On the Wings of Hope: Prose (Recognized)

Discordant

You are the one who stands up against. You have always been that way and plan to stay in the future.

You were against such an enormous number of things that have long ceased keeping track of them. After all, when the direction is clear, individual fragments of the path become less important, right?

You were against politicians since the moment of admission to the Institute – and, perhaps, even while staying at school. They all seemed to you as such petty and short-sighted assholes that you simply cannot tolerate them. That's why you have always so jealously watched lots of their performances, silently arguing and debating with each of them and all of them at the same time, no matter what monologue they were performing from the screen of your TV. You were a good audience.

If memory still serves you well, you were against the entire educational system since the moment of getting under its millstone. Accumulated by mankind "knowledge" always seemed to you as a heap of inconceivable stuff and totally incoherent fragments of information, reminding more the undigested remains of mind's food of the next popular scientist who dared to write yet another school textbook. The school system seemed to you as monstrous torture and mockery of healthy children's desire to run, dance, frolic and enjoy life. But you had to go to a college at all costs, so you have been obediently sitting at the school and home desks all day and night. You were a good student.

No doubt, you were against the majority of modern sculptors of the bad taste that have managed by some unthinkable way and defying all laws of human conscience and sanctity to crawl over the heads of others on self-created Olympus, having mistaken it with a swamp due to own shortsightedness. Works of many of them were considered as a bad pop not deserving anyone's attention. Maybe due to that reason you have mentioned them so often in conversations with your friends, often lamenting that art is almost killed nowadays. And what did you do in order to revive it? You were a good critic.

Yes, certainly, you have never met with incorruptible officials, because it would be so disastrous for your cherished image of a righteous discordant, mercilessly denouncing enemies and, as a matter of fact, being quite satisfied only with it. You screamed in the ears of deaf ones and wrote complaints about the blind ones for the indifferent. You cut off one head of a monster and two new immediately were taking its place. This is how it all ended time and again – the system taking over you, depleting your determination and courage. So once you finally spat on all of them from all the heavens visible – sort of a farewell curtsey in the direction of a many-headed monster. The monster only helpfully grinned with all remained heads, taking no notice. You were a fine cog in the bureaucratic machine.

You were against priests who created a fetish out of God and mercilessly traded it in their almshouses – but with what kind of good deeds, which are a manifestation of real faith, did you decorate your life and the lives of your beloved ones? Has your and their lives become a singing – not mournful ones like in Church, but a daily heartfelt one?

Is it needless to say that you were against a huge variety of other most unpleasant circumstances of reality, for the enumeration of which we have neither time nor will?

Against, against, against. This became an almost automatic reaction. You learned how to say "no" without learning how to tell "yes". And situations for your "yes" ceased to exist in your life. They became internally unneeded.

So, unwittingly and condemning you continued to live that like-life that was so despised by you. You were cursing the darkness, not praising the light. You were denying the evil, not absorbing the good. You were destroying what was considered dirty – but did you build something pure in its place? You denied without offering anything in return.

You became the greatest of critics – one from your very sleeping soul. The curser of anything and everything, yet not the maker of better things. You stayed warm and did not become hot – hot with all of your heart. In order to grow something outside, you first need to cultivate it inside your own heart. But what could you nurture inside it? Your kindness continued to remain only the unborn potential.

It was that way before – yet your life begins now. It begins with a "yes" to the warm love in your heart. It's your life. It's your move, critic.

26.02.2012