Digressions

Imagine walking into a space that is so familiar you can mentally construct it without its physical reality before you. But just as you enter that space, the subduing and soothing Familiarity metastasises into alien Familiarity. Its physical reality of concrete shapes melts into grotesque contours of a mutilated past, which you thought has been neatly tucked under the magical cloak of History, never to resurface in your life again. But History always finds a way to catch up with the present, or perhaps History is always there, a stone clinging onto your tail, which gets bigger and bigger as you walk further on, weighing you down.

The faint pencil contours gradually become darker and darker. Then you suddenly find the tableaux of petty inhumanity that were previously veiled by the cloak of History, floating unbidden along the horizon of your mental eye. Strangely enough, those same emotions from the past are evoked, as if time has not made them rusty. A lot can fall into the black hole of the vessel of time, but the very scenes that you wish to erode and to be washed away into the sea of oblivion, are preserved so well that they have not disfigured in the slightest. Just as an artist may notice a stroke of paint being added to his own masterpiece, so too will you if a prop is relocated in the theatrical staging of your own history. Uncanny, but true: the inner recesses of our mind are still in many ways, a dark continent.

Then you suddenly find that reality and the tableaux of petty inhumanity have become an organic homogenous entity in league with each other to wreak havoc on your psychological terrain. History must inexorably repeat itself, because where there is man, there is man’s inhumanity to man. Within a day, from the pinnacle of happiness, human excellence, you can fall to the very nadir of petty despotism and suffer another reign of petty terror. The foundations of trust, loyalty, reputation and friendship that you have so assiduously built over the vicissitude of your life are suddenly demolished. A monster with an indiscriminate appetite on the rampage will mercilessly devour whatever that meets it eye, so too will Vitriolic Defamation. With its ample power, you are ousted, demonised, cast in the worst possible light and you find yourself living a marginalised existence, again.

“Oh what a pity those foundations are demolished, you have to start from square one then!” exclaims the Worldly World. You try to seek consolation from the glimpses of light, but they, who dwell in the cosmic realm, can only say “alas!” and reciprocate your plaintive pitiful expression with an indifferent twinkle. Your love is trampled upon by Indifference. Love, so deceiving in her constancy. By Jove! Vows that one gives to another, promising one would love another forever, are nothing more than an attempt to mimic Eternity with an unsteady hand, a sham to masquerade the inconstancy of humankind. Vows like these are made by simulated prophets. Oh, love is merely something so ethereal, unfathomable, as if by incantation, it can be conjured in your heart out of sheer fortuity and spontaneity. After its immediate consumption, it spreads like poison, infecting your every organ with the self-inflicted pangs of passion. When you convalesce, you are left with nothing but a shipwreck, and if you are lucky, the dregs of love – a flame that extinguishes with time, which no fuel can possibly reignite.

If steadfast foundations can be demolished by fictitious truths, what can a petty flame like Love withstand?