Did you think I was finished traveling, and this blog over with as the result of my lack of vagrancy? Ha! Think again, I haven't grown up and started doing adult things that quickly. This one's long, so I'll keep the first bit short; it's really just for my parents' benefit anyhow and they already know most of the details. After graduation, I headed west again, and went to all the exact same places I always do because likely because I have a subconscious fear of change, and also because I already knew where all the good coffee shops are. First came Tensleep, where I fell off things I probably shouldn't have, gained endurance, and spent more time hanging out in the river by camp than was likely fruitful. Following Tensleep we made the short run over to Lander, and a crag that has a bit of a place in local legend. Wolf Point has one of the highest concentrations of difficult routes in the country, and with the addition of a heinous approach and exceedingly short day, makes for an amazing but intense (read- stressful) place to climb. I'm very happy with the month I spent there, sending most of the "moderates" (read- 8a and above) available at the crag, and pushing my sport grades far higher than I thought possible this trip. With the onset of cold weather, we have been relegated to the slick, sunny, seeping walls of Killer Cave, where I have one more day from the writing of this to send the rig and rocket back home before temperatures dip below zero. I won't say it's been a fun trip particularly, but instead a productive and meaningful one, devoted to trying endlessly to get out of my head and focus all my energy on rock climbing instead of worrying about it (more difficult than it seems). The sport is a heinous one, mentally and physically, but one has to take on the full brunt of it to get anywhere. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure how the stress, pain, and sleepless nights are worth it for 45 minutes of flawless climbing on a month-long project...but somehow, I remain completely convinced they are. It's a strange sport, and to anyone interested, I would recommend taking up fishing or golf instead. Until next time, enjoy my collected months of ramblings.
-
On Climbing Journalism
Someone intelligent and influential once said that there exist very few actual stories for humanity to tell; only a handful, really. We just continue to retell these same stories, with new characters and different words, in order to entertain ourselves in an endless, unvarying cycle. The fact I can remember neither the exact wording of this quote nor to whom it is attributed represents well my inability to retain information from the single literature class I took freshman year, however the statement’s veracity seems to ring generally true. In climbing especially, we are cursed with this scarcity of narratives- really, when it comes down to it, writing about climbing simply describes one sending their route or failing to do so. We dress it up, of course, and add glossy photos in the magazines to emphasize the point, draw metaphors from our journeys on the routes to our growth in life itself, perhaps get injured or lost on the way down in order to create some modicum of excitement for either tale. But every climber, regardless of skill as an athlete or writer, at the end of the day has either done the thing or failed to. In reality there exists no other option, and in our collective voracious consumption of climbing media we simply ricochet between each extreme- Ondra sent Silence, Megos failed to send Jumbo Love, Robinson tried to break the cycle and actually found some measure of grey area by maybe or maybe not doing Lucid Dreaming. You look at the comments repudiating every single (admittedly quite stupid) article climbing magazines post on Facebook, and it seems as if there exists no further place for the medium to turn- people are, very simply, sick of the same old thing, and writing about new things (no, I’m not interested in an article about “height shaming in climbing”) doesn't seem to be generating any significant measures of interest or even tolerance for the attempts. We all have known for awhile that print journalism is dying…but good god, what if it takes the dichotomous soul of our sport with it?! Climbers of 2040 will be glued to their computer monitors all day watching uncut Mellow videos of Japanese children flashing Burden of Dreams with weight vests on, while as a result too illiterate to even find a boulder described in some guidebook, much less determine where to pull on for the stand start. The climbing print revolution needs to happen without delay, and I’ll list here a few ways in which it could be facilitated-
1.) Scandal. The article’s first section details the dull specifics of some climber sending his years-long local project…but things really heat up when he finds out, upon victoriously returning home earlier than usual, that his wife and neighbor had been using his frequent absences at the crag as on opportunity to nurture a passionate and secret affair! Hell, the story doesn’t even have to be true, but let’s be honest- sexual deviancy sells a lot better than even the most fraught clipping of chains. Climbing crags, no matter how hard we all try and deny it, have already become a circus. What’s the harm in making them into a soap opera as well?
