Friday 9 May 2014

What is a truth?

He was the Artist. He called himself that, for he had never been good with names. He felt it was hard to come up with good names, and no names but the best were good enough for his characters (and himself, of course). He just hadn't found a good name, so that was what he called himself, and how he introduced when someone asked his name in the professional context. His parents had given him a name in birth, of course, but it was an irrelevant name, for everyone writing classic prose used a pseudonym. His was the Artist, until he either found a better one or wrote a masterpiece with that pseudonym.

The clock went through its darkest hours. It really wasn't dark, for he lived already June, and the clock was eleven in the evening. He was cycling. Was he cycling in the city or in the countryside? Irrelevant, he knew, for they complemented each other. In the city he could keep an eye on other people who had wondered into the night to search a better tomorrow. In the countryside he could keep an eye on himself, for for every better tomorrow found around him he grew more and more conscious of how bad he was at searching them. He enjoyed the utter solitude he found cycling in the middle of a pine forest, and loved the loneliness hiding inside the unending stream of company in the city.

He was a writer, yes. One thing he had learned by heart: a man reading know books along his life lived only once, a man reading a thousand books lived a thousand times, and a man writing a thousand books was a goddamn god. He found writerhood being comparable to insanity, as described by the late David Eddings: if he found doors boring one day, he could just write them to be little transparent, s-shaped things without boring, plain and simple colouring but instead coloured by Van Gogh. If he found his thoughts boring, he could write the walls to sing him a lullaby or to have an interesting conversation of the big questions of life. If he was bored, he could just open his notepad and write a play of light and shadows.

The artist loved summer evenings and nights. He was a nightowl, yes, but he loathed the winternights that began at 3PM. In summer he could take a bicycle for a ride in the midnight, and he needed neither artificial lights nor warm clothes for the sun provided both the light and the warmth. If he couldn't sleep, which was more frequent than he felt safe to admit, he could set up a work environment (an absurd chair and a writing tool somewhere between a notepad and a laptop) in the yard. If he had an awesome project under development, he could relocate himself to a near beach sauna, enjoy the warm sauna til the small hours of the morning to kick the creative juices flowing inside his mind, and then move to the pier to write intensively. The last way to write was among the best he knew, but it was also among the easiest to break. If he forgot to take a bath in insect repellent, he couldn't write a thing in the pier. Hours around 2am were also unbelievably cold outside the warmest nights of the July, and he couldn't just write the temperature to be higher.

Two things he hated with passion: noon and winter. Noon meant everyone else would be not sleeping but harassing him with foul trivialities such as the real life: when are you going to do your school/job projects? When are you going to eat? When are you going to waste your time with another irrelevant act that just belongs to adulthood?

And winter. He couldn't take his writing equipment outside, for either he froze his ass off or the equipment did, and even the cycling was stupid in the winter (for he had asthma). Winters were dark times, the sun setting few hours after the noon made him creative, yes, but his playful, childish creativity turned into sombre and gloom for months once the calender turned September. He hated artificial light, and there wasn't enough natural, so he had to pour the feeling of walls crashing upon him into somewhere, and as a loner, the paper was the only thing ready to listen him.

He was an artist, a writer. He loved watching people dance, but hated the dance himself. Let's hope nobody told him he can't avoid the dance. He loved the solitude, and hated the fact he couldn't live in it. He loved to be around people, and hated that fact. He loved people, he hated people. He loved writing, he hated writing. He was a man of conflicting views. He loved summer, he hated summer. He loved winter, he hated winter. He was a man of fiery passions. He knew what anxiety looked like in a handful of dust. He was the writer.

And that was the truth. Choo choo!

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