A Tale of Agency:

A Tale of Agency:

I some times wonder about whether or not every one here knows about me and all my exploits. The awkward reactions. I am probably bringing up things they had never thought about before. Tough questions. And then my paranoiac mind fills in the details. Some one found the love note I slipped into your tip jar. It’s hardly the sort of spontaneous gesture of affection that contemporary society smiles upon, but then is “society” not a projection of my most recently conditioned cynicism?

I suppose a natural, thirsting romantic would appreciate a secret admirer more than any one else would. It would be the dream-come-true that you have all ways wanted. You have all ways pretended that your boyfriend at any given moment might live up to your expectations. But I see it in your eyes: the discontent, the haze that signifies that you are holding back from every thing that you would never tell any one, but that you are secretly dreaming of a better life, and planning a way to turn your present life into that.

Why not yield to me? I feel, distance as you’ve kept me at, and as much as convention might bar me, that I’ve known you through several lifetimes. And having expected this fortuitous meeting for the past year, far from filling me with doubts as regard the prospect of what psychologists call confirmation bias (the superstition that wanting some thing fervently would predispose one’s self to delusion when one believes one’s self to have found it), I feel more certain of this than I have ever felt certain of any thing. The fact is that, intellect intact, I feel that we can pull this off. Why? Because you have lived up to all of my expectations, save for one, and even that one I am uncertain of: that you do not fervently stalk me to the degree that I stalk you. And yet I don’t imagine such daring deviance, which fills my nerves with fire at each long, laborious walk to this coffee house, and that transmutes as though by some alchemical magick to raw nerve and confidence along the triumphant walk back, would estrange you or lie “beneath you”. As the Taoists spoke sagely: “The Way seeks the lowest level, the one that human beings abhor”. And just as surely as we slip beneath the radar of conventional consciousness, my naïve and clumsy gestures notwithstanding, so it shall be that we soar above the binding laws of convention and instituted status quo.

My final point in my neurotic self-defense is this: that had I not known that this day some day would come, I would all ways FEEL this primordial love that culture, in all its attempts to represent it and then to bastardise the representation, can never touch or besmirch, that psychology cannot reduce and that philosophy cannot deconstruct. All generic and cliché ideas come from SOME place. Human beings are NOT predisposed tragically towards disappointment; it is rather that they envy, covet, and chase what they are not yet ready for.

I love you, Clever Field of Barley on the Hill. If I did not know this day would come, I would allow you to be swept away under the raw force of socially organized power, the most brutal wilderness to lose one’s guiding star within. In that sense, that the positive part of culture has helped me to combat the negative, culture acts as a set of water-wings. I shall not dare to let them turn to weights when it comes time to truly fly. I want YOU to fly with me, Clever. I cannot imagine joy without you.

Dmytri A.A.