Reflection and introspection at times clarified things for him.  His life had not been bad but it had been confusing, and despite its complexities and diversity, he was unfulfilled.  Fulfillment, he realized, at least in his case, had to come from within, and his attempts to obtain it through his diverse relationships had always been a mistake, a detour at best, a deliberate misdirection at worst.  But misdirection by whom, and for what purpose?  That seemed incomprehensible.  He was not usually prone to delusions of grandeur, or to despair.  He was just not important enough to merit that kind of attention, unless each and every one of us was.

We humans are gregarious he thought to himself, seeking to contradict instincts that hinted that introversion was not synonymous with temerity, and that at least in his case, accurate answers were more likely to be derived from inner reflection than from outward associations.  His truths lay within, something he’d always sensed, and perhaps it was boredom more than anything else that misled him.  Alleviation of boredom through intimacy with others was not love, although it often seemed that way, and when the boredom dissipated somewhat, what passed for love was gone as well.  Residues remained, affection, respect, gratitude, but nothing of the synergistic mutual resonance that he felt love should have involved, and those residues were always tinged with regret and self-recrimination because the residues included consequences to others, as if, vampire-like, he’d left the objects of his affection drained.

It was not love that he sought, although that’s what he frequently thought, but fulfillment of a very different kind, fulfillment that had no fear of loneliness nor need of external resources.  A sort of fulfillment crafted from inner echoes and infinite reflections in perfectly juxtaposed interior mirrors where, perhaps, his soul communed with his heart and with his mind seeking to grasp the eternal within and without.  And in that context, others would always be a distraction when the mists of passion lifted.  As they always did.

He was, he felt, a sort of tempest, a cyclone, a hurricane whose vortex needed to keep ascending fighting against emotional gravity wells lest he crash to earth and lose himself in drifts and eddies of rootless emotions, then be crushed in the grasp of history’s relentlessly chaotic tides.  But he’d always been drawn to chaos in whose inchoate depths everything remained possible and from whence he suspected he’d been cast adrift eons ago, before there existed time or space.  Cast adrift to find something, perhaps an antidote to relentless order, or perhaps something altogether intangible, perhaps an antidote to a divine inchoatesy, perhaps a counter balance to divinity itself, if divinity in fact existed.

What would that make him he wondered, as images of Hêlēl and Samael and Shaitan churned in his version of Jung’s universal unconscious, or was that subconscious, and any way, was there a difference there, or any relevance?  Did relevance in fact exist?  Was he utterly lost or on the verge of enlightenment, perhaps sitting in a lotus-like position, meditating under an immense primordial tree, perhaps somewhere near the intersection of Ragnarok and Eden, futilely seeking enlightenment?

Or was he just bored.  …. 

Again.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.