Call me Darrel… Last night I had a very strange dream. I was walking through a forest with my firebolt over my shoulder, following something silvery white. It was winding its way through the trees ahead and I could only catch glimpses of it between the leaves. I was anxious to catch up with it, broke into a run, but as I moved faster so did my quarry.
I woke and sat that night, realised that time had in sooth flown. It had slipped away through my fingers. Eheu fugaces. Time had trickled through my hands like sand. I groped for some sense behind my random memories. I knew it must be there, somewhere in the constant efforts — even while I was a child — to determine my place in the midst of shifting truths. All of the syndromes of one central complex of questions. Where is my place? Who am I?
This deep-rooted need to belong was to become a reality as I unpacked my hoarded collectibles and displayed my life and its achievements in an unorthodox but tasteful decoration of what is now my home. I enter with a sense of intrusion into my bygone days, until gently, as if opening the lid of a forgotten jewellery box, a tinkling waltz enfolds me and reveals diamonds among the rhinestones, bangles and beads.
Is it because I believe that if I relinquish my domination I become a victim? Yet all of us have our milkmen and our postmen; people who want order like I do and improvement in their circumstances and who, given the opportunity, would inhabit best of times and the worst of times.
The best years of my life have fled from me. From this day forward I vow to adopt a more relaxed approach towards social intercourse and to take the whole idea of fun more seriously. My imagination was awaking from a long slumber. No more to be silent; to be alone. All the being and doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated: and I shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being myself. And, as there is a tide in my affairs and I should take this tide at the flood as it leads on to fortune and if I omit to do this, all the voyage of my life will be bound in shallows and misery.
I knew it had me then. The knowledge fell on me like every thing on Earth and I was screaming and climbing up the wall. I try desperately not piss in my own shoes. My whingeing about the monsters who squirm at the other end of my moral spectrum make me want to consider the lilies of the field and that they do not toil as I do because sex, for a man, is always to some degree an edgy performance, more ritual than romance, a sport in which conscience is an indulgent referee.
For those, like me, to whom much is given, much is required and when, at some future date, the high court of history sits in judgement of me, recording whether in my brief span of service I fulfilled my responsibilities because I carry my nemesis within me. Yesterday’s feeling of guilt is the legitimate father of today’s feeling of self-admiration.
This is no time to speak of my hopes of the future, or the broader world which lies beyond my struggles. But I know that, for me, sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with my sex and beauty and arises out of sex and beauty, is my intuition. If an idea is right in itself, and if thus armed it embarks upon the struggle in this world; it is invincible and every persecution will lead to its inner strengthening.
For I have moved through dooms of love, through sames of am through haves of give and if a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty and applies it, as sincerely, to the love of the virtuous, he can exert his mind to that which pleases him and the others from who his thoughts have been so freely borrowed.
I want to be alone.
Readers able to identify correctly all the original sources of material in the above article will qualify for a prize. This will be a copy of Darrel Bisto-Gravy’s latest publication Stop Me If You’ve Read This One, signed by all its authors. Second prize is two copies