Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

As their relationship continued, he began to talk to her of a fictitious future life together, and she never objected. He poured into Elisa’s ears a story of stability, of family, and of progress. He never responded to her barbs, her criticisms of his prejudices, but sought to combat them by pure force of will, forcing upon her his vision, to make it her own. He never let himself be disturbed by her personal attacks, nor irritated by her indifference to his dream. By sheer effort Vincent made himself her willing whipping boy; he never complained of her cruelty, or her different habits and lifestyle. When she asked him about his life, he lied, when he asked her about her life, she responded in kind. Vincent never let her see that she hurt him or that he was desperate for her. He understood that his passion had given her the upper hand, and he took great care to appear as though he was not just interested in her for her sexuality. He never refused her, but he made sure to continue to hold her afterwards (even though she seemed to not see the purpose in it), and he did all he could to keep their sexual relations conventional, even though she was a willing participant in any fantasy and implored him on several occasions to explore his more deviant desires.

Neither of them ever mentioned Vincent’s slow change, although they were both conscious of it, he believed, quite vividly, that it was affecting her nevertheless: she appeared to become more confidential with him and more reliant on his presence. She would talk to him without cruelty and, once or twice, even appeared to gaze into his eyes with a loving look. Vincent was pleased with himself, although he couldn’t harness his own passion, he could contort it and seem less of a sexual tyrant. He knew he was the opposite of her former lover, and he believed that she appreciated him for it. No one, not even her with her foul mouth and deprecating attitude, would prefer violent paizogony, not when they had a gentle, careful, and serious partner.

“I like you when you want to make love to me,” she told him once, while they were waiting for seats at the theatre.

“I’m so pleased,” he replied.

“I don’t mind so much all of this foreplay, the nice dinners, the theatre tickets, the walks in the park, and all of these annoying acts, but I’d much rather we just spent our time in bed.”

She didn’t realize how her words, seemingly so benign, set back his plans nor how difficult it was for him to reply so nonchalantly. He had been fighting a battle against his desire for months, trying to seem to her a true and kind suitor, a serious man who very much loved her. To hear her say all she wanted him for was sex, it destroyed any notion of progress he thought he was making with her. Vincent didn’t know what else he could possibly do. Perhaps, she should be rebranded, perhaps it would help her out of her moral quagmire, perhaps it was truly the best thing for her. She was obviously of questionable moral fiber, she may never change, all his work and she was still only with him for her own purposes. The seeming headway he had made reduced to physical contact, she was still working against him, still seeking information from him. She was not with him by choice, this was her job, just as his was to watch her. He was silent.

* * *

“You see, my dear friend,” Joseph said, sitting on the stoop of the alleyway back entrance of a remarkably homogenized fashionable restaurant known simply as Top and feeding several small, slinky feral cats, one of which was part Persian, part Long-hair, with an orange coat, “it’s not so much a matter of beauty and harmony. We can liken it to a painting, if you will. My mother, not of course, my maternal progenitor, but rather my adopted caregiver, forgive me for my impertinence, I do not know feline, used to say I was page one hundred and fifty-six and page two hundred and twelve of Madam Bovary . Meaning of course — she was speaking of my eyeballs — that I am a construction of influences. Consider, my good friend, the notion of consciousness, for most people, death is a fearful thing because you lose consciousness, it dissipates into the void, who you are dies along with the flesh’s decay. But really, if you think about it, what is consciousness? Are we conscious of our liver, our heart, do we have any conscious control over blood flow or the synaptic flames in our brain? No, of course, I see you assenting — this is true logic. Our consciousness then, we must agree, is how we perceive ourselves based upon unreliable sources, other people, our impressions on how we behave, our fallible understanding of our own mannerisms, our little thoughts and emotions guided by outer influences. The more influences, the more fodder for this understanding we receive, the greater the consciousness. In other words, our access to ideas, information, art, all of these things, determines the expanse of personal awareness. You, for instance, have never read Tolstoy or Andrew Marvell, you’ve never seen a Cassatt or Raphael, you have never heard Vivaldi or Monk, and therefore, your own awareness is severely limited. Forgive me for saying so, but your ignorance, although seemingly blissful, is actually imprisonment. People, I should say, they fear death because they will lose their impressions of themselves. These they acquired based upon abstractions. It is not a fear of loss of blood, we do not fear the actual mechanism of our hearts stopping, we fear the outcome, that the energy will no longer flow to our brains and we shall expand exponentially into nothingness, no longer aware of the physical world. However, the way things are, most of these people have not had the influences to expand their consciousness beyond melodrama and what, in that, is really tragic? You see Theo, I do not embark on this mission as a saboteur, to proverbially throw a wrench in the great mechanism, no, no, my dear cat, I am an assassin, I’m afraid, the very most dangerous of the honorable, this is then, an act of hubris. How you ask, I expected it, how you ask can I leap off a bridge? Because I was fortunate enough to be given to idleness as a young man and to have been reared by an idle woman. We had nothing but our thoughts and our consciousness and we fed them like they were starving urchins. A death then, was nothing more than a loss of how I was perceived, a forcible ending to the engines of my anatomy, closing the book, if you will, on my own expansion, a return to ignorance. For does a child die if they pass before they have consciousness, before they can understand that they are perceived and that they should begin to acquire information? I think not, they go from whence they came. They do not know that they have lived, so how can they really die? If death is feared for stripping us of who we are, who we understand ourselves to be, it is nonexistent then to one who does not understand they exist. Our harmony then, makes us like innocent babes, stunting our ability to be conscious. We are as children, unaware of living so our lives are meaningless. We are the citizens of a content purgatory that does not allow us to consider what’s outside its confines. Like you, kitty cats, whom never expanded beyond the realm of simple needs, we are inflated beasts, only our needs multiplied without acquiring a true understanding of ourselves in order to fathom anything more. That is a tragedy, my dear friends, a manufactured mythology. As you may be aware, humanity has often times invented these control devices, these ways of suppressing wisdom and knowledge, these manacles of consciousness. This, I believe, is our theory of humours, the invented explanation for why we require control. We replace one fable with another, if it’s not Hippocrates’ than its Immunex’s, however both, equal in their intolerable grandeur of contortion, are essentially the same, they limit our ability to realize our existence and the innate value in it.