September 9, 2024
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August 26, 2024
If something is said to be beautiful, then it is bound to be ultimately good, correct? It’s been recycled over and over, that famous retelling: “Morality has aesthetic criteria.” That being the case, it would be also true that all which is ugly is monstrous, and all which is pleasing to view is, well, good. But once you look more into it, it really isn’t the case, is it? A monster rarely approaches you with violence, vigor and a stagnant baring of incisors… but more-so it caresses you, coaxes you into taking the first step towards it, maybe to absolve itself of blame.
A monster, often, is truly the offspring of an environment bound in certain shackles or chains of some sort. It is never first nature, why would it be? When someone is first presented to the world, or at least when they can first concoct some coherent thought, is their first thought to harm the world? Destroy it? Granted, there are some cases where that might be true but, I don’t think that goes for everything. Let’s take the Minotaur, shall we?
The walls of the labyrinth hummed with chill through their cracks, as whatever moonlight salvaged to pass through the miniature skylight at the far end of a tower within it and began to flow into the haunting corridors. Seldom a soul stepped inside, and perhaps for good reason. It was awfully silent, you could quite literally hear the darkness as it crept around you, overtaking that aforementioned light, drawing its hands around your shoulders and pushing you ever so slightly inwards, inwards, and further into the maze.
At any which corner you end up, what comes to mind? Do you ask yourself if a body or a corpse had been in here, but for far too long succumbed to disintegration, and ultimately faded away? Why do you think so? Why is it that this labyrinth must be home to victim falling prey to a behemoth? Do you know the behemoth? What do they tell you about him? A dreadful, terror-striking creature possessing the head of a bull, and the body of a human? One that screams and tears through the silence of the night. A fearless, merciless being who, at first laying eyes on you, has no other aim than to kill you? Why does it want to kill you? Also, why “it”?
I wonder if I would ask you at this particular moment to ponder, and try to draw the image of the Minotaur in your head, would you picture something similar to what I had described? What fear I had fed into you? What would you add? Throbbing veins extending from the creature’s neck, blood pumping on arteries that are so mad, so filled with rage they could explode? Or would you imagine its hands: calloused, ashy orbs of concrete that destroy and destroy all the same? What more is there to think of?
You, befallen to the siren-song of your curiosity, venture further into the labyrinth until the appearance of the walls begins to change. Long gone are the untouched cracked slabs of stone, aching for a semblance of human touch, and now you are presented with stories carved, in the shape of diagonal straight lines, as if scratches of some fleeing animal. Do you think the scratches are human? Do you disagree that they are devoid of any soul?
Come closer, take a look at my brother. Glaucus, I call his name, but all I am met with is a roar. I’ve never seen him before, you see, I wasn’t aware he was alive. But he knows me, he knows the variations which my voice takes; the pitches, the inflections and the sort; he would hear me through the pipes stretching from down below, above into the palace. I approach him further, look. He’s calmer now, timid, almost afraid. He crouches and creeps closer, lashes shine bright red on his back, as if they were trenches filled with moonlight and powdered ruby. He extends his hand to touch mine, though he hasn’t done that before, who would he touch?
I grasp the horns of his head, gently fearing I might hurt him, but they were fictitious; a lie spun, a web woven – those horns were not his. My fingers are met with a feeling akin to when touching concrete; hard, unshaking, inhuman and not bone borne. His limbs quiver, and his back arches further. Glaucus? I reach towards the back of his head, and find a latch of thread.
Untying it, the Minotaur is gone; the façade has vanished. Long faded are the flared nostrils, unhinged jaw and lifeless eyes. I find myself gazing into auburn eyes, pools of honey, that dare steal whatever light trespasses into the room, and a mouth that shivers and fails to open for any semblance of thought. A human. Who told you he was a monster? Was it my father? Was it those who wrote of him but never saw him?
One of the first words you find when you search for the definition of the word “monster” is ugly. Monster, Monstre, Monstrum, Monere – warn. A monster takes away your humanity, they strike fear into your minds, they rob you of mercy and kindness. Monsters have tongues of gold, verses of pure diamond. A monster looks at you, talks to you, even shares a meal with you. Monstrosity is not screams, darkness and terror, but rather words laced with honey, fragrant compliments and decadent enticement. A monster does not wish to scare you, but rather to take settlement of your mind, feed you images and thoughts that it deems are fit for a definition of a concept. While humans may toil in captivity, terror and darkness their entire life, withering away, becoming semantically ugly, dreary and frightful to look at – a monster can smell nice, feel nice, and speak nice. So, tell me, what is a monster?
There is stone, moss adorned and ancient. Whispers flow through its sun-stained plaques and rush through its body, as if racing to jump out into the air. It’s four columns, two of which remained unfinished. The unsung castle sits comfortably on a bed of grass, greeted by a concert of trees, under the watching eye of mountains behind it, that carry chill from their peaks and fill its corridors. The tired hue of late day casts its body upon its walls from the outside, as if to rest after hours of toil. I pass that monument usually.
