the thing with the storyteller (part three)

(continued from part 2)

all that i ever wanted to give you is freedom...

on monday one corporate legal counsel held the storyteller in his arms. the story teller was crying, he is one of her very best friends. together they share a passion for life lived to its fullest, something about a city in north africa and a deep commitment for peace.

what remains of a love affair when the ashes in the fireplace are cold? sinnan. once more the storyteller returns to it, this place, and what it is that remains to do. action is all that there is, and action is not about doing things, and certainly it never was a circumstance or an excuse.

it was on a bridge over this river of chance, near a place that should hold history and fright, that the the storyteller one fine summer evening came to realize that it is action that will make a difference. the storyteller continues and crosses that bridge, the storyteller can not turn around.

how does a storyteller, a woman, an hermit and a damned mortal human being deal with the path so chosen? where does it begin and how does it start?

choices they say, is what life is about. choice to this storyteller is a very poor cousin of what the woman discovers. listening to music reveals wonder. music is, like literature, something that passes on from one human to another through some representational abstraction of letters or notes either on paper or as sound produced by a musical instrument created be it by the simplest of craftsman with the most rudimentary of materials, or with the most farfetched gadgetry out of the quantum kitchen of technology. use a stone, or use a quantum-well, music you can make. music is not about technology, it is about rhythm, and it touches the soul directly. choice is an illusion; in reality there is only one path to now.

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual
.

Albert Camus  (speech, Nobel Banquet, Stockholm, 1957)

while the hyperlink has restricted associations and recall from the fuzzy to the explicit, and it has made knowledge a resource yet to be fully reckoned with, if it has not totally redefined it, the storyteller remains in the privilege of painting the common joys and sufferings, like the musician remains in the privilege of resonating with our deepest senses.

while in americana one wonders about the epidermic truth of the fiction-absolute of tom wolfe, in europeana the storyteller wonders why the  rift between the shores of marseille and martha's vineyard have grown apart, or why supposedly smart-grown-up-people who claim to know what is good and right, do all the wrong things and nobody dares to tell them one simple piece of information, that they are wrong. wrong. but who would dare to say so and risk life in its process?

when the man in montana tells the storyteller that he is tired and dealing with existential angst and that the world out there is wrong and not ready for life, then this storyteller listens and knows that most of all he needs to be listened to. although the world out there surely looks to be out of order, it is not, this is the world that we have created, this is the world that we live in, it is ours. for the storyteller, the woman is not important, neither is the man, but something grander is important, the moment, the instant, and every and each breath of this life. war happens, men kill each other for reasons beyond comprehension, and then find excuses in the texts of history books. causality becomes an excuse and tragedy and drama become a certainty, and we go on and call it war, or we call it life. when the man in montana is grieving the pain of the past, the woman wonders about what is real and what is absolute. perfection may be the ultimate utopia, but then utopia is never perfect, and the storyteller would warn that never is not absolute. then they say that the storyteller is sultry while the woman keeps herself veiled,  the unattainable recluse whose skin you may touch, and whose being you may experience. she returns, and then it all starts again, once more, like the seasons on the shores of europe. she returns and the seduction continues.

when the tears shed in paris are recalled, the woman knows that the storyteller will go on, day after day, one step at a time, one word after the last, and again the fears are recounted, retold, rehashed, and eventually conquered and embraced. fear, once more fear. fear is just another emotion, she says. then the woman appears and she is divorced from fairness. the universe is complete; it lacks a sense of fairness. the world is as it is.

when intimacy is felt... what happens then? it was felt. the first time, it was not recognized, an abyss summoned the woman, and the world lost its innocence. the storyteller froze, the woman tasted paradise.

(to be continued)

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