Ugliness exists, but its recurrence depends on us. We create the world and we can fix it when it rots. We have shaped ugliness and now we have to scrap its paper and throw it in the bin. We must write beautiful stories. And then the urban heart will never, ever be again in the dominant position of deadening the veins; our veins will be lively, embellished with the most inspiring tales and the most excruciating beauty our eyes have ever bumped into.

Life from a distance

what would someone say if they looked at our lives as mere spectators, from a safe distance? what would they say if they saw our life as a movie, waiting patiently for a plot twist that will change everything? what would a theater crowd exclaim when we make the wrongest of choices? will they follow along or leave the theater extremely discontented and furious?

We can not turn our lives into movies, unless we’re Justin Bieber or Margaret Thatcher of course. This is how commercial film making works. But we can always distance ourselves from our seemingly helpless situations and become spectators, preferably without any emotional involvement to intervene. We must be objective and judge rationally, not sentimentally.

If I sat back and watched my own life, I’d feel extremely awkward, hearing myself saying things I would regret a moment later. I’d feel humiliated to see myself crying over trivial matters and getting so angry at people that tears end up running down my face uncontrollably. I’d definitely feel a little bit embarassed because of my stupid jokes and my tendency to try to smile even when I feel terrible. Although I would put this in a list of my good personality traits, it always depends on the point of view. Some people might say that it’s better to take out negative feelings at any time, but sometimes it’s impossible to do such a thing in front of people who wouldn’t know what to say. Awkwardness is…well, awkward.

Distancing myself from the intensity and the extreme sentimentality of the moment of a decision, I would definitely get mad at myself for being so quick to decide over serious issues and, above all, for being so relaxed about trusting others. Maybe, I would place some rules and conditions at the trust I give to people. I would mentally construct a list of signs that one must manifest in order to enter the so-called trust circle. Although, when I’m writing this, I must confess that it sounds pretty stupid. No one ever does that. It is not mathematics or going to the supermarket. It’s just life, people. It just happens. But on the other hand, it would save me a lot of trouble and pain later on.

Mostly, I would regret things I say to others. I can definitely picture myself regretting or face-palming over things I say, as I would do when I heard a dumb character in a college movie say something extremely nonsensical. But not only dumb things, things that make no sense. These things would make the bottom of my ‘remorse things’ list. Mostly, things that hurt someone else. Things said at the heat of the moment that are regretted precisely a second after they are uttered. The worst type of utterances. As if the vocal tract feels urged to utter something so hurtful and cannot keep it back. But it is immature to blame anything on the vocal tract; all it does is to articulate the images formed in the brain. So, the brain needs all the scolding and reprimanding. Only the brain, that sometimes needs to be disconnected, since its absence, at times, is better than its presence. Then, I would regret things that sound remotely hurtful without the intention of being so. I know it is an exaggeration. Sometimes, we say things that are hilariously misunderstood by people of our immediate environment, but most of the times, people who know us realize that nothing is said with the intention of hurting lying in the vague background. How do they know that? The context helps. If we’re speaking relaxedly, it is less possible to hear something depressing or offensive. If we’re quarreling, the chances are growing. So, yeah. But sometimes, people confuse contexts and misunderstand things because…eh, well, that’s how their personality is, they just take things the wrong way. So, I would eliminate, as much as possible, the chances of saying something potentially offensive/hurtful. Although, as I write this, I acknowledge the incapability of doing something of that sort. We cannot control all our utterances on the basis of our knowledge of the inferences that someone else makes in their brains. It would be madness, utter madness. Most probably, I would end up in a psychiatric clinic, totally baffled about the mysterious workings of the world and the human brain. So, I’m just overanalyzing here, as I always do; which may potentially place me in a bed in a mental hospital someday. Come visit sometime, but in the meantime, try to understand the world and simplify it for me; the sick person needs de-mystification of the reason why they entered the hospital in the first place.

