Agna and the merman
This story has been told many a-times and in many a-ways, and the echoes of eternity strike kindly with each telling; but no Agnete resembles my Agna. No Agnete has the incommensurable depth, and no sound resembles the chord of this particular telling of Agna’s heart. Likewise, many a merman has been told us before, and many have rode the tide of eternity, but none such as this.
Agna is no innocent woman; Agna’s birth says so. Her bosom is not soft, her cheek’s are not rosy, her smile is not effortless, her heart is not flowing and her love … her love… ah… her love… is not. Agna is a victima ultima of her birth, cursed with her very existence, so she is by all means not innocent. Guilt flows from her heart and sends a green current that effortlessly distorts her vision and disorients her way; it smudges her life. Her life’s gait is one of clumsiness, betraying an awful attempt at care and protection; a self-defence that’s enough cause for a tear from the naturally and painfully sense-tive. Agna has never known happiness, her happiness has been an absence of pain. A happiness that is nothing but a wearisome gaze, a sigh of exhaustion. Her soul is a shipwreck, a shipwreck that awaits rescue. Oh, how hard it is to see her in the fog that is her life, it takes no average man to see this, it takes a super-human to harbour the eyes refined enough for seeing her in the fog. Her shipwrecked soul is so close to oblivion, she can taste the darkness, she can smell it and feel its depth approaching. The only thing holding on to her, or maybe she holds on to it, is the anchor she has dropped on her shipwreck to stop it being taken away, swept clean by the eternal tides. Her hope is to not be swept away by the darkness, her hope is her fear of oblivion.
Agna is not innocent. Yet, no-one has the refinement to sense this, no-one can feel this – and who blames them? She is well-educated in the world. Her smile echoes not a formidable strain, a hard work, a sweaty brow that has taken many years of service in the social battlefield to bring home the fruits, the honey, the spoils of what is known to some as deception, as appearance. It is flawless. An awe-striking and elegant gait; nothing sexual in it whatsoever, only a tender feeling of care and openness to the world. A supposed fervency of exploration, a love for charity, a sense of propriety, blooming, ladylike and almost motherly – the perfect masquerade. She knows man. Man, that creature that can’t, try as he might, escape himself, leave his condition like his seed leaves him. Man, the creature that cages himself in order to un-cage himself, and she knows this. She knows that man yearns for the wild, yearns for the appearance of the seed. Man, the insatiate creature that is perfectly happy with his insatiate ways, even plays to the world he’s created, dances to the tune, just to amplify his caging. The creature open fully to his desires, open in order to open, caging in order to free. Man lives for his desires, and desires that for which he lives. She knows, she is wise, she can make any man her own. Her fertile apparel would be enough, but she’s stronger and more capable than that. Perhaps one of man’s biggest temptations is that he yearns to show his capacity, to make it burst forth per analogiam. Indeed, it would seem that woman lives in a man’s world.
I repeat, who has the refinement to see this? Who is able to bring out from the depths the conditions wherefrom such a plant as Agna grows? What manner of dirt and hidden minerals swarm around mixed with the water in the soil wherefrom this appearance sprouts? Ah, how tiny and shallow, like the froth at the end of a wave, is her exterior – how concealing this motherly demeanour is. To the animal in man she appears fertile, to the man in man, and how rare is such a man, she is a decaying weed feigning fertility to be consumed, to be impregnated such that her life would not be in vain. The last instinct in her body, doesn’t maintain her, or her body, but wishes to reproduce itself and try again, for her body borders its limit, it is decaying. She feigns fertility. This is the body’s last stand. This animosity is its last battle. The body can feign strength in order to scare, but it can also feign abundance in order to gather. But, lo and behold, this shows – it shows! Allow me to bring this out for you, for it’s all I can do, all that is within me – because soon enough I too will be consumed by her green current.