2.) Free soloing as a commonplace activity. People love this shit. Don’t be fooled by all the condescending online comments (“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes;” “He’s not even that good at climbing, probably couldn’t even redpoint my warmup at the sport crag”) whenever a picture or article is posted; loving to hate something still counts as loving it! Imagine it was standard practice to go for the solo on any project after a redpoint, our favorite sport might actually earn its working classification of “extreme.” People would eat it up, and as an added bonus, Reel Rock would be easily twice as long since the “in memoriam” section would take up as much time as any film.
3.) More ethical transgressions. This one’s easy, we all saw what happened in Ten Sleep. If some brave idiot bolts steel ladder rungs on to the west face of Leaning Tower and claims a first ascent, the magazines will have things to write about for months on end. My other ideas for ethical infringements include permanently ticking the sequence of Moonlight Buttress using spray paint, and drilling three-finger sinker buckets into action direct to “make it more accessible.”
4.) Diversify the sport. Alright, this one’s not really a joke, but the mundanity of sending/not sending is accentuated when all you see are a bunch of scrawny white stinky dudes accomplishing said results. As a card-carrying member of this demographic, I can say with the utmost confidence that we are generally quite boring, and the community could probably do better.
5.) Get more creative about product endorsement. This, in a way, falls under the scope of ethical transgressions, but with a certain added twist. Get Caldwell to spray paint a giant Nike Swoosh on the side of El Cap, or film Ondra popping a Viagra halfway through some heinous send (making eye contact with the camera, states “the climb is hard, so I must be as well” then screams for another thirty meters of 9a like some kind of horny demon). Not only will money come pouring into the sport, everyone will get pissed off about it! Cue the indignant op-eds in Rock and Ice, and those ensuing handful of writers who try to play the devil’s advocate and condone the behavior as it brings growth to climbing. Remember how those Indonesian (I think) climbers generated at least twenty articles after they rolled out their national flag on top of Everest for a photo op? We could generate a response like that every day if more pros just sold out! Save the climbing magazines, stop your liberal hearts from bleeding so damn much- just embrace all the worst parts of capitalistic advertisement, take the money, and generate the controversy.
6.) Stop caring, and realize this sport is inherently both selfish and meaningless. You got me, this is a cop out, but probably the most accurate thing on here. Climbing journalism is, in truth, a joke. The actual information in even the most inspiring of climbing articles can generally be gleaned by just perusing the appropriate score cards on 8a or watching a Youtube video, and if we’re all being honest, what’s left in the magazine just kills time until we can get back to doing the activity it describes. Because none of us really care what anyone else does or doesn’t do, do we? At least not compared to our own goals and achievements. The highest levels climbing has reached are not only unattainable to the general population, they’re also completely inconsequential. The average climber can’t even conceptualize the difference between 8b and 9a, much less appreciate the nuance of individuals pushing grades from 9b+ to 9c. This sport, like it or not, revolves around numbers (grades, pitches, height, temperature, runout length), and not many of us truly care about those which aren’t our own. We generally weren’t the team sport kids; weren’t the ones obsessed with scores and times and varsity letters. We pursued this sport specifically because it does not lend itself well to direct competition or comparison (with the exception of those comp climbers, which are a totally different can of worms), and even the most artistic of articles really boils down to exactly that. So even if professing the necessary end of climbing writing is a bit melodramatic, let us at the very least see it for what it is; a distraction loosely related to a sport we, at that particular moment, cannot participate in. So I’ll leave you with my sincere hope that your own withdrawal as you read this essay is short-lived; that this piss-poor alternative to the real thing represents no more than the distraction it is meant to be. And that, in your general search for ever-increasing numbers, you succeed in caring about none nearly as much you do your own.
-
Dreams
They say dreams occur in an instant; a momentary and fleeting synaptic flash like an army of lightning bugs against the darkest night. Blinded, the mind struggles to catch its breath, to distinguish a neuronal reality from so many countless signals, chemicals, and preconceptions. To advance the beautiful, and perhaps ageless tradition of assigning object to the ephemeral subject, and vision to a blind world.
They say this is how dreams occur.
