Sonnet 116 

This is for you .. a man much bigger and wiser than I said it some five centuries ago.  I wish you the best there ever was, and the best there is to come.

You have shown me what it is to be in love and what it is to have your heart shattered at the worst and lowest possible moment in your life.

The only reason I still am: there is nothing more left in heart or liver that can be broken.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

    William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

The further one goes ..

There's been this thought that's troubling me for a long time now.  Little did I know that Master Lao had a view on my strife.

The thought simply centres around the question of how much or, more precisely what sort of, knowledge one accumulates, the farther one travels?

Is it a case of gathering more knowledge and understanding the more you travel? the more people that cross your paths during your travels, long distance, overseas travel? does one really get satisfaction and knowledge by travelling further afield? by venturing far and wide? or is there a different angle on what seems like a triviality?

This morning's been nothing special so far.  A bit heavier than usual, in fact.  It's raining, and the weather has been miserable in Minsk all night last night  and this morning too.  Nothing too unusual about pulling a book, reading a little, being frustrated with it, and tossing it aside.  
Too lazy to make tea or grab a bite to eat.  I keep thinking of all the things I have to do,  this thought that has been with me months now, and, goes without saying, of her, every second.


And I ask myself, again and again, travelled the world over (almost) several times.  Seen some amazing people, customs, ways of trade, traditions ...etc.  Have I really expanded my knowledge base? am I any more knowledgeable or, Heaven forbid, any wiser?!


Then I see a possible answer in one of master Lao's teachings, and it kind of makes sense, though I don't wholeheartedly agree with it:  "The further one goes, the less one knows".  In a way, he is right, and who am I to question the pillar and post of Taoism?.  But in many ways, he himself teaches that knowledge is within, and fawning is what knowledge does.  An endless cycle of accumulated, re-cycled knowledge - the cycle of Zen.

True, the further one travels, the less one knows.  Though is this not the very basis of seeking knowledge, and therefore acquiring new knowledge by venturing into spaces that one hardly  knows?


In a very small and very silly and very twisted way, I see his teaching in you my one.  The further I travel into this seemingly simple case of outrageous love, the more I am lost and can't find a way back.

Once, I was told that someone who loves you doesn't seek you in their time of idleness, but in times when they are so preoccupied with work, the daily life, their strife ...etc.  The rationale is that this goes to show that you actually occupy a space within their life and daily routine that is so important, that they actually go and seek you prima facie and by default, no matter how busy or preoccupied they are, without needing to find place in time and space to dot it because you are in that time and place any way.

I know you do in my time, space, life and very fabric of my being, that I actually take the time to seek you irrespective of where we both maybe, how much struggle and sadness I carry around, whether or not you will respond, or the kind of load I carry on my shoulders in this crazy life.


And that, my one, is why I will forever be confused as to what it is you feel towards us both.

the less one knows ..


QED.

An Enquiry into Values ..

"And what is good, Phædrus? And what is not good ... Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

This is a place-holder for a blog post I'm writing off-line.  It is to do with a book by one Robert Pirsig, and his magnificent Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - an enquiry into Values.  

Now before anyone jumps into conclusions, neither the book, the author nor yours truly has anything to do with motorcycle maintenance, or the legendary school of Zen - the mechanical and Buddhist aspects that is, and everything to do with an altogether different undertaking, namely, an enquiry into values, and the title of the book could not be more eluding, nor more befitting at the same time.  Hardly surprising coming from a man like Pirsig.


One day, I'll finish the topic; One day very soon; For I have not liked, nor connected with any of the commonly accepted, and somewhat shallow, critiques of this one-of work, and neither, I would suspect, has Pirsig himself.



And one day .. before I die, I will take my Adil on a similar journey .. where it will take us, where we arrive and who we are seeking, however, is an altogether different story.


So watch this space for a Qud Erat Demonstradum soon ..

The Search ..

