Being with him for a few hours speckled over the recent past
days, I happened to come to an understanding, a sort of intimation with some of
mine, namely a sort of vicarious experience of seeing through his eye, or of
holding on to his being—seemingly like with some high idea about himself. And
it was on one recent day.
Of stout, squarish medium build and sallow complexion, he
wheezed out a disturbed breath. The bulk of his paunch bobbed up and down once.
He tended to incline back supported by his stretched hands on the soft lawn,
but the atrophied muscles of his arms didn’t let him remain there relaxed thus
for long, with his paunch bit flattened.
“Well, I will go there to meet my aunt in Tokyo, on my own
expenses. But I won’t stay at her. I will stay in a hotel, and go to her, if
she invites me to dine. I will join, if she takes me around. But I don’t want
someone breathing at my heels about his or her favor incurred for me. I am not of
such a type who can take such thing,” said he while casting nervous, envious
glances at a lit gas balloon soaring high up in the night sky still dimly lit
by the set sun, as it was summer solstice here in France, at a faubourg in a
corner of Ile-de-France.
We were lounging on a sprawling inclined lawn rimmed with
the silhouettes of towering trees minutely outlined against the sky with
looming gold-tawny clouds. The lit gas balloon passed through a mass of cloud
and lost for a few seconds before falling down as a dark burr like a black felt
hat, with its fire extinguished. I was randomly thinking about what I had left
reading, not about such silhouettes of trees but of steeples and spires of
ancient churches; my haunting to it was related with the writer’s fear, of his
not being able to versify and write fiction with poignant, unique way of seeing
like Bolch, of his finding himself like before a cul-de-sac when he tried to
cull up his intuition to be able to deal with an ‘abstract truth’, and so on.
Though, frankly, I hadn’t such an intimation of myself, I liked learning more
about such, like of a lost one in Sahara desert, and his means of survival to
prove himself the opposite, a real doer. Maybe it could be of my own status as
a political refugee in a foreign land, whatever. Yes, we were lounging there,
with two young French women in mini-shorts lounging just across demarcated by a
trampled strip. As the darkness deepened, I saw one of them lying on her back
and the other sitting upright and smoking; the former’s way of lying by
adjusting her feet one on the other and vice-versa drew me into another realm
like the floating lit gas balloons in the expanse of the space. But there was
this barrier of personal idea not that easy to be dismantled, not that easy ‘to
take life easily’ with it. Yes, he was still talking beside me.
Though not of an ordained background, he was still single
despite being forty-plus. I, however single, was not like him, namely not
having had that much intimation with the earthly run of life-making. But I could
feel some of his remaining single in me. No, no, not a perfectionist he was, I
was unreasonably sure. Then what, if not of this same personal idea about
oneself, such a phenomenon that could be found remaining absolutely independent
of one’s conscience in general or at a particular time, or of one’s compunction
and humane intuition. Trying to see through his eyes, despite being indigent if
compared to him, I found something like being a doer in home-making sense but
not making a home of himself. And so strangely to me, he, though, wanted a
family of his own. I was pretty sure he had some knowledge of what I presumably
thought of having traced in him, which could be a sort of epiphenomenon to his
idea about himself that mattered the most to him. And could that giant one be
limited somehow? Like voluntarily or involuntarily laying himself at the
disposal of someone else’s caprice could be possible, but I didn’t wonder so at
the time. I found instead, as the priority imposed on himself, like persuading
myself to stick on to adding up a lump of designated value on another as the
safe buttress of my own idea about myself to lean against, with taking the
tender thing or union as sure to come up along my way ahead like the next
morning. And I was almost sure he wasn’t the one who could do without such a
safe buttress; he was more terrestrially charged. Then how possible about
renouncing everything to pursue his own idea about himself, and that without a
sound philosophical ground.
And the clock ticks on, when I involuntarily go back to him
asking myself why he lags behind despite being a doer. I find myself being
meddlesome to the point of taking myself as inexistent. Why not, as seeing does
matter, bumping into whom does matter in teaching you such thing of drawing you
into his or her own way of seeing, for everyone isn’t gifted with such a
personality that draws you in… Then why not a huge unrecognized gift, if you’re in
search of such an encounter to feed your doing of such tedium and labor and
value.
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