I do not know how it came to exist, who built it or for what reason. But judging by its state, I can only hope that the architect had found a more rewarding pursuit; maybe Love or some other endeavor that steals one’s mind from oneself, and leaves them in their tracks, putting halt to their creations. A muse, maybe. But who am I to say? I’ve never dared to set foot. There are songs in empty places, in halls that deemed no person fit to inhabit them anymore, and in doing so succumbed to moss, overgrowing and ever flowing with grass and vines, as if to say, ‘leave me’, ‘I have seen enough of your torment, and now I just want to be embraced’.
I remain convinced, however, that the great mind behind that monument, wherever they may be now, be it above or below, have rendered themselves ever-so-slightly immortal. For truth, the wind that falls into this valley mixes and intertwines with their breath, their scent and specks of dust that their body had once left on a tiresome, boiling day in August, as they stood there laying brick against brick, watching, Pygmalion, as their lover came to tower above their head, becoming something greater than they would ever be.
And there is my scorn. Will I ever be able to create something that outlives me? Something that, in a pure act of hubris, decides to defy the shackles of time, and allow me a compartment of memory in one of its many folds? We do not take anything with us when we pass, nor should we; we are far less needing of such sort. But maybe, maybe, we are allowed to leave a piece of ourselves there. Not for our sake, that we may live on or bathe in soft sunlight as the ocean extinguishes whatever warmth the days had to offer, but more for the sake of those whose hearts we take residence.
Is it too much to ask? A place, where I could haunt. Where I could dwell, in fleeting threads of memory, long after my parting. Every column of that old, decaying castle bares the name of its creator, and if not the name, then their thought, their entity and mettle. We may not know who it is that has built it, but the castle knows. The castle knows its creator. It has sat with him, heard his laughter, his cries long through the night, nestled his aching limbs as the chill of fear of the future came upon him, nurtured and wept for him as he wept for his own sorrowful, fleeting self.
I ask for walls to remember me, for shadows to utter my name in the ears of those who pay minds to angels carrying stars and galaxies in their robes, for a person I’ve loved long before I deemed myself mortal, or accepting of the fact, for a person I’ve made myself whole because of, to be able to witness me once more, so that I could find warmth in the boroughs of their mind, and that they may remember me fondly.
A castle, to not be forgotten. A castle, to have existed once for a day or two, if even at all, if even for a short, unsurmountable period of time.
If there were ever a certain light that hit my window, one that lay rest in my brain for days after it had faded and was taken child by moonlight: It would be the orange hue of Saturday mornings when I was 9 years old. It came from the only window in my bedroom; a small porthole into the outside world placed in the top corner facing my bed. The rays would hit my walls almost meling with them, and settle on my face, as if carressing it.
That same light carried itself with me wherever I went; I could not shake it from my eyes, as if it were some sheet of translucent paper, a color filter draped over my face. I could not shake it, nor did I really want to. It would follow me into corridors of school, hallways that were once bussling and raging with the angst of teenagers: loud exclamations of triumph, vigor and heartbreak. It would rest upon a locker or two, fall down to the white tiles as the day extended, and the end came around. It would hover at my feet, as I stood in the center, watching as everyone’s motion slowed, almost hanging before me in a robe of smoke, until no one was left but me and the ray of light. On the ride home on the bus, it followed me, hopped over extinguished street lights that didn’t wake up yet, settled in the branches of trees as we came nearer to the outskirts of a forest I had always dreamed of entering, only for it to leave my view, as I inched closer, and closer back home. There, I would find the light greeting me one more time.
As curious as a bird watching over me, this light would now latch itself on the barks of trees outside my house, darkening as the Sun made its rounds, reddish and mature, older now. It would slip through the cracks in the tree’s body, as if to warm it on cold days, keeping it company, for even trees I think can feel alone sometimes. It would trace itself in circles around it, dwindling down and further down into the beds of sage that were dampened by the storm that screamed and wailed all through last night. And that light carried itself with me still, everywhere I went.
I am twenty five now. I lost the light for a while; I had feared that I may have upset it or just got separated from it by the lines of life or some other profound utterance that the better part of my brain cannot fathom right now because: I found it again. It has brown curls settling above a reddish forehead, it has auburn eyes that shine whiter than snow sometimes, and darken into pools of honey at others. It has silk-colored arms, and small frackles scattered as stars would in the night sky. It is ivory, it is sweet, it is maroon. The light still greets me at my bed, but now with a kiss on the head instead of melting into my face. The light does not follow me anymore: but I it. The light likes vinyl records of soundtracks from the Seventies, obscure Eastern-European music and German, Russian and French art. The light likes the taste of hot sauce on boiled noodles, and the light likes birds. The light likes working with her arms, creating right now the very same wonders and miracles – bringing them to life – as it once did when I was 9. The light travels the world, and every sunset, I pray the light will find me again. My light has kept warmth, above frozen lakes, and damp grass. My light smiles, my light cries, my light 'caws' .
My light shines, now, brighter than it ever did when I was nine
My light, hoping that it will come home
Prayer, prayers that my light remains mine
As she blesses the colloseums of Rome