And why do we imagine reality to be so very different? Where can a stone be held but in one's hand, and where may even the greatest mountain be discerned but upon the tepid surface of an animal eye? Where is this reassuring concreteness the world is said to boast, but clinging to strands of trust so vehemently anchored upon the firings of cells to receptors? They say dreams occur in an instant, but never mention our reality does as well. From an instant is created ourselves; and from ourselves, created the world.
-
The Crow
Tony, when daggers of sun stirred him from sleep in that timeless period between slumber and consciousness, had taken to imagining Nothing. Not in any metaphorical terms, which would suggest his unoccupied mind wandering amongst the scattered static of conscious thought, but rather as a result of hopelessly unresolvable fascination at the very concept. It is so easy, after all, to summarize in a few words, even cliché- ‘It is the absence of something;’ ‘It is what you feel before life and after death.’ So easy, yes, but in Tony’s mind, equally meaningless; products of the high-minded lethargy expounded by generations of unambitious dreamers. Perhaps what he sought those mornings could be considered more akin to meditation than thought, but if so it was meditation provoked by thought, encapsulated by it; a sleek sliver of Nothingness he endlessly failed to capture in a trap of his own understanding. For the paradox is obvious, is it not? Something is required to experience Nothing, and this presence of Something negates the inherent somethinglesness character of nothing which was the entire object of the exercise to begin with.
And so Tony would begin his mornings with a vague failure, if not an unexpected one, and prepare for the day ahead. His mind engrossed in a viscous cloud of the aforementioned metaphorical nothing, it would at times occur to him the peculiarity of those actions living on in simple muscle memory while so much else in his life threatened to collapse into a void generated by the absence of something integral that was once taken for granted. The calculated brewing of coffee, his autonomous hand habitually measuring the precise mass of grounds soon lost in an exploding column of steam. The choice of clothing, ingestion of vitamins, consumption of breakfast; all accomplished with hardly a single thought. Tony found himself relegated to that uniquely dismal corner of the human condition resulting from simple loss, compounded by the circumstance’s grounding not in the misfortune of death nor injury, but in the cold logic of rejection proclaiming clearly his own insufficiency. For, to avoid tiptoeing around the issue further, Tony had been left only a week or so before by his partner of many years, by the target of his devoted and doting affection; his promised land signaling an end to so many countless pilgrimages in miniature of his hand across the silent darkness of bedsheets in those vaguely timid hours immediately following the stroke of midnight.
Her hair and eyes had matched as if by design in their glowing brown color, and the beauty of her face was seared into Tony’s memory like a brand upon cow hide, but it was not this appearance which so distressed him in its loss, but the way she would flick hair from her eyes as if by mindless response when deeply engrossed in a novel; how she could find the most impossible sources of humor in the everyday monotony of life, discovering any excuse to laugh like the jingle of shattered icicles and inventing one herself if none was presented. The cause of the relationship’s end is unimportant; just as both parties involved fought to build and preserve its magic, fault can likewise be found with both for its eventual downfall. Tony first perceived the separation to come after purchasing her a gift on a whim unrelated to any birthday or holiday; a necklace with a silver chain shimmering like liquid and simple copper charm on its end, shaped cryptically as a perfect circle. He had seen it at a dingy antique store walking home from work one day, the charm slightly green with tarnish and chain dirty from negligence as it hung unassumingly in the afternoon sun. He couldn’t have described why exactly it so caught his attention; perhaps he simply had a weakness for shiny jewelry, perhaps the somewhat suggestive ring shape of its charm intimated plans for he and his partner’s long-term future echoing only in his subconscious mind. Her acceptance of the casual gift was lukewarm at best, seemingly preoccupied with something of greater importance she muttered thanks and draped the necklace upon Tony’s bedside table, where it was to stay without being worn for the remainder of the relationship. From there disagreements led to arguments, led to fights, led to long walks alone in the evenings to simultaneously gather chaotic thoughts and sample the idea of being single again. Finally it all led to the breakup itself, anticlimactic in a sense, the truth dawning on him only upon reading her note scribbled on a scrap of paper near his salt shaker, failing to provide a new address or even that obligatory yet empty promise of continued friendship typical to such proceedings.