Everywhere.  Very specifically, in everyone.  Every face and every gaze.  Every pair of glowing eyes and breathllessly divine smiles.  In the soft voices of young people saying sweet words to each other.  In the loving looks of grandmothers insisting on speaking Russian to me, even though I hardly understand this romantic language.  In everyone's footsteps; the ticks of high-healed, outrageously feminine women all around me.  Deep in my soul; my very being.  In the beats of my heart.  In heavy breaths entering my troubled chest, as if by force; as if knowing how indifferent I am to living or dying ..

In all of these I search for you my one.  Failing every time.  Hopelessly retrying every time .. and so will it be .. so it has been .. and so it will always be.

QED.

To change the world ..

Leo Tolstoy once said: "everyone is trying to change the world, but no one is actually thinking of changing themselves instead".

I must have read this statement a million times, and I don't know if its me or if there seems to be an endless cyclical paradox that infinitely goes back to a common denominator - one's self, then the hierarchy builds up to "the world" which is, very trivially, a collection of individuals, souls if you will, and we are back at the beginning which is also the end ad infinitum.

What completely blocks me, then, is that I, like many fools before me, and doubtless after me, have embarked on a journey to change the world; to create a "world", a universe if you wish, in which one person, one soul, is the centre, and everything would emanate and terminate there, and in the process, little did I know, that I was moulding myself in and around that centre, together with everything precious and dear, within and outside of my very being.

How difficult must it now be to dismantle all of that, and still be standing and survive? it was hard enough the first time round. How much more so must it be now my one?

Neigh enough impossible ..

QED.

Nahawand ..

I guess anyone who hails from a land before time, that gave the world time, amongst other things, must be a proud being, so needless to say .. I am extremely proud to hail from Iraq, the land of Mesopotamia, but that's not why I'm writing this, for fear of stating the obvious.


Today, I saw her .. heard her .. smelled her .. touched her .. in a piece of music I was playing .. she was there .. she is the music .. she is the soul that moves my fingers on the strings of the Oud, and she was Nahawand; In all his glory in her being, his wisdom in her steps, his love in her eyes .. his passion in her contradictions ..

And here is the Nahawand for you my one, for he is you and you are I .. though I thought you'd better hear it played by the fingers of a man I am proud to call my master ..


QED.

The Sun Worshipper

Legends from Southern Iraq tell of a bird that loves the sun so much, that people named him the Sun Worshipper - it is a legendary bird called the "الدلم" (Dilem) by local folk.

Legends tell how he forever has his head up to the skies, and eyes looking directly at the sun's aura, turning all day with it as if dancing, so much so that his tears never stop falling in silent desperation and mute pain.

An old folk poet once told me:

ثلاثه بالملا مثلي يونون: الورق و الدلم و الخنسا الشجييه

To roughly mean that only three in existence will weep the way I do: the Dilem, the wood pigeon weeping the loss of her loved ones and the Khansa "الخنساء", a renowned female poet that wept the death of her eldest brother Sakhr till the day she died.

And though he was a southerner, and I a Baghdadi, we had long chats as he tended to our house's huge garden in days when I thought the world would never change .. we spoke of fools and kings and a million and one other things .. I loved him a lot .. he was also our gardener, and tended the garden out of love for us, as opposed to any sums of money.

The poet has long since died, pretty much like all those unfortunate enough to have known me and I to cross paths with them, which is a whole different argument on its own.

The Dilem will still dance his desperate, legendary dance underneath his beloved sun. She will forever be bright, long after he has gone, long after I have gone, and he, like me, will never stop weeping, content only to know that she will always be there to shine her warmth upon his miserable existence from far afield.

And forever will I weep and mourn you my one, content only that you are, like the sun, as bright, as warming and as loving, are somehow shining down on my barely existing being, till the day I die.

QED.

All's right with the world ..

It would seem so .. it would seem that I am once again revolving around a circle who's centre is myself; a vicious cycle of misconceptions of love, the universe and whatever else is going on around me, when everyone else is busy living; busy dreaming, and busy with a whole load of things that do not include anyone else.

I wonder when, or if ever, am I going to see a light that for once will shine down upon my being and not others; when, or if ever, am I, like the rest of the world, from what I see, going to find happiness and satisfaction that is to do with the selfish 'I' as opposed to seeing it in the eyes of those I care about, and therefore be happy myself?