What else would I regret? I could easily claim that I would regret the fact that I made certain people way too important for me, despite their belonging at the lowest scale of my trust (that sort of knowledge came later, of course!). However, without any intention of coming off as the superior all-forgiving human being, I would not substantially regret these decisions. Now, I shall provide you with a cliche I’m sure you’re familiar with; but it is fundamentally true, however ordinary it may be. These people shape our personalities sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse; but truth is, they make us stronger, since we see what is good and genuinely honest through dishonesty and ugliness. We appreciate it more. We start making better decisions in the future based on avoiding the mistakes of the past. Now, end of cliche. I mentioned before that I do not want to sound like a superior, all-forgiving creature, because I am not. There are things I cannot forgive. There are things that I can’t forgive, because I am too scared that forgiving will eventually lead to forgetting and I do not want that. I want to have conscience; to know when I’m being fooled and when I’m being treated properly. No blurring between the two. I do not know if I’m clear enough, but my brain is usually a mess, so this sort of sentence structure should not come off as a particularly surprising event. Anyway, people come and go, the point is to see what has gone wrong, to forgive yourself, to know when to forgive others, to seek motives and reasons and move on. Eventually, you will make better decisions and reflect on the past. Or that’s what’s gonna happen, ideally. Sometimes, it does not happen this way, which is somewhat depressing, because it means that my very much favored cliche is just JUNK. anyhow, the post has become a little too long so I’m reaching its end now. I need to thank ‘Daily Prompt’ for the inspiration, although I deviated from the initial topic and did not, in fact, write odd things about myself. I just made an overly dramatic post about how life can be extremely shitty for a spectator who feels the need to bang his head against the wall till his brain is mashed potatoes because of all the stupidity they’re exposed to in the large screen. oh well.

Photos time!

as most of us are addicted to The Image, I thought it’d be nice to post a photo and redirect you to my gallery in deviantart where you can browse my photos! you can check my most recent ones which are taken in the beautiful city of Kavala, northern Greece, a week ago. feel free to provide feedback

p.s. you can get to the gallery by clicking on the picture above

Take a peek outside your window. What do you see?

I reckon that people who live in London see different things to people who live in Paris. Or maybe not?

I do not know what you can see outside your window. But I know what I can see outside mine. And as I write this, I frequently turn my head to the window, so I can create a mental image of the world lying out of the safety of my room.

In the foreground, I can see the bars of our balcony. On those bars, my mom decided to embellish the industrial decay by decorating it with flowers. Flowers of so many colors, handled with so much care.

The weather is rainy. It is the sort of rain that, in combination with the gloomy sky, makes the industrial cityscape more depressing and helpless. Rain endows it with an impression of fatality, of a tormenting stability that no one appreciates. Looking at the sky and seeing nothing…nothing but an indefinite greyness is the reason why curtains are often kept drawn. There is nothing to hope for out there. Maybe, some other day…

In the background, I can see a block of flats. This is the main architectural style in Greek cities; and especially in the west side of the cities. Apartment buildings with faded plasters and wallpapers, reeking of decay and entrapment. Small little cages carefully constructed to keep the intruders out. Too much personal space that winds up to confinement.

There are apartment buildings that are tended to and often renovated, thus seeming more friendly and picturesque in the heart of the industrial town. But there are apartment buildings that seem old and abandoned, although resided by a lot of people. The block I can see from my room is somewhere in between. Although painted in a melancholy, yellow-ish colour, the flowers in the balcony make it seem more inviting. During the summer, its residents often sit at the small table and discuss and laugh and drink and eat. Mostly, they laugh-and pretty loudly. But now, it’s winter time. No one wants to spend time in the rain and cold. People prefer the cosy, warm interior space. Sometimes, you can see their figures sliding smoothly beyond the curtains, before they turn out the lights and go to sleep. Sometimes, you can see the light coming from the TV screen meeting the balcony door. Sometimes, you can see them decorating their windows for Christmas, allowing the melancholy yellow lights to make the neighborhood seem less somber.

