Melancholy

I don’t know who said this, “Life is a comedy for the one who thinks and a tragedy for the one who feels.” It must be a tragicomedy for me, but I don’t know why I have not yet felt its comedy.

Pain it is called, that which has enfolded me. I have dragged myself all the long, all these years, holding tight to my heart, keeping it way from the threat of obduracy. I polish it every day with music with letters. All the social forces seem to be commanded to target this puny heart of mine which looks sexy to them. I feel I am satiated with pain; they say you cry when you suffer from pain, but alas, not even a drop of tear.

Is there any where I can fly to? Even if I find solace in the arms of these Concertos and Sonatas or this very oboe, still in the background I hear a neighbor woman say, “Thanks goodness they caught him, he had gone too far, my son. I was afraid I had to collect his body someday.” These stories and the like have been told and narrated again and again by many, writers and laymen, but I won’t let myself be inured to them, never. I can die many times a day, and suffer, and break, and despair, but I cannot be obdurate, no, that I will not allow.

If I were a recluse in a village near Birjand, does it prove me a weak man, a coward, socially stunted? There I know I’ll live a comic life, I’ll just hear the bursting of the water bubbles in my soot-covered kettle, the hissing of its ever-boiling contents, the funny, backbiting, termagant living below, and other innumerable small delights which I prefer to the bigger ones in a city…

Would that they had let me alone!

Life Force! I always sense its antique, hirsute push on my frail back…and I feel the grim looks of the strangers as they look on a solitary bachelor, and the scolding ones of my parents and other ones as they look at their supposedly wretched son who has is so fragile. For them fragility, for myself and those like me, it is feeling.

I wonder how this Second Movement of the Seven sucks my agonies, it succeeds. Where the agony goes then? When you tell your agonized heart to a friend, part of it is discharged, but it is not thrust back to the world, it goes straightly into the heart of your friend. I believe the eyes, like this music, suck others’ pains and soothe the other’s pains.

But, where do you keep, sweet music, those agonies of mine you pull out? I know! You keep them in you, that is why every time I listen to you, you sound different. Poor one! You have the bundled tears of all Mohsens stored in you…