God's in his heaven .. and all's right with the world .. though I will forever question, which world, which heaven and what right and happy actually mean?

QED.

The Day of Victory

This is a day when no words will suffice. Not a million prose. Not all the words, in all the languages, living and dead.

In each others arms, and let the world go to hell. In love, to the point of melting down space and time around us and not caring. Despite them all, despite it all.

It is a Day of Victory, no more and no less. And it is yours my love, and mine.

QED

The night Che Guevara Died

It was a cold night. The breeze from the Rio Grand was misty; the air full the stench of treason, and little did Che, the revolutionary, Che the man and Che the lover know of any of it. Nor did he care.

Little did he care, I submit, because he was a man in love. In love with his cause, and the woman in his life that stood by him in that cause. With her it all made sense.

More fundamentally, consider this: what is love, but a revolution? what is revolution, if not love? An individual, or a collective, falls in love with a cause - the cause of freedom, the cause of breaking prison walls and the cause of the will of the free human spirit, are as good causes as any. The labour of it all is their fight to attain that ever so near, ever so far an aim. And upon the palms of death, arrives the child of labour of that love, in itself a victorious revolution; A manifestation of the everlasting cycle of life, that has no beginning and no end. What more can be more human, and what else can be so close to being in love than to revolt for it? And the converse, is trivial, quam clarum.

To him, the world was written in black and red - white was to yet to be born. To his mind, the ever-so-subtle interaction between these two colours would produce all the other colours in the spectrum of light that was to be the road to his, well, death. I say that so hesitantly, because I really do have a problem accepting that any man can die when he is so much in love. To my aid rush the proofs of his hands all around, for all to see. To the point that even when his dead corps was being displayed by captors, he looked alive.

I submit that there is a side to this man that no one ever cared to consider, which is how much of a faithful and loyal lover he was. To let it all ride on a wing-and-prayer. To throw caution to the wind, in pursuit of "the one".

And to sum it all up, this is for you, Che. I'd imagine we'd be good friends. Even though we could not be more different in political ideology, we'd be marvellous friends if you were around, for we are both lovers. You, of your Marxist cause, and I, well .. of my one, the only one ..

Here's to you Che .. ever present, and not forgotten.

And here's to you, my one. This revolutionary still lives on, and while they may hang me and show my corps to the world, I shall never surrender you. For as long as I breath, I will fight for you, if only for my heart to keep beating your name till the day I am no more, and my soul has to come back from the realms of oblivion to guard you.

QED.

The hand ..

That rocks the cradle .. is the hand that rules the world ..

She will be, the world has been ruled, sent to oblivion, me with it and both my world and I are an irrelevance.

Her hands, will forever remain, the one that will rock the cradle and the ruler of worlds. Mine has just been unfortunate enough to cross their heavenly path, and fortunate enough to be destroyed by them.

Here's to your Godly hands my Goddess ..

QED

Hic requiescet corpus tuum

Legend has it that St. Marcus had a vision of an Angel greeting him that peace shall be upon him, and that his body shall lie where he was to be killed seconds before he was killed.

The irony of it all is that no one will know. No one shall ever know anything. Whether the vision was true; whether Angels do really manifest themselves to people; whether they exist at all nor, alas, whether St. Marcus is even anything more than a figment of some fanatically religious story teller's imagination. Our witness, after all, is a dead man, of questionable existence.

Pretty much like this being, falling apart, yet standing nonetheless. In love, to the point of no return and madness, yet unbeknown to the world, and very content being so. And there his body shall lie, in a graveyard made purposefully for him, and him alone, and a grave dug exclusively for him, by both of them.

Though he is no saint, and she's as real as the air he breaths, and blood that keeps his veins alive, which is no more, and the wind, and the rain, and the sun and the moon and the stars.

Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus.

QED.

To you in 2011


I've no idea if you still read this, or will ever, but here it is for the history books ..

I still wish you the moon, the stars and an angel to look over you from afar. I still have you deep down in there, in a place so sacred, that no one can ever take you away from me, not even you. You will forever be mine come what may.