Even as Tony lacked a partner and wallowed in the resulting despair, he remained in possession of the clouded and creaking double window to his fifth story Chicago apartment, placed in the wall opposite his bed and lazily allowing access of the morning sun to the room’s darkest crevices, whether or not he believed the days of the last week warranted such illumination. The white paint covering its wooden border had begun to flake and expose an olive green beneath, and its panes of glass were edged by a smoky glaze as if tiny fires burned within the window’s frame. Tony had always taken a strange satisfaction from its lack of any screen, so anything could pass across its border out of or into his room. How visceral the world appeared to him without such inhibition separating it from himself, how exciting the daily rush of vertigo as he casually peered over the edge! What a reminder of the infinite we fail to capture or even categorize in these climate-controlled boxes of our lives; the brute force of all the world’s energy displayed over the gray cityscape.
He had taken to the reproachable daily habit of smoking cigarettes out that window, before work each morning. He would roll them absentmindedly, gazing towards an indistinct point on the industrial horizon, watching loose strands of tobacco carried on his city’s famous winds as if imbued with some gift of inanimate flight. As he slowly exhaled the flavor of leather and earth, embers would fall to the gritty, tarnished paint of the windowsill, caught in that same cruel dichotomy of humanity itself- either dying silently, as if never having existed, or burning slight unnoticeable holes to that olive green that once was; blessed with a legacy, cursed with its irrevocable characteristic of destruction. But for humanity, of course, the aspect of choice is present, outcomes malleable depending on eight billion sparks of intelligence or soul placing us in that grey area torn between free will and destiny. Perhaps this grey area was Tony’s Nothing, though the prospect of such a definition terrified him more than those of the two extremes it was said to lie between. Perhaps it is an illusion, perhaps it is where some great philosopher of tomorrow will prove the existence of God. Perhaps it traps anyone truly considering the concept in the endless cycle of begging an unanswerable question.
Pigeons strutted daily on the sidewalk far below; avian beggars blessed with apathy towards the necessity of human charity or negligence for that day’s meal. They would explode now and again into random and spastic flight, alighting upon steel beams and brick rooftops to escape a constant perceived danger. The diversity of bird species in Chicago was not a statistic which had warranted Tony’s consideration until he began that morning ritual involving principally his steady gaze through the window. There was not, as it turned out, a wealth to observe; the aforementioned pigeon and a collection of unassuming sparrows, those animals which had in their own ways followed humankind’s industrialization and melded with the urban environment as if created in its image. This particular morning was initially no different, and Tony’s thoughts spared little room for ornithology during those waning minutes preceding the start of the workday he so zealously guarded. Even a black silhouette cutout from the morning sun, as it found lift without movement upon lazy thermals, failed to capture his attention until the crow landed on a weathered balcony just a few hundred feet to his right. The animal failed somehow to blend into the landscape surrounding it; reflective black strangely incongruous with a city’s palette of white and grey. It seemed to, by its basic nature, escape the confines of adjectival description; somehow not majestic, insignificant, noteworthy nor its opposite. It very simply was, like a simple and wondrous burst of muted intelligence. Tony watched it sporadically survey the balcony, gaze twitching from point to point as if hoping to catch reality red-handed in a sudden act of impossible change. The bird hopped about, considering the potted plants surrounding it; their wilted leaves and endlessly optimistic flowers. Then, with a frenzied burst of wings seemings too large to be contained upon such a fragile body, the crow took flight, in its beak stolen a simple plastic pinwheel, glinting like the richest of treasure in the sun’s glare. A sudden act of theft; a simple emotional determination of newfound rightful possession. In some vague way an unconscious act of rebellion against a dominant species which had stumbled and tricked its way to the top of the food chain.