Then, there is this tube used to allow the water of the terrace to escape and drip. During winter time, when the temperature is extremely low, the water freezes, and it is so beautiful and inviting;you almost want to reach out your hand and touch it and let it melt between your palms; escaping before it normally would.

The rain keeps on ruthlessly assaulting the terrace of the block. But in the background, there is more to see; another apartment building, half-hidden. Sometimes, there are people staring out of the window and I can see their figures. And on their terrace, I can see antennas…a lot of them. Antennas emerging from the roofs and blocking the sky view. Antennas blocking our lives’ views. Antennas blocking our lives themselves.

There is so much more to describe;so many trivial details to be put in words. But I will not go on; I will just leave them to your imagination. Even industrial cityscapes have room for imagination; in your brain, you can paint them in your own way and make them less suffocating.

Grab a pencil, grab a crayon and add some color in them. Then tear the paper and turn your creativity into life.

 

Carried away

Sometimes,

I am carried away by all this exquisite beauty of the movies,

the flowers blossoming in the balconies, the golden sun washing their faces

their kissing passionately in the middle of an otherwise gigantic nothing

and then there’s me

wondering if I will be able someday

to catch a glimpse of beauty

and handle it so softly in my palms

so as to keep it alive throughout this constant darkness of the times.

My palms will be burned

but

at least,

I will have gained something that outwits time.

 

The Pills

When you left
you could not turn around
and look me in the eye

You gave me those pills
those white little monsters
and you told me
in calmness:

“These are substitutes for my absence
take them
every single day and every single night”

There I was,
with my heart pounding like a drum
choking on my pill

A pill can make you ill
a pill can give you a thrill
but I cannot swallow this pill

You were late
and your absence made the room darker
and the world more lonely

There I was, still
with my pills in my hands
trying to find a new way to swallow them

I was always a complacent fellow
never could I realize
how harmful people can be

And when you came back
you abandoned me
and you said

that I did not love you
because I never swallowed the pills
and never accepted
this piece of love.

The city in which our dreams reside

(This is a relatively old piece of writing. I wrote it on August 2011, but my feelings haven’t changed a bit.)

And the clock turns back, and back, and back in time…on the day you were born. You can’t exactly remember, because your memory isn’t fully developed. But you can recall the laughter, the enthusiasm, the sunshine after the rain, all those mixed feelings that have taken over the room of the hospital.

You’re five, and your parents take you out for a walk, so you can finally see the world with its ugliness and its malice, in a constant fight with its delicacy and its charm. All you expect to see is bloomed gardens, and feel the smell of their perfume baffling your senses. You know it’s going to be like that. You’ve seen it in the cartoons, the world is like a perfectly painted landscape, an artifact of immense enchantment, a masterpiece made of a thousand colors and sounds.

But instead, you see a grey world, with a blinding sun over your head, with no friendly intentions. You see a world made of cement and metal, with a few trees breaking the shades of grey. A world with buildings much taller than you will ever be, willing to swallow you, chain you to their emptiness, entrap you inside their colorless walls. It’s too early for this, but you don’t know it.

Later on, this city, with all this modern essence, its traffic lights being the only manifestation of joy and vitality, is going to be the shelter of your dreams. No matter how much you will hate her with a passion, for not being the ideal landscape you thought it would be, you won’t be able to get away from her. She’s like a woman, a witch that has cast a spell on you, and you cannot escape. It’s all a mind-set. Although this city has proven you wrong, has shown you that all your childhood was made of glass, protecting yet deceitful, you still won’t be able to take your hands off her dirt.