And I still wish him death and eternal damnation in the deepest dungeons of hell, he who took you away from me that miserable day.

To you ..

And you know who you are, and how you have touched me in every single way like no other. As only you know how. Like an angel shining through the darkness of my soul. To bring a glimmer of hope to this dead being within me, whom hope has abandoned to an internal song of silence in the cold depths of a grave yard that knows no bounds and has no exit, just an entrance to oblivion.

Who taught you to love this way ? what is it inside of you that made you love me so much ? a man that has given up the business of feeling, and succumbed to the loneliness of numbness. An ever so celibate hermit that has seen no light outside of his monastery and no soul left in him to redeem. Giving it all up, and throwing all of it to the abyss. Not knowing that this all powerful, delicate lucent hand, ever present, would one day declare him to be hers, and snatch him right out of the jaws of death and into her cradle of life and love.

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing; know that I am yet to even begin to tell you how much I am in your debt of gratitude, and in your love .. to you .. may we meet soon .. may we be forever together and never apart body, as we are souls.

Today I just realised how much of a plague there is all around us. A very specific type of plague. I call it the Indian plague. Or perhaps it should be the Indo-European plague; debatable.

Anyway, rather than waste time on semantics, let's just get down to the business of grabbing the bull by the horns and really address this.

Yesterday I had encountered the plague three times: once over the phone talking to it, once in the bank trying to reason with it, and once again over the phone, this time opening the gates of blasphemous hell to my enraged soul, and down the phone over to, well, it !

I think it all started when someone, in their wisdom, or shall I say some accounts department entrenched in their financial models, decided to deal with a nation so plagued by it's on miserable system of casts as individuals, who could be stimulated and lead towards a useful cause, namely the Indian lemmings.

Ok, I have probably broken every rule of political correctness, and could easily be accused of racism, but hey, it wouldn't be the first time I've done that, nor do I really care about people labelling me one way or another, so just go ahead and label if you must.

Back to the plague. It answered the phone, as usual sounding too pathetic even for the mediocre script it was reading from. Made a complete disaster of the whole conversation, and at that point I was completely stuck. Jammed. Ceased. Didn't know what to do, so just shouted a little and put the phone down.

Then, I meet it again at the bank. It (she it this time) tells me that it is "sorry for your wait sir, there are only two of us". "As if it's my fault", says I. Hopeless again, so I simply tell it to leave me alone. 1 hour of wait later, and I meet it again !!. This time it thanks me for waiting, and there you have it. Hell breaks loose. This time, I am still ceased, but at least I tell it exactly what's on my mind, and it feels my rage, so just pin-cushions the whole thing .. that's what its are very good at doing.

So .. backtrack a little bit. Somewhere down the line, some higher eshilon its decided that Indians are a good candidate to completely take over our lives, thereby providing command and control to the higher eshilon its, and so shifted the call centres over to Mumbai and Delhi. So much so, that if you have two cows to spare; forgive me .. you can't spare the cows, they spare you. Start again. If it could find some land to sell it sells it, and then it has a couple of very appealing options: either make a so-called Bollywood movie, of which over 600 are made every year, all number 1s, or, which is more appealing these days, open up a call centre.

Perhaps this is a very good time to emphasise the it sort of 'I'. So irritating to the ears, the only option one is sometimes left with is to imitate it out of despise, and then hope the it being spoken to would notice - ironic. Off course it never does, and even if it did, then that would make no difference to a pin-cushion. There is more sensation in the lower artificial limbs of an amoeba than an entire ocean full of pathetic its.

So how did the its turn into this formidable plague ? who set it free ? well I did say it was the its at the higher layers of the echelon tree that somewhere down the line decided that ...etc, but I think there's more to it, and perhaps one day us lesser mortals would come out and confess that the Orwellian "Big Brother" isn't really in the lobbies of government, but really deeply entrenched and fortified into the very fabric of corporations that we soled our souls to. Here's to Orwell, 24 years on from '1984', and here's to hoping.

Today I feel free. No, not broke free. I feel free. For the very first time since she set a nuclear bomb to my whole existence, since TekNet died, the post was run-over and the flag fell, since root shackled me with a hard-to-die dream. I feel free, and by God alive.