Tony, as was his nature, invested more thought into the occurrence than was at all warranted. The idea of theft, even one so inconsequential, and its resulting loss for the other anonymous party involved produced in him feelings of enmity unique to and resulting from the general circumstances of his life at the time. He anthropomorphized the crow almost immediately, imagining it to have the mind of a shrewd and analyzing thief trapped within a feathered body just inconspicuous enough to escape human justice. He built in his own mind anger against this bird which had caught his vacant glance that morning, imagining and expanding its various offenses across the city that day to fuel his fire of strange and misplaced emotion. It was not that Tony was ever a man quick to anger; in fact, he would generally have considered himself quite the opposite. It was more that he found himself with a sudden lack of purpose in life, compounded by an insatiable need to give reason for its causation, a need to find explanation for those inherently inexplicable offenses the world saw fit to throw forth.
So it came about that he failed to shake that crow from his head; maintained those thoughts of animosity which soon morphed to ones of revenge and protection. He began to see the world as a grand stage set carefully and precisely for a play which occurred without end, a play surely set to reflect some measure of meaning and purpose for a disgruntled and messy swathe of humanity scattered across the planet. And if the world was a play, well, that crow stealing its vital props was worse than a villain, no, it was an audience member with schemes to set fire to the entire theater; a building janitor preparing to suddenly turn out the stage lights. A symbol of irredeemable chaos, universal entropy, and (as a result) the negation of anything involving the pursuit of a greater purpose or individual destiny.
Tony didn’t go into work that morning, claiming to both himself and his manager that he was sick. But ‘sick’ was simply used in lack of a better term, one that would describe the emotional toll of cognitive dissonance as an amplified existential state instead of temporary illness. He had found a means to comfort in his job, but certainly not meaning, certainly not any legacy. As a human creature then, Tony exercised his inalienable right to place purpose before comfort, and sickness became a symptom of this choice rather than a condition unto itself. He remained in his bedroom after calling in, near the window, maintaining vigilant watch. When viewed with a certain mindset, the cityscape beyond was rich with opportunities for minute theft, the contents of balconies, windows, and sidewalks representing portraits of countless lives; compact tributes to individuality violating any large city’s inherent semblance of a homogeneous whole. Tony left only briefly, to descend the staircase to his building’s courtyard and collect an array of pebbles and stones. He arranged these on the windowsill, like archers preparing to defend its ramparts from an enemy siege. His absurd purpose of preventing the crow’s transgressions became somehow grandiose and altruistic, the mission of a man chosen by some force of destiny to observe an injustice and prevent its recurrence. He ate far too little, smoked far too much, and lost himself in a daze of the determined and misguided.
The crow did not return that day, but Tony dutifully returned to his post the following morning, staring outward across the glimmering haze above his coffee. He had not forgotten the obligations of his job, but chose to ignore them in favor of that strange commitment he had made to the world beyond his window. Even after only a day spent looking upon it, patterns and stories began to emerge, a vista of constant random change morphing to one of intricate routine. He watched a woman emerge from an apartment building a couple doors down, only to hurry back in an awkward high-heeled run to rescue some forgotten item from home, and go forth again in the same manner. He analyzed the cyclical nature of panhandlers on the street as they roamed from place to place throughout the day, hands and cups thrust forwards, spirits weathering dejection by clinging to that optimistic ring of coins within. He watched as a mass of humanity together shed their fears, anxieties, and muddled lives to walk confidently and briskly to thousands of clear destinations. And, near one in the afternoon, he again saw the crow. It perched first upon a telephone wire near the limit of Tony’s vision, as if to survey a novel landscape before picking its careful way through. Slowly it dove forwards, gliding towards the sidewalk below almost lazily, head jerking back and forth to leave no potential threat unobserved. It hopped along the concrete’s grit and filth, and in full mocking view of his ardent stare, retrieved a single glinting coin and quickly took flight as if to forget it had ever arrived. Tony’s stones, though he had begun immediately to pitch them at the avian kleptomaniac, had little effect due mainly to his accompanying lack of accuracy. The crow made off cockily with its newfound treasure, and in his resulting fury he found resolve. It was an absurd purpose he had set himself to, yes, but more importantly it was a refute to the Nothing Tony had all but given up attempting to visualize. It was a way to accept such a defeat spitefully, and disallow further entrance of that Nothing into his life which it already permeated like holes in cheese. For a man to consider himself above such things; to consider himself a hero or legend, he of course requires a corresponding villain, and in an absence of such rivalry, must invent one from even the most supreme mundanity. Tony, then, had discovered his as a dark spec upon the skies of Chicago.
