A reflection, a poem and an unusual story

On this rainy morning Phoebus visited me, I think. I'm going to post three different texts out of this single post: One reflection, one poem that hopefully is going to be well received (even though I'm aware that it can be really bad. I'm no professional poet) and finally an unusual short story. They are not related so you can go straight to the reading that calls more your attention.

Nostalgia or Pessimism
There are minds that look for something beyond what the world of senses can offer us. Minds that are so empowered by imagination that find in the world insufficient intellectual stimulation and they look in ideas, forms and symbols that which can't be given by the spirit of our times. I'm not saying anything profound here, and I will explain why. I still remember the fantasies I used to play with when I was a kid: first it was the dinosaurs in my earliest infancy; for a time I feed from Star Wars until I converted into a trekker in my teenage hood. Later on I found feed for my imagination in The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons, the world of magicians and monsters. I was always desperately looking for these treasures of creativity in which I could play in my mind and rest from the humdrum spirit of modern times. Once I've exploited enough of them, I would usually move away into another world of discovery. Realism can be very tiresome for some people, and we find in fiction what materialism lacks in essence (matter itself has no essence, but the thought we have about it, making thinking essential and experience vacuous) My point is, I'm still that imaginative mind that flies into distant worlds. I've come to realize that in those moments of realist disenchantment with the world, today I go back in time into ancient societies. Or as Machiavelli once beautifully put it:

"When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely".

My nostalgia consists in this longing for a world that no longer exists and lies far away, lost in time. The magic springs from their reality: they existed (and this is a strength that no fictional creation can match). They were real once. Today we (I) recreate their life in our (my) minds when this world of us become too absorbing. I share with Machiavelli this playground. Our creativity looks back what we know can't be found forward. This is the reason why I can't be a progressive or a liberal; nostalgia can turn into pessimism; longing for the past is contempt toward the future. My vantage point is not human rights, nor the proletariat. My vantage point is not the economy, climate change or the bourgeoisie. My vantage point is, my friends, Ancient Greece.



A poem without a name
The train moves, it does not stop.
The spirit of our times, driven like a train,
aiming forward, without restraint.
A moment still, a beautiful moment,
gone forever, nothing stays here,
everything moves, just like the train,
without rest, without refrain.

It slows down, it speeds up, it does not stop.
What do I see? Workers making it real,
making it move, like history, like our times,
moving forward, you can't deceive.
Board the train, it's called life,
the moment still, when it was here, it seemed too real,
then the train arrives, and you have no option,
you board to survive.

Station, next station, industrialization moving you forward,
from birth to youth, to bloom and with luck, to old age.
A love I had, a love that was real,
and like reality, a train also came,
with its moment of depart one day at Union Square,
a love that was real, it came to go, not to stay,
we boarded our different trains,
survival made its claim.

That beautiful moment, it didn't survive;
that still, that was never real.
This wind, that blooming tree, those clouds,
those mating pigeons, my breath and my mouth;
this rain, that bulb, my pain.
Beautiful moment, you are gone.
The train came, and I departed.
I'll never see you again, driven by industrialization,
survival made its claim.


An Unusual Short Story
One day a man was teleported from distant past into Grand Central Terminal. That man was Aristotle. Nothing physically impossible happened. Matter was not added to our time. Like scientist and science fiction authors claim, matter just changed, like is happening right now as the reader reads these lines. This time it turned out to be Aristotle to which matter changed. A very curious man indeed, right there, but the New Yorker couldn't care less, living as she does in a city filled with curiosities. What an unfortunate man indeed he was, brought from the polis to the nation times. In sooth, everyone thought he was a homeless, and an eccentric one, like many others, with a long white beard and a queer colorful robe. He thought he was in Olympus, with all this electric lights, with the high blue ceiling picturing the stars, the golden clock in the middle and the huge foreign flag. Everything too alien for a man of his intelligence. Then he thought that that might be the Tartarus. Everyone was dressing like barbarians; this couldn't be the Olympus or the Elysium. Or can the Gods look so differently to us the Hellenes? Almost like a boy, he seated on the stairs, lost as he was, wondering as he is, lost in his thoughts. "Where am I? What is this incredible place? What kind of illusion I'm suffering from?" Those were the questions that he was trying to figure out when a policeman forced him to stand up. It is not allowed to sit on Gran Central's stairs. Aristotle might have felt more at home if he would have teleported into the Metropolitan, not a train station! So he came out into the streets, where the tall buildings, the yellow cabs and the horrible weather made their effects. "This must be a dream! This is not possible!" Some people thought he must have been some kind of drug addict. He definitively looked so, staring as he was, at all the world around him, people pushing him aside and one or two yelling at him "move out of the way!" He walked down 42nd street, not even the numbers could be recognized. And the Chrysler building, high above ground, resembled a spectacular marvel. Everything was marvelous. Everything was out of proportion. Everything was horrible to this man's eyes. Like all stories without endings, this one will stop here for lack of development, and just add that Aristotle, in all his wisdom, was last seen sleeping on a bench in Bryan Park, totally alone, speaking a foreign language no one could understand, reading from letters no news paper would print, thinking in ideas no one could imagine in modern times.