So free that I told this silly, simple, creature sitting in my arms, heavy with child, about it and all her little 2-ounce mind could see was all the burdens and relics of my shackles. Don't blame her. Never was one for brains, but dear me does she have a heart.

In no particular order ..

I suppose that the motive behind this posting is a brain dump of some description, or, to be more precise, a vent out of ideas that have grown congested since my last posting to the point where the burden of carrying them inside the gray matter of one "Persian", as one very close person used to refer to me, became both weary and bogged down with carrying them around.

While on the subject of that man, giant, controversial, up-and-in-your-face, it's worth mentioning that he has perhaps touched my very being in a way that I very much doubt he ever realised or, knowing him, would have been too precarious of his own apparent detachment from everyone and everything around him to entertain - a state of conscious or deliberate encapsulation. In any case .. just being around him, having the chance to rub shoulders with him has been a privilege, and without being conceited, coming from me that's quite a personal achievement of admission.

Still, no regrets admitting that or, indeed, standing by any particular path I have chosen to tread, usually the less travelled, usually the least popular and almost always with devastating and disastrous personal consequences. Perhaps the one bitter hint of times gone by is that no matter how hard I have tried, it has proven an almost colossal undertaking of difficulty to win him back some how. I don't know if the right expression is admiration, but the encounter with this giant on a professional level has made me rethink entire parts of my own approach, values, evaluations and courses of action on both a personal and professional level too.

I feel like I'm babbling, but what the hell ! this little space has become my only refuge of escape in the midst of all the rubble I feel being snowed under.

Any way, back to him .. since our very first meeting, there was I, surrounded by "hostiles", in a manner of speaking, who grew in number and aggression with every successful delivery of a work item, however small, being met by this ever present, seemingly irate, sharp, straight-talking Aussie, who had asked my arch rival at the time whether I had "cocked up yet", and the ice was broken forever.

This is to you SM, and you know exactly how I feel about you, and how much of an admiration I have for your person, and perhaps little you know how much I feel the battles you fight inside of you to keep your sanity, your sincerity, your decency, and yes: your emotions from ever surfacing, perhaps even to those closest to you like your equally wonderful family; logical to the last, even when loosing your temper at the little people the likes of PF and EW; rational to the last even when having the biggest go at me and shots being fired left right and centre; and composed to the last tiny bit of reason arguing for and against an outsider, a foreigner in every sense, like me, to deliver when the other failed. And here is one for the record: never once have I taken a word you said to me lightly, and never once have I been more hurt than when they got to you after they have run my post over, and the flag was down.

May you live a wonderful, fulfilling life .. always .. may you, wherever you go, be the giant that I have come to respect more than I have ever respected anyone, and love like a brother that had been hiding for millennia somewhere, like Enkidu, shining his light in Gilgamesh's quest for immortality, and the tragedy that was to prove his downfall. Here's to you, from humble me.

Always,
"The Persian"

The day "justice" was done

And the world is a better place. And we are rid of the "terrorist-in-chief" on the hands of the Almighty "commander-in-chief". This is the surface, and us lesser mortals, the children of an even lesser God try to scratch the surface in vein, till there are no more nails or knuckles left to our miserable palms.

We are told that President Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging for foiling an assassination attempt on his person in Dujail. And before I go on any further, how many of you outside the borders of Iraq actually know of Dujail, and for that matter how many Iraqis are still living in Iraq ?. Last time I checked, the country was more Iranian than Iran !. The deal had been struck and deed done to exchange this most ancient land with the miserable mullahs in Satan, sorry, I should have said Tehran but any way the two are synonymous, in exchange for their support of their all-time masters in Washington.

Any way, back to the subject matter. Since today is being dubbed as the days "justice" was done, and speaking of "justice", in the non-American (aka hypocritical, racist, hooligans) sense, shouldn't justice have been done on George Bush Snr and co in Kuwait in 1990 when he ordered the execution of the assassination squad that was sent at the time by the Iraqis to assassinate him in Kuwait ?.