It’s not her beauty that keeps you there. It may be have pretty spots that the human eye has never seen. It may have spectacular landscapes so strategically concealed, so carefully hidden, as if the city is a little kid that so urgently needs to feel cared and loved. A woman that expects you to look for her. A human that needs to feel love like a river flooding through his arteries. And you’re too weak, too conceited to look beyond its shallow ugliness. But you don’t love this city for her beauty. You love her, you so helplessly adore her because it’s the shelter of your dreams, the home of your most loved friends, the harbor of your most cherished memories.

Those people with the faces you vaguely remember, those people you never had the chance to meet but you could easily fall in love with them, for an instant, forever…those people that kept you company when you were drunk, broke, heartbroken, with a knife stuck on your back, feeling a pain so unimaginably great, so overwhelming, that your heart was ready to explode, to break into smithereens…those people that made you laugh, or made you cry, or made you feel sentiments you never felt before, and you owe them a thank you that you’ll never have the chance to say…these are the people you recall, their features ill-remembered, with a touch of nothingness in their expression, since you forgot the color of their eyes, the way their skin moved when they hurt you, or made you happy…

These moments that will never be able to come back and offer you a moment of youth, springing like a fountain in your heart…these moments of laughter, of pain, of disappointment, of enthusiasm, of anger…all those positive or negative notions mixed together, creating a daze that confuses your senses and benumbs you…and you cannot escape because you cherish this insobriety. These moments when you thought that you found the love of your life, or succeeded in something, but in time you were proved terribly wrong, and your heart wanted to die, to stop beating, to find a way to turn off feelings but keep you alive…these are the moments that reside in this city, and in every corner of it, you find a piece of yourself so utterly painfully seeking for a salvation, for a moment back in time.

You wake up with a sense of nostalgia, as your mind flies back when you dreamt of being a good guitarist, an accomplisher sportsman, or, the simplest of all, yet the most profound of all, a happy person. A person that wakes up in the morning and smiles at the broken mirror, a person that knows what matters and what doesn’t matter and can’t help but laugh at people who worry too much. Your mind is so achingly looking for a moment of innocence, when you thought you could do everything at once, be a perfect person and make this world reflect your perfection.

The clock strikes again, reminding you of the fact that you’re travelling somewhere else, in a place where no one knows you, and you know no one. A place where your parents’ warm hands won’t be able to guide you through the arteries. You have to begin all over again, to make a start all on your own, without clinging onto the glories of the past, the experiences that passed like trains before your eyes and disappeared, living a scar on your soul, either painful or pleasing. There is a time when you know that the past is past, that your life hasn’t ended and that you cannot stay in this broken city forever. You cannot hide yourself behind her walls forever, like a little kid protecting itself from the world, by hiding behind his mother’s dresses. This is the truth. But your heart refuses to respond to reality, as if it’s convenient for it to relax in a utopia, where people will always love each other, and know each other well enough not to disturb your harmony.

As you leave your city behind, you silently promise to yourself that you’re going to come back there one day, and let yourself become one with her walls, her traffic lights, her people that walk by you everyday but refuse to take a look at you, her vaguely remembered faces and her never-leaving sun, that still blinds you everytime you look at it…

She always claimed her happiness depended on others. A lot of people feel this way, but admitting it requires a lot of courage and honesty.

She could not be happy if someone else was mad at her, if someone else was depressed. She could not be happy when she caused the tiniest bit of trouble, even if this kind of trouble was necessary for her to claim her rightful place. Still, she could not help it. Every time she unfolded her wings, someone else spread their chains on her.

Sometimes, she felt like a butterfly locked in a jar. She is not supposed to be there, all locked up and imprisoned. But she is.

Disintegration

She was a woman next door. You would not be able to tell if she was insane, or sane. Her sanity was not visible. Her head was not an open door. Her feelings were never disclosed;she was not an open book for the public to examine and write critiques on. She was simply a distant human being, one of the many alienated souls that inhabit a crazy, industrial, grey town.

She kept her windows shut, never allowing the sun to reach her existence. The sun disturbed her sleep. She slept a lot. She dreamt. Sleep is just a temporary death without dreaming. As Edgar Allan Poe said, “little slices of death”, which we however need.

