It is common knowledge that Don Quixote is a hilarious book. In fact, I never thought I’d laugh out loud so much from a book written the early 1600s (Quixote confusing “my mouth sores” with “Methuselah?” Sancho being punished by a royal court by being slapped in the nose? Priceless). At the same time, Don Quixote is one of the most profound books ever written. Even at times the humor reflects back on itself, the sheer insanity of one man who yearns for a time long forgotten, and in doing so, acts as if that time never ended (Yukio Mishima, much?). Even one of the people that Don Quixote meets on his journey finds his situation perplexing. “How is it possible that there are knights errant in the world today or that there are printed histories of true knightly deeds?” he asks (Cervantes 553). And, for the rest of the world, his question is not only correct, but in itself the statement. The time of knights in shining armor are long over in Spain; life has become sadly boring, internal, and, dare I say it, modern. Alonso Quixano, however, doesn’t want to believe that the tales he reads in his romance are no longer a part of his culture; he, taking the name of Don Quixote, decides to go on an epic tale, in the name of a Dulcinea that happens to be a random peasant girl, in the name for an adventure he can never actually complete. In the second half of the book, Quixote’s tales have become legendary, because someone chose to write them down. Now, dukes, travelers, courtesans purposefully play with Quixote and his madness, jesting him into fights they know he’ll never win, toying with his believes for a cheap laugh. It would be wrong to say that Quixote never questions (he is, after all, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face for a reason); instead, it seems that Quixote never stumbles. After a moment of self-doubt, he resuscitates himself, calls upon his squire Sancho and his horse Rocinante, and returns to journey towards the path never traveled, the path that doesn’t actually exist. Near his deathbed, Quixote returns to Quixano, and he questions why he chose to believe in a world that could never be. He dies, believing that he did was for nothing.
Don Quixote is a book that has proved to me that, one can live entirely in one’s time and be a product of said time, referencing events long passed, reacting to deeds a person of another world or history will never understand, and yet still be universal. For, Don Quixote makes it aptly clear that the end of the knightly days is just the soil in which Don Quixote happened to be planted in, and inside the blossoms that somehow never seem to wither away are buds of hope in the face of hopelessness, doubt in a world that will never understand you, the curse of being given a gift that no one will see the beauty in during a lifetime, the lies that humans tell themselves to never deject themselves from their path, be it the search for salvation on Earth or to be salvation themselves, and, yes, the most pressing of all human reactions, the need for laughter in an unpredictable and troublesome world.
December 18th, 2011; “I’m sad...”
I’m sad that when people ask me what they do, they don’t really care about the answer. They only want a quick blurb so that they can get into deeper conversations. I would rather just enter those deeper conversations.
I get the sense that people don’t want to get to know me. I feel that most people orbit around themselves, never interested in the planet that has come to make them who they are. I not only orbit around, but visit my planet every day. I ask myself why I feel sad, why I have to make infinite chains of interrogation about something that might have very little to do with what I’m actually feeling. When I get to the bottom, I feel lost, often confused, because there was nothing there in the first place.
For some unspoken reason, at the core of every human lies an unparchable well of sadness, the sweat of which seeps into my very skin at the moments when I would least like it to. I wish I were better at hiding my sadness; I wish people couldn’t understand how I feel upon a glance into my eyes.
I’m sad, but sad is different. Most people conceal their sadness by pretending there is nothing to be sad about at all. They enjoy not feeling sad, as they should. Most of them keep their mind on the surface in the first place, nor does their mind wander into self-defensive triggers and unplanted booby traps the moment that they first touch upon how they feel. They didn’t even notice their feelings in the first place.
What do you do when you are not only the one who sets traps for yourself, but has mastered every nuance in your step, every half-foliaged wall you decide to purposefully touch, because you’re the one who wants to hurt yourself, that you’re the one who wants to seep in sadness and explore sadness knowing very well that nothing exists in sadness except sadness?
I guess the only thing to be done is to feel sad.
December 19th, 2011: “I want to make love to a dancer...”
I want to make love to a dancer. I want to feel as I hold him in my hands the expression of an artist, a man who touches me the way his feet react to a falsetto. I want to feel as if I can own something who has a beauty that transcends time. Not someone, but something. A statue with a pulse. A body lost in a contortion that never unfreezes. A replication of my mind in the body instead of spirit of a human.
What is it about the dancer that makes me love him? Is it his perfect body contrasted with my very mediocre one? Is it his physical beauty that shall always surpass my own? Is it that vain cock of the head that comes with being so beautiful? Or, is it the fact that I not only seek art, but envy it, loathe it, and I want to mash my body up against that which I can never create, but only inspire?
Whatever it is, I’ll give you this much. Dancers are fucking hot.
December 20th, 2011: “I feel like a stay-at-home mom during a revolution…”
I hate that I’m not published yet. I hate that I’m going to probably have to wait years before I’ll actually be able to speak in public that which my (unfortunate) close friends could probably re-recite to me. I hate that there’s clearly a revolution going on. People at Occupy Wall Street are already on the frontlines; I want to be with them, but in the form of literature. I want to be published now. I want to impact the world now. I want to unload everything which the worlds needs to hear, so that I may rest in peace, but the world will turn in the same frustration I hold for it now.
The good news is that my writing is not solely timely. I don’t think that my work will be dated if published in ten years; the worlds and their depth, their insight, their dissatisfaction, stretch not towards only the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd century, but towards infinity. Fifty years from now, no one will know the difference between what happened in 2011 or 2013 or 2016; they are both years of the early 21st century; what seems so distilled, so urgent, will be just part of the past, like every other moment of urgency that came before it.
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still urgent for me. I’m glad to have learned that the act of feeling that my writing is no longer in my private space has calmed me down, but I can’t avoid the fact that my world as we know it, right now, in this very decade. This is the decade in which the world will continue to descend into its never ending stupidity, a culture of video games that make us feel like we’re in video games as we become taken over by the very rich, destroy ourselves for the sake of profit, and the earth is eaten up until what remains are skyscrapers. Or, the earth may re-bloom, use technology to enter the world into a state of global collectivity, where old definitions can die out for more inclusive ones, where we continue to take walks in the park even as we take those same walks in a network. I want the world to turn once again, to begin a new moment of itself, much like the Mayans strangely predicted (global, much?). I feel like I’m an unfortunately big part of this. I refuse to be silenced. I refuse to pretend that I’m like anyone else. I refuse to dim down my voice when my voice is exactly what the world needs right now. And, that makes me impatient, anxious, driven to succeed, and times, a monstropolis of my own.
Where’s a good back massage when you need one?