Fractal Attraction

Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press

My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;

Lest sorrow lend me words and words express

The manner of my pity-wanting pain.

-William Shakespeare

Sometimes, as thoughts glide over each other in my head, the meta of the meta of the meta just slips through and there is nothing present to slow the acceleration: there I am, slightly forlorn and speechless before the fractal nature of my probably useless mental jests. For example, I’ll be thinking of my mother, and before I can stop to enjoy the details of the memory - or the pain of its fleetingness - I find myself focusing on myself as I am thinking of her and on myself as I focus on myself thinking of her, and so forth till the thought itself is a long lost nebula and I come up with someone else focusing on me. Preferably someone who soon, listlessly, majestically, looks away and forgets about the whole thing. A dog can do. 

So voilà the way I am. Not new at all. I end up engaging in bloody battles against these perspective trips, greatly aided by the same sophisticated mechanisms of self-control and discipline which allowed me to finish conservatory two years before I graduated from high school. And sometimes I win, actually, and manage to pin a precious memory down, look at it queer before reluctantly letting it flap its translucent little wings back to oblivion. Did she really live through that? goes my inner narrator. As her narrator expressed her awe, she covered the keyboard of her piano - at once a gesture of sacrificial offering, self-denial and self-ridicule, perfected through the decades, goes my meta-narrator… well, well, what have we here? Just another dog looking away. Goes.…who?

This is what happens when someone with what amounts to a boundless, magical childhood is violently hurled into the sordid injustice of what is really out there. A girl is born late-ish but turning-point-ishly in the story of a Neapolitan aristocratic family prone to extraordinary adventures, near-misses, near-hits and ridiculous levels of nostalgia. She lives three lives and alters three hundred others in the space of half a life in South America, travels for years, and then, while becoming an orphan is quietly informed that the rest of her days might, or will most likely, be spent in a room, unless. One might think being in a room sounds more like being ‘in there’ than being ‘out there’. But these concepts deserve a better look. Being in a room with your friends far away, three quarters of your childhood family dead, and all of your certainties put to the test by unintended but unshakeable teachers introducing you to devious arts, the least of which contempt, for the first time is, to my understanding, being out there: far, way beyond the surf. Even more so in current times. And the ride may very well be worth the seasickness, but oh: the answer to the question would you do it again remains as healthily veiled as ever.

In a world, fractal inwards as much as outwards, that spells out the message that I should shut up and pay attention if I want to make any sense of things at all, I decide to take the first friendly step towards enlightenment and healing by learning to silence my voice without silencing my voice. Yes, I can learn to be silent in order to hear my thought unfolding. Shutting up my thought, besides being idiotic, would turn out to be not only cruel and disastrous but unnecesary. I must have vowed - unbeknownst to myself - to let thought and emotion embrace with no hesitation within me; I must have vowed to have a surplus of spiritual marrow as long as I was alive, in order to sift through my inner world and just enjoy every discovery, no guilt involved… And indeed, searching for repeating patterns in the most unexpected spots of my reality, without discarding stuff a priori, is what continually saves me and injects me with joy, however absurd the pattern. It suggests the opposite of an Aristotelian reasoning path, no matter how much I’d like for mine to be just that. In practice, it translates into this me I see with luminous tendrils and open-ended chord progressions reaching out from my being in every direction - an image which doesn’t do much to convey methodical reason. 

With a start she realised that there was no reason to feel forlorn in the face of accelerating fractal patterns, goes my narrator. I can think things through, however unconventionally. I can let brilliant deductions sail through my Bosphorus. And I can defend them. Even nothingness, which I can imagine and thus summon a void. I can do all of these things, and luckily I can also stay still and marvel at the views inside the views - as I wait for the right cues. Indeed, you never know when a healing thought could come to your rescue, making any room actually become the coolest place on Earth. In the stillness, in the stalking heart of the night, my spirit reaches out and back to me, and I can see what’s gone: it’s right here. As is the meta of the meta of the meta.