Thursday, January 9, 2014

The Warping of Absolutes


All is white, shiny and uninviting. Yet I do like to go there. Because I know I can return to a warm cabin, atop a mountain where all looks like a picture, often two-dimensional.

Just after sunrise, the white is shadowy, and not yet shiny. It is an aloof tableau where I paint every day. Flowers only die, snow slowly melts, but the cabin remains warm. Because it is a rebel in a mountain where all is a cycle and predictable.  And I like to go there in search of absolutes.

Crunching ice and snow under my slow stride, I dream of islands and long days of sunshine. “Would a man stranded on an island, bathing in sunshine and glorious sunsets but alone, still feel passion?” I wonder. A passion for what, since it cannot be ‘for whom” anymore?  Or will he learn how to become detached, be in the moment, just because he has to be?

Passion and detachment. An unlikely tandem yet essential to co-exist for their own very existence. Two extremes where nothing can be relative as there is no partial-detachment. Nor negotiable passion. The man stranded on an island is every man in cities of steel and stone. And the island is never surrounded by oceans deep and angry, but by other men, women with large feet and children who do not have imagination. That island is where all absolutes get warped, as the stranded man becomes fully detached.

Yet there is a cabin on a mountain where one can go to feel warm. There are sunsets on shiny snow where the cabin, the rebel against all things relative, finds its absolutes in passion alone. But not for someone or for the now serene tableau repainted every day. Not a passion doomed to become love. Not a passion that burns you to ashes and then blows them to the winds, swirling and cold.

Rather, the passion for stretching oneself upon the warped reality of absolutes, like a lover without passion, and watch the stars at night.  In a warm cabin, atop a mountain quiet in snow and its own shadow.

January 9, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014

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