She dreamt about a man bringing her roses. She adored roses. She always wished for a man to give her roses as a gift and a declaration of his love. But roses…those were the most important part. Their smell, their touch, their deep colour and…their thorns. A perfect representation of love, as the natural world views it. Sensual, deep, pleasurable but…there is always the possibility of getting hurt by its thorns. Getting hurt…and hurting. No one is innocent of hurting. Getting hurt…may be avoidable but sometimes people are so excited to experience such a wonderful sentiment, that they forget to mind the negative possibilities…and plummet among the thorns.

Her whole life was surrounded by this dream. A man bringing the most fresh and sweet-looking roses one could ever encounter. Then his hands start bleeding. Then he starts dissolving as blood covers his whole body. He disappears, along with the roses…the prettiest roses that have ever grown.

She suffocated as the man dissolved. Her figure dropped into the darkness, an abyss so ugly and hostile, an abyss never-ending. She never reached the bottom. She never solved the problem. She never had the epiphany. Constantly trapped in her own abyss, she was unable to put up with anything. Her weakness overwhelmed her.

She woke up. She did the usual stuff she always did. Gazing beyond the curtains of her house, waiting for the man with the roses. She swore her dream was a prophecy. But men with roses always visited someone else. Men selling roses never knocked on her door. She never had the chance to hold the roses someone else’s hands have held. A depressing reality reinforcing itself every day, beyond those curtains, a world devoid of colors and beauty and love and sentiments. The colors have faded, almost dropped into nothingness. She did not like this world. She preferred to isolate it beyond her curtains. She would not let it reach her brain and enslave it.

Every day, this dream tormented her and rejoiced her at the same time. She could not realize that she may have not been enslaved by the external world, which she has rejected with a fiery passion, but she was tyrannized and dominated by her internal world, by the desires that never came true. She picked a different kind of chains, but the chains were there, torturing her body and her soul every day, every minute. All those fixed intuitions about suppression…there are innumerable forms of suppression camouflaged in the shiny and pretty costume of the alternative,freedom-carrying choice. Chains are chains, even if they may be clean and nice-looking.

She slowly descended into confusing dreams with reality. Her mask of sanity started slipping, abandoning her. Sometimes, she would run to the door, expecting a man with roses. She could not comprehend the fact that all this beauty was just images of her brain. She was disappointed by the harsh wave of reality; everything remained inalterable, common and depressing.

That night, she plunged deeper into these spectacular images that could heal her heart for a while. Most people do not know that our dreams last very little. We believe that they last for hours, just like a long movie playing in our brains. The truth is that if we were ever to draw a parallel between movies and dreams, we would claim that dreams are insanely short films. In her brain, her dream comprised scenes that could be included in a romantic movie, slowly shifting to a horror movie. The sudden change, the fatal cut. The turning of happiness into a nightmare.

The man turned in to bring her roses. He declared his love for her. His face was difficult to describe, his figure was merely an outline of a human being, as if drawn with a pencil and left incomplete. The voice seemed to come out of nowhere, like music whose source is unknown, yet heard and pleasurable to the senses. Her eyes were like a camera, observing everything. But this time was different from the others. He made a step and handed the roses over to her. She was that close to touching them, to feel them in her hands, her fingers just a breath away, but then…they dissolved. They turned into blood, melted, like snow turning into water when touched by the rays of the sun. The man started dissolving too, covered in blood, and his outline disappeared as if someone used a rubber to get rid of a grotesque figure on the paper. Then, the abyss…oh, this everlasting abyss, always keeping her away from the roses and their smell. Pitch blackness, hostility, not a friend in sight. This abyss resembled the real world so much. It almost overwhelmed her. She wanted to cry, but her punishment was to be perpetually stuck in a nightmare deprived of motion, of vitality and colors. The red of the fire and the black of the darkness, always trapping herself in between.