At the time, we, the lesser mortals, servants of our non-American, non-Christian lesser God, we were told that this was just punishment under the articles of war, and hence the deed was done and the assassination squad got executed accordingly.

Today, we are told that President Saddam Hussein is being sentenced to death because he bestowed exactly the same sentence, under exactly the same articles of war, on a bunch of Persian-, Mullah-, Terrorist-, Racist-incited thugs who tried to assassinate, yes, you guessed it, the head of state, in his OWN country. AH ! that was the difference ! George Bush Snr wasn't even in his home country, and let's not get into the background of how the so-called Americans came to savagely take the lands from the Native Americans in the first place. He, Bush, was in Kuwait, not his home country, and not even a recognised sovereign state in many private circle, regardless of what the puppet UN says or does. Yet, still he saw fit to hand down the assassins to the hangman

Oh, and let me give you some bullets to fire at my humble self: Perhaps you would like to call me a "terrorist", to which I would say look in a mirror, or even read the news for a glimpse of the biggest, stupidest terrorist of all, his Royal Grand KKK Dragon Highness GWB, or you would call me a Baa'thist, to which I would proudly reply yes; Surprise me. I am open to suggestions.

Long live Iraq. Long live the IRAQI people. Long live Baghdad.

QED

Shock

I am falling more and more into the belief that perhaps I belong to a dead creed of people, or is it so ?

This afternoon, a situation took place that had me shocked wondering whatever happened to standing by those you love, regardless of consequence and irrespective of whether or not others approved ? Is it me, or has the world changed ? Or could it be that it is I who stood still, by some ideals and pillars, and I lived a lifetime defending and living by them, as the world moved on ? Passing time, watching trains go by as the saying goes.

You see, by my book, blood is not only thicker than water, blood can never be compared to anything else. Blood means that I would be by you, next to you, fighting with you when you are remote family, let alone close family like a son, brother, a sister, father or mother, and I am damn confused to the core.

For it seems that those values no longer hold fast when subject to the close scrutiny of the reality of our existence, or at the very least my existence. It seems that push come to shove, people are prepared to forsake you no matter who you are, in exchange for fervor with a spouse or when it comes down to their own stupid misjudgment, when those very same individuals had only you by their side, when close and far abandoned them to criticism, ridicule and character assassination. It seems that it is only I who puts blood family first and foremost, when subjected to the same situations, pressures and circumstance.

Once I read in a novel, depicting true accounts of what had happened post October revolution in Cairo, I read about two men who grew up like brothers, shared the same food, gone to the same school and lived under the same roof even though their parents could not be more different: one was the son of an aristocrat who occupied a lavish palace, while the other was the son of the concierge at the same palace. Regardless, the former's father was reputed to be quite a noble being, and treated the latter's son as he treated his own. Charity, chivalry, humanity, call it what you will.

Post revolution, there were laws enacted, rightly or wrongly, to confiscate lands and assets belonging to the former aristocracy, with only enough proceeds and funds being released to allow them, the aristocracy, to live a basic life. Needless to say, the remaining proceeds, assets and such like found it's way to the pockets of the so-called revolutionaries. Typical of political change methinks, but that's not really the gist of the tale in the "Here and Now".

To cut a long story short, this aristocrat's son went one day to collect whatever little they had been allowed to receive every month, and that used to take place at one of the "State Security Investigation" bureaus, scattered in abundance all over Cairo, and all over and Arab homeland, that has been plagued with a cross of evil rulers and greedy occupants. Any way, this man walks into this God-forsaking building to collect the monthly allowance from his dues, his family's assets, only to be told that the chief of that bureau wished to talk to him. So in he goes into this luxurious office, to be faced by another man, his age, with his back over to him. He greeted the official, who subsequently turned around to face him, and there he was: his life-long friend, whom he considered a brother. His first instinct was to rush over to him, to hug and to great him, but something in his train of thoughts, and the body language traversing the distance between the official's chair and himself mesmerised him. I guess it would have been some concoction of shock, fear, coldness .. How am I to know ?.

