- W.Y. Yeats
“I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, and my ladder’s gone.” She whispered to herself at 3AM in the bed, voice dead, hair dry. She had exhausted her daydreams and fancies, trying to seek a new one but the ladder was gone, the entrance somewhere lost. The line between hopelessness and ecstasy had become somehow blurred, since the beginning of the cruel December. Unable to bear the hurtful loss of inspiration anymore in this prolonged winter night, she surveyed the dark, empty room, rested her eyes on some dim light spots on the wall, and masturbated. In the heightened sensation she finally saw some shattered images. Loomed over her barren imagination was spectacles of London.
A fine and quintessential British boy. The sharp silhouette of his face composed a perfect canvas for his hazel colored eyes, softly framed by his dark golden hair and caressed by a black striped scarf. The heavily textured wool jacket in a faded grey tone had a good composition that gently hugged his tall, slim torso. He smiled when she made a joke, nodded when she thanked him, looked into her eyes when she asked a question.
Her finest memory with him took stage in the Royal Observatory. The River Thames enchanted her so much that she forgot, when their boat reached the London Bridge, that they were not going to turn head back to Westminster but Greenwich was the destination. It was a lonely town and the Observatory sat on a highland by the outskirt Greenwich. Wandering inside the Observatory, she tried to envision what life would be like for the man who lived here for decades. She looked at the exquisite British boy by her side, imagining him amid those equally exquisite, complicated equipment of horology. He would look into sky throughout the endless chilly evenings, guarding the Observatory as its sole, lonely timekeeper.
Greenwich was never a deserted town but a royal retreat in the past and a popular resort in present. Yet the countless clocks that varied from thumbsize to roof triggered her romanticized and heroicized imagination. How could one NOT feel lonely here, isolated from the ever-floating, secular, atomic world?
It must be the weather and post-Paris syndrome. She didn’t have time to rationalize her mellowness yet when he embraced her from back in the towered garden on top of the Observatory. The foggy vast English country stretched before their eyes, intoxicatingly. “I will never forget you.” He said to her. Alas don’t say that, she stopped him. In some remote memory that flashed back, her first love phantomly emerged. I will never forget about you. He said on the phone. It was the last time she ever heard his voice.
It was fine to be forgotten. It even had nothing to do with hardening one’s heart. Possibilities forgone and embraced, she decided for better or for worse, the best way to defend oneself against this dystopian world was to love as if there were no tomorrow, as if nobody would get hurt, and as if one’s entire life were supposed to be consumed by passionate and inconvenient love.
Then he was gone too. On one of her last days in London, she walked from Westminster to Oxford Circus to return a book. The sky was depressingly grey and rain was cold. When she was crossing St. James Park, the rain suddenly transformed into snowflakes. Gooses hovered over the river in snow and she thought about him. How many times had they walked cross St. James Park, holding hands and smiling into each other’s eyes?
She started to like this soft side of herself, little bit mellow and kind of sweet. After returning the book, she traced down Regent Street all the way to Leicester Square, following the footprints of the tranquil walks she used to take with him on every fine, pre-fall afternoon. It turned out, finally, that bidding farewell to London was far more heartbreaking than kissing goodbye to him. After all, he was an empty-hearted boy whom she can see through like crystal. He licked her lips intoxicatingly but never intended to hurt. An empty-hearted, overly protected, innocent and handsome English boy.
On her way back home, she bought two pairs of beautiful shoes. One pair of heavy boots in a shade as red as Merlot, and the other was a pair of black, fierce high heels. Dreams and images rose from the shoes, adding luster to London spectacles. They whispered at her ears. They were saying: wear them, wear them when you are back to Manhattan, wear them when the summer returns, when you could slip into a summer dress and dance on the table in the tiny courtyard again. In that way you can re-live all the exhilarating moments once again, meet somebody new and fall in love with a hundred percent of your soul and heart.
However it was winter here and she was lying on her bed listening to the sound of cars passing by, observing how light spots varied. When she masturbated she tried to dive into her shattered memories in London – how she buried her head into his neck, smelling the scent of cigarette and feeling the chunky texture of his shirt. He would rest his beautifully shaped jawbone on her forehead, the shades of his brown eyes swirled with changing beams of sunlight.
Emotion opens door for us to be fully who we are. What agonized her at this particular hour was not the absence of the English boy (or human warmth for that matter) at all. What confronted and challenged her was what had confronted and challenged Yeats when he wrote -
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone.
She was fine when she could add to the patterns of her fancies each night, until the drowsiness closed down to the most vivid scenes. They used to drive her to wake up 6AM and made her happiest, whenever she felt that she had made one tiny step closer towards the vision, perfection, and the ideal self. However, sometimes – like this moment – her winged fancies grew too splendid and ergo impossible to realize in the real world. She became frustrated with reality: what was the point of being so hard-core if beauty and idealism had no-where to be found but in dreams.
She became even more frustrated when trying to let go her winged fancies all together. She made a martyr-like effort to learn to compromise and live. Her imagination, however, never fully accepted such an option. The platonic conception of her ideal, Renaissanic persona with a twist of 19th century Romanticism had grown so deep-rooted, so vivid that she had to stick with it for the rest of her life, albeit the suffering and emptiness she had to endure, and albeit the comforting warmth of the English boy.
The suffering and fear that amplified her solitude came from a disappeared vision, a lost ladder, or a blank canvas. “How paralysing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is,” Vincent van Gogh used to sigh. She wanted to become Vincent, who is the real, passionate, diligent painter who dares in front of the “you can’t do a thing” stare of a blank canvas. Yet Vincent killed himself in the end. Does it always have to be like that? Things in the distance, shining so brightly, when reached by us, lose their allure. It is the same with all her dreams. Even for Yeats – his circus animals, stilted boys, and burnished chariot – the ladder was gone when those masterful images became complete.
Sic transit gloria mundi – So passes the glory of the world. As the chariot parted the cheering crowds, a hired jester whispered in his triumphant ear. She decided it was important to remind herself so, that the heightened sensation of creativity flowing through her was just like the glory of the world, doomed to pass as soon as the moment was over. Now she felt that her moment was over, even her most cherished memory could not pull her out. But she had to believe in something and have faith in herself. All she could do was to quietly and patiently wait for the next glorious moment to come, a new chapter to unfold. Before the next triumphant moment, she shall lie down where all the ladders start for now.
