the view from the stained glass window.

on romanticism

Living an inspired lifestyle, as it’s naively put, leads to Bacchic diversions on every front. More so in the city than at home, but following closely here and everywhere I travel. I seem hellbent on this vain crusade of escapism, disguised loosely as a noble journey. The moment a man decides to live romantically is the moment he becomes free, I tell myself. It’s a path which leans into impulse. Using impulse to propel oneself into grand illusion. And grand illusion to ascend into delusive behavior. A risky venture that, in heavy doses, reaches toward the greatest risk of all: outstretched fingers pointing toward an unmarked grave. Here lies a fool. He is not remembered how he thought he would be. For he could not see his own folly. 

My school of writers, we think we’re the prophets but we’re really the clowns. Reciting the gospels of our literary heroes, as if they came to us privately, in words direct from the burning bush, betraying the intelligence we hold so dear. We cheapen ourselves, willingly, with every line of confession and pseudo-experience lived behind the lens of romance. We thought that if we lived great we could be great. But it would take an act of grace to lift us from our egos, to show us the view from the rafters, as we glance upon the parade of jesters, all howling from the same dark cell, unable to see the truth. 

The ones free from our cages know us well. Dreamers would be too complimentary. Fantasizers, they’d call us. People who are sleeping while awake. Idealists of a made-up-world. From our vantage, we see only the chains that bind them. The burdens of their nominal existence. We think we have freed ourselves from that pain. But in our blindness, new chains have been assigned to us. New anxieties have tethered our spirits. And just as we have laughed, seated in our decadence, at the dismal lives they lead, they too bellow loudly at us. No envy is lost. We cannot live in that reality. We cannot live in any reality. For so much is given to the creation of our worlds. So much is given to the view from the stained glass window.