Slight Reading
After Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men
I saw it for myself, the possibility of where these words may take us. It may take us offshore, it may take us to the unknown, it may take us to this blinding fidelity it renders us speechless before the divine. To be sublime is to sublimate all these desires and “dress them in warm clothes again”, wherein what happens next is neither life nor fiction but a kind of beauty almost akin to poetry.
Of where these words may take you, of where these worlds may make your words, of where these cacophony of noises may reach you in the silence of my beating heart from afar— I have loved you with all my might and I am unashamed of it; stubborn with it, even. For I know what is rare and what is commonplace, for I know what is genuine from what is mere illusion, for I know where these words would take me— hopefully— through you.
I do not want these worldly possessions in the picture. And besides, these images— these perfidious images of perfection— these are all a sham. For what is a truer love than recognizing oneself in the Other bereft of these shattered mirrors?
The truth is I have been optimistic, the truth is I remained optimistic, and the cruel truth is that optimism took me to places wherein I left my body and returned as a ghost. As if a ghostly archive, all memories of the past erased; only yearning for an affection that is yet to come; of benevolent hands clasped together in silence, be it in the presence of the divine or the surrender to the natural order of chaos.
Thus, we must believe in the divine for it is the only order that we are pre-ordained in the midst of all this chaos. All these meanderings, these ramblings, only meaning to say that I have loved you, that I have dared love you, and everything proceeding that is catastrophe.