He was not a rich man by any stretch, but desperately financing life in a big city paycheck to paycheck became somehow more bearable when it was in the service of something else, some goal unrelated and so much greater- the promise of a family, everlasting love; those desires implicated but never decreed by the modern american dream. In Tony’s battle with the crow he replaced these desires by consuming himself with something singular and unshared, something he alone had created and as such could, in contrast, happily determine the date of its end. The endless vigilance, the quick starts of righteous adrenaline those few times throughout the days- each additional layer to the experience drew him deeper into a pit of misplaced passion to which most sane men wouldn’t even consider entrance. The days wore on and on, and financial obligations fell unfulfilled upon Tony’s shoulders silently as leaves in autumn. The crow made off with a single orange zinnia from a neighbor’s balcony flower garden the same day they shut down electricity to Tony’s apartment, and a child’s forgotten marble the day he lost running water. His dwindling reserves of cash, at least those not needed for quick grocery store hauls of bottled water, ramen, and propane for his ancient camping stove, proved insufficient for his basic needs (not the least of which were his already overdue rent payments and credit card debt), and the volume of orange, threatening envelopes in the mail began to increase. Tony considered such pecuniary obligations silly and irrelevant; the earning of money a strange exercise to simply assert one’s existence to the world while simultaneously demonstrating its efficacy there. Sure, the immediate and logical necessity of employment came by way of a struggle for comfort and vitality, but such a description ignores its uniquely human element. Humans struggle for their own livelihood in a strangely selfless arena, separated from other animals by the mere fact our comfort is tied intrinsically to our ability to further the species itself. Tony clung to this separation, read into it to a degree unsupported by science nor reason. He refused to view humanity as those same simple stereotyped masses of cells which constitute the animal world, saw in man the undeniable presence of a soul and the inherent meaning and purpose which must accompany such a thing. He shirked all other obligations in life then not for victory over the crow or personal fulfillment, but because such a struggle epitomized these attributes he so voraciously assigned to the human condition; replaced employment as his source of differentiation between himself and a simple animal. He stood at his window, stones in hand, for days and weeks not only to accentuate a vital divide between human and animal, but between spirituality and biology; meaning and a lack thereof. Between Something and a greedy, beady-eyed Nothing.
It was rare for Tony to abandon his post for anything save sleep or sustenance, but an exception to this rule came when a quick knock rang out from his door one afternoon some couple weeks or so after his campaign had begun. He backed away from the window slowly, the sun’s lingering glare across his retinas casting colorful and surreal shapes upon the room’s darkened walls. Opening the door, he was greeted not by a person but instead a notice, hanging from its exterior in a shade of yellow chosen seemingly for its unique ability to demand the attention of whoever may glimpse it. Tearing it free and skimming the contents, Tony reflected that thirty days seemed like an eternity, especially for someone like himself with a history of late rent payments culminating in their more recent complete cessation. For a man with an obsession preventing foresight much greater than twenty four hours in advance, thirty days seems as if they may simply never all occur, at least until the twenty-ninth. Throwing the paper upon the kitchen table, as one does with important documents they fail to imagine further use for, Tony glanced towards the window, and its frame which now contained in astonishing proximity a familiar inky body and bright eyes. Neither party moved as they stared one another down, both futilely trying to decipher the other’s intentions. He stepped forwards slowly, eyes locked upon the crow like a mountaineer’s on some insurmountable peak. A glinting from its beak, like a microscopic star cursedly bound to earth, revealed first a shining silver chain then, when the bird cocked its head to the left, the attached copper ring, spinning slowly in stark gleaming contrast against murky feathers. Tony forgot any strategy he had failed to formulate and lunged towards the window in desperation, fingers grasping at air as if he could pull back the escaped bird using invisible strings formulated solely from sheer desire and need. But these strings, relegated as they were to a world of imagination wholly separated from our physical realm containing things like necklaces, windows, and the city of Chicago, failed to appear, and the crow made off with its haul yet again. Tony was driven past anger to furious panic, screaming obscenities from the window, sweeping the contents of his bedside table to the floor in a clattering