miércoles, 8 de diciembre de 2010

a mountain boy and the master visionary

Rabrindanath knew the mountains. Their everchanging moods and the old words whispered by the forest trees and sung by the myriad brooks of his valley in the spring.But it was through the language of birds, which he so naturally understood, that he had learnt the mystery of the beginning. Yet he thought that what he knew was also known by everyone else. So he lived, he told himself, in a world where no one was wrong. When he left the village in the remote mountain valley where he had been born, he undesrstood how mistaken he had been, for he came across people who thought quite unlike him, engaged in violent argumentes about the truth, and even killed or were killed to prove themselves right. The cities of the world, he saw, were full of terror and madness. He remembered the peace of his mountains, and realized that it had been a reflection of the peace within him. Having gone out into the world and experienced its fury, he could no loger hope to regain that peace anywhere. Even if he could go back to his valley, he would not find it. He felt it very dsiturbing that the world was filled with writers, each of them expounding on their own spiritual or political truth with sauh rage that it was as if they were engaged in a race against each other. And each of them had millions of worshippers, followers who would have killed to be able to kiss the feet of the great intellectuals they so admired. This made the human quite different from any other species: a terrible need to follow, a thirsty want for leadership- mixed with a will to lead, in return. But when Rabrindanath read the works of the famous writers he found in them not much more than tiresome platitudes, pages and pages of interpreted history, and of stories that were obviously mere lies designed to make their authors seem enlightened. So, aside from the fact that there had been wonder and truth in his mountain childhood, what else was there to be said for the sad, sad world where he now lived?
One night in winter, in a dark and filthy bar in some unnamed neigbourhood of a huge city, when he was already not so young, but still driven by an anguish to find something inside himself to connect him in a harmonious way to the outside, he met(he instinctively knew it right way) the greatest visionary, artist, writer, in the world: a midget wrapped in a thick winter coat, drunk on cheap whiskey, tootless except for a couple of green shards of bone that shone in the grim light of the pub everytime he spoke. He wore a bowler hat full of stains and holes, and there was caked blood under his fingernails. " I have scratched so much to find truth that my fingers bleed. Don´t kid yourself, but the pain is so bothersome I must drink all day to numb it"
It is known that people in general waste their time idolizing mediocre imbeciles who have become popular, but totally ignore the truly great ones among them, possibly out of unhealthy envy, or even because they do not really want to contemplate the reality exposed to them by the true geniuses, lest they, in their narrow mindedness, should be driven mad by a superior idea. The reaction of the pedant to real artistry is always the same: a sort of guilty, lame agressiveness. The result of animal jealousy. The genius midget was fully aware of that and spoke at length about it: "that is, essentially, why I have no fans, and no one reads what I write. Aside from the fact that I never really write anything on paper: it´s all in my head."
Rabrindanath was hoping for the prophet, artist, genius midget to finally give him a piece of his wisdom, but the creature(we will have to call him that because as time went on he began to look only quasi-human)had climbed high into some sort of alcoholic heaven and now his speech was thoroughly incomprehensible. But finally he muttered: "but now I have a follower, a true admirerer: you. And I will initiate you into the rites required to cross the line separating the world as you see it and the world as it is. You will be the first person to be delivered by me from the idiocy that affects the rest of humanity"
"What idiocy is that, exactly?" asked Rabrindanath.
"The inability to discern whom you must worship. There is a multitude of idiots out there worsipping the works of tricky writers who say nothing but lies. They befuddle History"
"But how do I know you have the truth?"
"Because I have never felt the need to write it down on paper. I told you already that it is all in my head. I am the only one you should believe, therefore."
Rabrindanath awoke, pleased in the extreme to realize that he had never really left his town in the mountains. As a kind of benign omen, he saw through the little window of his room that it was beginning to snow. The silvery lights of morning rose from behind imposing heights in the distance. He had been changed by his dream. He had been shown something, although he could not yet define waht it was. He dressed quickly. As he left the little stone house, he heard his mother making breakfast in the kitchen. She also must have heard him going out, because she told him: "Rabrindanath...where are you going? come and eat something"
But in his zeal, Rabrindanath had no time for her.
He walked on the snow, arrived at the base of a mountain and, using hammer and chisel, begun to carve something, with a religious fervour. Hours later, he had finished. He was exausted but felt accomplished, happy that he had delivered a clear message to whomever wanted to pay attention. Whe he left for home, the moon had risen over the mountain crests, and lit with a silvery shimmer the sculpture Rabrindanath had carved into the hard cold rock. It was the exact image of the midget he had seen in dreams: the only creator, the one who never left any evidence of his immense knowledge in any book. "

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