After exchanging a simple hello, this official starts preaching to the young man how the aristocracy, exemplified by his family, has stolen what really belonged to the people (huh !); how they have ill-treated the peasants, and how all of this has changed now; no more titles, no more aristocracy, and no more assets; "We are all equal now. Long live the revolution". Reminds me of the Orwellian line "All animals are equal, only some are more equal than others". So the young man asks about releasing their assets, only to be faced some more rhetoric, and so he gives up, and simply says to this official, in his luxurious surroundings, afforded to him by the God-blessed revolution, and an imposing photo of "Big Brother" Nasir overseeing even the void, he responds so calmly: "I understand now, and how I longed to have understood".

QED.

Irony

Half man .. half horse .. not human, not animal. The combination of the non-sentient and sentient .. the centaur reaches for his mate. The gaze in his eyes convincing me he is human; oops .. did I say he ? or should that be “it” ? once an bitter, stupid old man told me that “it” is a horrible word, though that was for a completely different reason. He, the man, was too sensitive to my referring to his cat as “it”. God .. whatever brought that up ? perhaps it’s simply that my brain is overloaded, and about to crash or shut down .. whichever is more attainable.

Any way .. back to the centaurs, I suddenly realised that past this creature and his mate, he, for lack of a better reference tool, is reaching for her; or longing for her ? any way .. I repeatedly asked myself about the sense of placing those two criss-cross creators at the entrance of one of London’s most famous landmark shopping centres, and failed to reach a conclusion. Whatever the case maybe, he and she have now seen me through one marriage and three-quarters .. and a few girlfriends on the way. What a sadistic, black comedy this fate of one’s path has .. leaving him much like the he-she-sentient-non-sentient icons in exactly the same co-ordinates on the plane of human existence: lonely, yet no alone .. married, yet unmarried .. this time round struggling to do what is compassionate, and humane, by someone who has so swiftly, and without a fight, become the core that is me since the very second he was born, at the sound of his first cry to announce to a long empty, dead world inside of me that he is here, and that he is the messenger of a compassionate God above, bringing my soul redemption .. for he is me, though to do what is right by him is tearing me apart. No matter. Is this sounding confusing yet ?! well .. I know I am damn well enough confused to the point of a total meltdown of the nuclear reactor up in my head.

The centaurs are still there. He looking at, longing for, her; she with a neutral gaze, straight into his eyes, and they dance the dance of life in the criss-cross existence of the intersection between who they are, what they have been made into and the practical reality of her being a female, nonetheless, and he being a male regardless. It seems to me that one common denominator survives all arguments across sentient species, even those on the fringe of awareness; That common denominator is the very definition of this emotion we so-call “love”, and the different shadows and impressions it casts on the two different genders, wherever gender can be identified. Simply, that glaringly obvious inability of the female to “love” in the abstract. She, the female I mean, may well be more sacrificing, or selfless, if ever that is the case, or even the magnet that is between the pieces of a relationship, but is she capable of the abstract “love” ? of the emotion of psychological, physical and intrinsic pairing between herself and her partner, to the point of being in “love” ? for no other reason than simply for the person that is he, for himself, regardless of any other pillars that people seem adamant to ascribe as to “why” you would “love” someone ?.

It is so disgustingly and hopelessly obvious that the only gender capable of such emotion is the male of the species under observation. He is able to love to the point of killing, able to self-sacrifice and ask questions later, whenever or if ever there might be a later; able to experience the abstract emotion that is “love”.

Once, in a rare moment of naked admission, a very close person told me that “men are so soft”. She had me thinking about this a life time, and for every situation that I have encountered or, to be more precise, every relationship that I have been in or had the chance to observe, I would listen to her voice loud and clear in my head, trying to come to some sort of sensible conclusion as to why she may have said that, and like magic, time and again: you see it in the female behaviour, expressions, even the way she makes passionate, crazy, uncontrollable love to you. She is the one on top, no matter where you are in every possible sense, physical, practical or emotional. She is on top. The irony of all of this, and the hopeless reality, is that no male will ever admit this and no female will ever let you extract this out of her. Not by choice, but simply by genetic programming.

QED