That night was the climax of her misery. All her life was building up to the caressment of the roses, and once she was just a breath away from holding them, she faded, she collapsed. All her life seemed like a farce to her, a joke that is not funny anymore, incapable of inducing laughter. She woke up with tears in her eyes. Her figure was not able to cry, but her real eyes, they could not be controlled.

That night, her body was found in the threshold of her house. Her appalled neighbors called an ambulance.

The coroner diagnosed an aspirin overdose. The women, aged 39, was dead.

For a long time, the journalists of the city could not help but wonder…

“Why would a woman place a bouquet of roses on her chest and proceed to kill herself?”

But no one could find an appropriate answer…

Written on the walls

“I love poetry!” she used to say to me, all the time. Every single day of the week, every time I stumbled upon her, she would churn out beautiful lines like these. Then, with the usual sullen look in her face, she would correct herself involuntarily; “I love your poetry, you know! Not just poetry in general!” she gave a kiss at my cheek and left. And behind her figure, ruins, ruins, ruins. I was inexhaustibly in love with her. The very shadow that emerged from her well-formed body, her moves, the way her fingers caressed the ground and the sound her lips made when she touched my cheek, everything pertaining to her was just unrivaled. She was a very, very powerful wind, a vento (oh, how she used to retrieve all her knowledge of Italian vocabulary, she tried to pronounce words she has not pronounced in ages! I never had the courage or the attitude to tell her how funnily her lips moved when she tried to pronounce Italian words), a force that even if you painstakingly attempted to resist it, it swarmed over you, your existence, your essence, your longings and ambitions, and managed to conquer you, and reduce you to mindless, blindfolded obedience. Yet, you still lusted over becoming a part of her collection of tormented, fatigued hearts. I could give up everything had she implored me to. I could figure out multiple, imaginative ways to kill myself had she wanted to make a piece of art out of my death.

One day, she walked up to me and told me how extraordinarily exquisite my poetry was. I was enthralled once again by her choice of words. She carefully picked the words that would make me beg on my knees for a reassurance of my existence in her universe. She told me every single day how much she wanted to have poems written about her, by my hand. Oh, how little she knew! I had scribbled an insurmountable number of stanzas dedicated to her. I never had the nerve to show her how my artsy self felt about her.

“I want poetry about me!” she yelled with a joyful look in her face. People thought her drunk, but she was more sober than most. This elation was natural to her. She did not have to add alcohol to her words. She was an exuberant, high-spirited, funny person by nature. This is the main reason why I adored her. Her eyes had a different sort of gleam every time you gazed into them. They always reflected a different kind of abyss. And this abyss penetrated you. 

“I will write poetry about you all over town” I said, intoxicated with amore. She looked at me for a moment and laughed from the bottom of her heart. “No, you won’t!” She offered her regular kiss at my cheek and abandoned the debris of my heart longing for another one. Her disbelief motivated me all the more. I wanted to prove to her what I could do, what I was capable of.

I wrote poetry, lines, drawings, faces and balloon hearts looking for their owners in the streets. On public, private properties, on everything that could be used as a surface for art. Elaborately, carefully, diligently, I scribbled lines for her. Not only my lines, no. There so many immense poets before me that illustrated female beauty in more imaginative and erotic ways. My work was insufficient to describe spectacular miracles of nature. Every single corner of this gray, industrial town was painted with love, with immense, immobilizing, laborious love. The kind of love that blooms even in the gloomiest of areas all around the globe and creates a depressing contrast with all the sadness and the misery emanating from these corners of the world. This was my love.

“I will write poetry about you all over town” I said. But what I truly wanted to say was, “I will write poetry about you, everywhere. I will write poetry on your arms. I will write poetry in the walls of the most squalid building you have ever set eyes on. I will write poetry on every cement surface of this town, and let a flower hesitatingly bloom from the spot on which my words silently lie. And this flower will exist only for you…for your blissful smile.”