The merman is no seducer and enticer of the depths. He is no creature with a smile that hides the intentions of nothingness, the intentions of death. There is no such thing to be found anywhere, it is but an illusion. No, no, do not let his appearance fascinate you in this way. There is no such thing. The merman is himself a proud creature, but also a creature of great torment, much like her. The centre of his chest resonates a pulsating pride, a self-sufficiency and togetherness, coupled with a poise and apparel, which just like her, makes him desirable. His very own last stand. The merman, a broken creature, a shipwreck that’s exposed to preying on women. This is his apparel, the predator, the creature of darkness. He is the creature of soft, sweet words, a piercing emerald glance, subtly raised eyebrows and a tone of voice that disarms Hera herself. He can have any woman he wants, this has been the spoils of his very own service. A genius of the mood, ah, what strength he has over a mood, over an atmosphere – and therein lays his power, woman knows such power only too well. How earnestly she courts such power; she courts and envies.
The merman, the evil man, the devil incarnate. The man that can make any woman’s legs turn momentarily goat-like; like the devil’s own. The creature of decadence with an insatiable hunger. Woman’s fear, but likewise woman’s secret yearning, for woman wishes to be impregnated – and how she lies to herself, how she pretends to love him and attempt to bring out the ‘good’ in him. Woman, to him, the parallel creature of decadence like himself, the insatiate creature, the being that courts and flirts with nihilism but in the process calls it love. The being that must hate before it can love, the backward creature, the creature of the backyard. There is indeed only one cure to woman, only one way out of this flirtation: a child, pregnancy. A child is the only thing that seduces a woman, her hope and fear of oblivion appears in this child. She may place layers upon layers on herself, words upon words, lies upon lies to try and conceal this, to run away from this awareness, from this simple fact – for that is all us humans can do once we find the truth, we run away from it, we wish we never knew. We pretend as if we never knew, as if it never happened! They call it repression amongst other words. Consciousness is the illness of life. Life’s little bit on the side that is threatening life itself. But, just like man cannot conceal his insatiable desire to impregnate every woman that strikes his fancy, so is she not able to conceal her insatiable need to be impregnated. The merman knows this, he knows, he feels this limit, he shakes hands with it and then appears to use it.
Just like Agna however, my merman too has an anchor of hope, so he is not a creature of darkness entirely. But what hope? What is this hope that these two have? Agna wants to come home from her shipwrecked soul, to be rescued. What rescue is there for Agna, other than pregnancy or something equivalent? – for there are many forms of pregnancy. What then is the merman’s rescue? It’s simple, the merman’s hope lays in the cage. The merman’s hope is freedom in and of itself, the kind of freedom that does not need an escape from a cage to feel itself free, and just like her, he suffers from guilt, he smudges his life with guilt. Just like her, guilt is at the centre of his chest. Guilt is his birth. The more he learns of the world, reads the world like a book with his glasses of guilt, glasses that have gone far beyond responsibility, the more he feels the need to cage himself. Each time wishing to make his imprisonment harder so that his freedom may taste just that little bit better, and the biggest imprisonment for him is pregnancy. What? Is it then possible that after all, man lives and loves, above all else, to live in a woman’s world? Man impregnates in order to cage himself and free himself. Woman is impregnated in order to escape from her fear of oblivion.
The man that doesn’t need (but wants) to impregnate is free of necessity.
The woman that doesn’t need (but wants) to be impregnated is the shinning beam that pierces through oblivion.
But is this all that can be said of my merman and Agna? Surely my contribution to the story of Agnete and the merman doesn’t end like this, with an unravelling of their depths? Do you expect me to give us a light, a way out of this apparent baseness, this ugly bedrock of living in the world, these lies we seem to be addicted to like poison which numbs our pain but at the same time drains our energies, and the body itself, slowly? The lies that our body needs to force on itself in order to compete with consciousness? The things it does, the thoughts that our body has to fathom in order to stop consciousness from destroying us and itself completely, in order for the body to get a say in this thing we call living? Consciousness, this brain-organ and nothing more, nothing special, must believe in its special character, for how else will it maintain control of the body? How else would it remain superior and accumulate all the energies necessary for this superiority?
If consciousness had its way, we’d all be dead. Nobody lives because of consciousness and its strength, but because of the body and its impulses.
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