Eternal Return and another Deathday of heavy rain.

October 15, 2021

The summer was dry, yet prosperous, Father. I did as you showed me. I filled my bread basket with joy, and movement, and the soft tendrils of nascent love. I walked out my door tasked with soothing a broken heart, and I tore off my clothes.

Shamelessly, with gleeful intention, I shed them.

A poet cannot live with a guarded heart, nor ever blush, I am told.

I tore off the clothes that had housed me through this nightmare of a year, and burned with a fire doubly ardent with the urgency of lost time.

Sunshine to confine. Confine to coffin. A verbal heart cloaked and curtained- furnished for a year and a half with silence. No more!

Then the rains came again. The rains came again just as I had been running about the streets pouring out my soul, indulging in love and affection, deriding the lonely and hoping my basket would be bountiful enough to make it through the chill. I walked out into the world unprotected and exposed to the elements.

The rains came just as I began to feel the life, my essence, my poetic heart return to me.

They returned and pronounced an end to such lively fires. Decreeing darkness and dolefulness. Commanding the city to stop. Sending millions of Istanbulites back to the their homes after months of frantic seeking. What they were seeking, I will never know, but an ecstasy had filled the air during those long days and short nights. The whole world had become symposium and the rains returned to close us out of the bacchanal. You would have loved it while it lasted.

But I wasn’t ready for the rains, father. I needed the promise of rebirth to last at least a fraction of the time our imprisonment endured. A fraction of the time of my sedentarity, my isolation, those long months to which I lost my taste for the one thing that ever bore semblance to the Sacred, the closest thing I’ve ever felt to be art: human connection. Those months when a whisper returned to ask me a question which I hadn’t heard in nearly a decade and which gripped me by the entrails: why waste your heart on people? Are they not a loss on investment?

Oh how the summer, like we on earth, was briefly gorgeous! I lust now after more time in the greenery of life. In the sunshine, breathing life back into this restless frame, cleansing myself of such tarnished thoughts and profane musings. I needed more time delighting in the olive trees of Yalıkavak, the beaches of northern Spain, and the joyful banter of Mediterranean bougainvillea. Laughter spreading like disease, smile lines etching an atlas of imponderable joy around my eyes. Prospect! Memory! Who can be happy living between the confines of hope and grief?

Would I hate the summer had you died in July?

“He was repelled by the pettiness that reduced life to mere existence and that turned men into half-men. He wanted to lay his life on a balance, the other side of which was weighted with death. He wanted to make his every action, every day, yes, every hour and minute worthy of being measured against the ultimate, which is death."

I am supposed to feel embattled at this time of the year. You taught me that. To mimic the seasons. To act not as rain drops composing a melody, but as a great storm pounding the earth, screaming my strength, announcing my fearlessness. Standing upon a soapbox declaring that I’ve grasped my mortality. That I, too, may die young. That I have woken up every day with a nagging in my belly, a constant assumption that this may be my last month, last day, last hour amongst mortals.

Is it a crime, to imagine that living like you means I must also die like you? That I have no image of myself as an old man? Amor fati.

You taught me to dispense with safety nets and go for broke. To set it all ablaze. But you never once mentioned surrender and awareness, the soft pitter pat. That assuming these to be my last moments on earth was the antithesis of living.

Unless you did, of course. Unless you’ve been pleading with me to see it for the last two decades, and I was simply too far lost in memory and hope to notice.

“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

Last year I told you that I occasionally wonder if this yearly show-down, the eternal return, hasn’t propelled me deeper into despair.

The year before that I asked you if Being can also exist in rest and in the hair-raising stillness of the written word. The one that sits there on the page, staring back, and bearing witness to our every passing thought. If you thought I had the strength to write that book.

I recall now all our conversations of years past. How I've asked you if you knew from an early age that I wasn’t made for stillness. Whether you knew I’d run away some day. If you knew that my worldwide quest for human connection would leave me in near equal measure exalted and in the most terrible of solitudes. Did you see yourself in me?

I often feel I was wiser in the past.

“I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.”

I return to my bed, breathe deeply, recline into a nest of four pillows. How many eyes have laid in this same spot, observing this 14 foot painted ceiling, theorizing the years of life and love concealed in its flakes and fissures? Appraising the care taken by its original creator some 120 years ago? How many families have lived in this space? Were any of them like mine?

The droplets tick and tock on my window, measuring and blurring the time, reminding me how powerless we are in the face of gravity. To surrender to gravity- but how?

“How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.”

I listen to the raindrops and see you in the windowpane. Am I writing you today to prove to myself once and for all that words have a chance of beating the silence, sentences beating the void? Am I writing to be heard, if I cannot be seen? The answer to both of these questions is certainly no.

I write to prove to myself that I, unlike yourself, am not quite dead. To tell you that I nearly died last year. Not from contagion. Not a physical death, but one far more troubling. That isolation didn’t plunge me into despair or make me feel lonelier than I’ve always been, but that it extinguished my fire, just as the rains will try today. I write this at once under the guise of an apology, and as an oath: to tell you that despite the dull ache and decay of the past year, I am no longer a ghost peering out a window.

No more prospect. No more longing. Only presence. That’s what the rains returned to teach me. To live in the present moment, relinquish my grasp over ego, memory, projection, control and time. Who can teach me, if not you, to surrender? Are you not hidden within the rain?

When I have felt those things (and trust me Father, I have felt them), I was almost angry at the intense respite.

“The genius of lyric poetry is the genius of inexperience.”

And now I've written you thousands more words, seemingly hundreds of 'I's, to tell you I'm giving up on words and ego. What a cartoonish person I've become.

I realize today I’ve blamed you for too many of my struggles. I can no longer be the verb and you the subject which lords me. That I've assigned too much power, too much responsibility to a dead man. That I am the voice in my head, not you.

No, that isn’t a fair assessment of what is and what isn’t. I have a voice in my head. It is neither you nor I. I am simply the awareness.

If I am to find peace in this mind, I must leave behind the words. Stop overindulging in love and joy. Stop pondering my suffering when I wake up from the dream.

Stop willing myself vainly and in vain to be a poet.

I must stop writing these foolish letters to the dead.

I’ll keep this last thought warming on my tongue,

Simmering on the smoulder-

that through its unspeaking-

it may liquefy a bit

And I’ll no longer feel so close to choking.

Meanwhile, I shall sit here quiet,

and busy myself with industry.

just as the humming bird which does not sing

nor even truly hums

nor really has time for the foolish melodies

we sing to make our hearts feel more like fires

and less like ships headed for the deep,

breathless calm of winter.

I just wish you hadn’t died when the rains returned, father.