gesture born from greater powerlessness. The despondency of his situation began to dawn on him, the feeling of loss previously muffled by obsession now rising like a flood without possibility of escape. The bedside table only a beginning of the physical embodiment of that torment he now felt, other furniture in the apartment was treated in kind; plates and silverware pushed to the floor in a shattered mess, cabinets flung open and the contents within scattered about the room. He was more enraged than he could ever remember being previously, and what made it all the worse was that sinking realization of the emotion’s true causation, so much more a result of his own assortment of failures than any uncontrollable injustice of the world around him. All those things he had seen previously so clearly as points of meaning now morphed to examples of failure, pulsing like incriminating hearts which could never be stopped. For, in search of purpose, one is more likely than not to find inadequacy, as if that original intoxicating promise was all too grandiose to be obtained by any save a select few. The emotion broke upon him like waves on a rocky coast; the failures of his relationship, his employment, his avian battle. With resolution born somehow from depression and uncertainty, Tony began to collect certain unbroken necessities from the apartment with intention to leave the following day, escaping somewhere vague and undefined on the thin hope that different could could somehow prove synonymous to better. The items he gathered fit in a small cardboard box, a collection of objects barely capable of decorating a life sufficiently for it to be distinguished from any other. He slept uneasily that night solely for the delineation of days, as one does on the eve of something momentous, with the box at the foot of his bed as if prepared for an impending and desperate getaway which could be necessitated at any second.
Tony woke to the timeless haze of morning; to that window and its view, those prodding rays of light it allowed to shine through. His morning routine was suddenly uncertain, for how does one act in preparation for an end to the life they have always known? Moving mindlessly through his kitchen, he found an intact box of cereal propped in a corner from its sudden flight the previous day, and used it to create a sparse breakfast to be consumed quickly and without thought. Strangely, as he considered his options following the impending permanent departure from his apartment (none particularly promising), his mind became preoccupied not with fear but instead nostalgia. He lingered there in the familiarity of the place, in its recessed and sulking memories; those that strove to drive him away like a hand from a stove, and those sweeter ones echoing that cliché suggesting it better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.
Tony’s reverie was halted by a tapping upon the window, closed for the first time in over a week. Unbelievingly he looked at the crow perched there, staring at him with the playful intensity of a child victorious in a game of their own devising. Its beak tapped the glass again, once this time; impatiently. As if through the viscous waters of a dream Tony walked towards the window, threw the latch, slid it open as the crow flapped gently to maintain its balance upon the sill. He stood back aghast, emotions seemingly mutually exclusive fighting for purchase in his psyche. The crow hopped forwards carefully, like a timid vampire requesting permission to enter, and Tony watched as it dropped a single marble from its beak, shining with the glow of a boy’s premature wish for manhood. It flew away but to return in minutes, this time with a square of foil and length of string. The cycle continued without Tony moving nor truly believing. He watched as the collection of gifts grew; containing a pearl necklace without its clasp, the pink and tattered hat of a doll. As it grew to contain the desiccated remains of a flower with only a fraction of its browned petals, a bent hairpin, $1.42 in change, and the shining blades of a gaudy pinwheel struggling to turn in the breeze. He watched an undefinable slice of the city around him collected in his apartment, those forgotten things deposited by thousands of lives unknowingly marking the world with irrefutable signs of their very existence. The crow met his gaze one last visceral time before its final departure, as if a gesture of respect for a battle well fought or story well told. As he collected his newfound treasures, Tony became somehow more than a rudderless man without a penny to his name, something more than an insane and unneeded vigilante of humanity. In that moment he became idealism’s martyr, Kundera’s dancer, the artist who paints a masterpiece but to happily burn his canvas. He and the crow became, ecstatically, the simple and anonymous negation of Nothing, the sheer absurd and impossible circumstance of life itself. As Tony closed his apartment door behind him for the final time, he likely set out towards a period of destitution and suffering; sorrow and despair, but above it all, incredibly and uncomprehendingly- something he needed nothing more from than to simply exist.
-
Comments
Post a Comment