The Duelist

If the sword is the extension of the will, then my sword has gotten dull and rusty.

I can barely concentrate on a single thing for a long period, unless it’s a game. I can barely make myself study. I no longer meditate. The dissolution of my paradigm was excellent but without the discipline, without the will to hold myself together my drive will dissipate into nothingness. Heat waste.

This has to stop. Tonight I am binding myself to the sharpening of my will into a single point. I am a mage, and without my will that means nothing.

The sword is the extension of the will. And it is only as sharp, as strong as the will.

While speaking to a friend recently, I came to the sudden and strange realization that I am probably more familiar with melancholy than most people, barring poets and unrequited lovers.

Which is not to say that I spend my days depressed and lonely, or that I wallow in self-pity. It only means that when I do feel the onset of melancholy I allow myself to be acutely aware of it.

Aside from run away from it or blot it out with activity, there are two things one can do when one feels pensive. First, you can simply wallow in it, like a potent drug. Second, one can use it.

Use it? When one is melancholy everything becomes acute, and you become very sensitive to the slightest nuances of just about anything. The Japanese in particular, as a culture, are very conscious of the beauty in sadness and often the most beautiful scenes in their books or plays or movies evoke a certain bittersweetness that seems to render everything crisply, sharply.

Acute. That’s the word. Suddenly every falling leaf or beam of dusty sunlight becomes pregnant with non-verbal meaning that borders on the spiritual. Borders? It is spiritual. Suddenly the ripples of an otherwise-still pond speak to you in a hundred different ways; even a moment spent staring out the window of a train at the passing cityscape becomes an occasion for an unspoken truth.

People recognize it in the works of other people more willing to stare melancholy in the face, even if they never dare to face it that closely themselves without soon turning away. Often these appreciations are voiced in imprecise terms: “It touched me,” “It’s so true,” “It seems so real.”

Real.

That’s because it is. It is a sincerity of such stark clarity that the first urge of most people is to look away, as if having stumbled upon something too sacred to behold. The simple truth is that these things, captured in word or song or images, are too naked. Too vulnerable. It is an interesting paradox of our times that the expressions of ourselves that resound most truly are the most hidden. There is too much punishment for living the undefensive life.

Clarity, then. The next time you find yourself there, look with melancholy’s clarity. Look unflinchingly, and bring back a piece of it with you when you leave, so that other people may recognize it.