After these three long weeks, I have returned to the world of blogging. How can I begin to fill the gap that this period of silence has created? So many days with their innumerable thoughts in tow have flooded past.
What presses to the front of my mind at this moment and at many moments is the future. It entices and terrifies in equal measure, weaving a vivid tapestry of horrid fantasies and pleasant daydreams.
[oh, what it is to write again, with this blank page before me and my hesitant fingers]
I am confronted with something that only has one name: disappointment. This disappointment is not shrouded in the haze of my future, but is unfortunately locked in the present.
It is not that this disappointment really distresses me—I accept it at this point. These past weeks and the preceding months have taught me that my mistake was vastly exaggerated within my own mind. The mistake (choosing the wrong option) proved a false dichotomy: what I should have done is disregard the choice all together and forge a different path. But what’s done is done, and my disappointment is embroidered into the fabric of my past nine months. Its thread is ambiguously between brown and grey, a middling colour of rising mediocrity and falling acceptance. The colour of present weaves into the future, as it always does. It will not be stopped.
My mind’s eye focuses with suppressed anxiety (but look closely, you will see the veins of frenzy) upon the images of the scales that Libra holds (Libra, an amalgamation of all the Libras in my life, multifaceted but faceless all the same). Every day, every minute, a new possibility gets tossed onto one side of the scale. The reckoning forges on, the balance scarcely uneven one day, even the next, completely thrown off the day after.
All I know now is that I am sick of it, this object that causes my disappointment: Academia, or my specific breed of it. It drips with my disdain, palpably—once loved and looked to with expectant hope and security, now spurned and loathed. What have I learned these years, following along the line on which the present leads me? Near to nothing that will contribute to what I truly want to learn in life. My creativity is stifled, my writer’s voice choked, my beliefs fluttering and flimsy, able to be argued against upon the most tentative sensation of perversity.
Yet it could not have been any other way, at least at first. The conventions that they have built in such recent swathes of past prove inescapable. And they are necessary, to some extent; I cannot regret my entire university career. The cathedral sustained me. From a purely intellectual level, yes, I can think deeply now, but about such meaningless topics. What do I really know? [nothing, of course]
And look, look with me upon that haven of peace and security, that heaven containing my ideal career. I worship at the Book. It sustains me, uplifts me. And there it is, in seclusion, it is there infinitely, all for me to pretend to possess. If only the skies would crack and the unknowable force would come down to earth just for a moment and tell me: what is the most important thing to seek out in life?
On the one hand: my ideal job, the opportunity to fulfil my artistic passions, the ability to write and read and sustain my intellectual and change-driving needs. On the other: the land, the friends, the possibility of that hidden Love, the history—oh, the history! How can I even consider such a thing, to leave it all behind, the cathedrals and the castles and the monasteries and the gravestones and the earth beneath it all, breathing still despite the rain of the centuries.
Enter, Realism, present me with my typical next thought: is it even possible for me to stay with such history? Should I enslave myself to some unknown company in order to touch that ancient stone, in order to gasp in the English spring and the Scottish winter?
If I must leave, I must take a certain strength with me. It is true that the past four years, rather than build me within, have torn me down; every minutia of what I considered a virtue has dissolved under the brunt force of mediocrity. I see such subtle breakings only worsening in the future when I look into my crystal ball, into the surface of my avalonian lake. The Global World feeds the competitive nature of things, and careens forward on a path of increasing intensity, a runaway train that cannot be stopped until it runs over a cliff.
The bookstore is away from all that. There, I am not mediocre; there, I can thrive. But I cannot know whether it is my uprootedness that feeds my mediocrity, or whether it is simply something that comes with age. It must be a mixture of both, though I have flown far enough from my surroundings to see that the comforts which nourish those who grew with me nourish me no longer. I am beyond, in between, unsettled and in need of settling.
I will play my hand. It is the only thing that can be done. I rail, rail against so much of Life, and almost all of it is to no avail.
Is my own mediocrity only pushing me to finally pick up my scissors and cut through the fabric? I’ve seen new threads, they lie just outside my reach, I could reset the loom, begin the tapestry once more. What I want from Life. What do I want from Life?
I’ve lost faith in my old Epiphanies—they keep to themselves now—but an intoxicatingly subtle experience in the South has reopened my eyes to the spiritual. Goddess, peek through the clouds for a moment and answer me with your eyes: what is the right choice?
the rambling medievalist 