Sedartis sets no store by opinion:
‘If you want to know the giants, the masters, the geniuses of your age, look whom the critics disparage. You’ll find no surer guide to greatness than them: they dance on the ashes of the works their alleged wit has burnt to the ground, congratulating themselves on their deconstruction, but from these ashes rise the phoenices that will soar for future generations to emulate, admire, and study. Trust me, on this, for I know.’
What we project onto our heroes. How we prize them; how we invest in them. How we see our own inadequacies fade into nothing and our misdemeanours absolved: those sporting legends in their own lifetime, their career years elevated to seasons of gods. Who are we then, without them. Why would we not heap fortunes upon them for the privilege of watching them chasing a ball? Why would we not conspire to see in one artist’s work all our selves reflected, while in another’s we discern nothing and resent being confronted with our own shadows, to the point of hatred? We are so simple, when it comes to our primaeval responses and, yes, so complex; so light, so effervescent, so intricate, so delicate and delicious, and then again at a stroke so basic. So instinctive, so brute.
I let Sedartis understand that I don’t know what he’s talking about.
‘No matter,’ he shrugs, in his calm, forever reassuring and slightly annoying because also so-sure-of-himself manner, ‘it will all make sense.’
‘It will?’
‘It will. Liberate yourself from the urge to understand, within your head, immediately. That may seem, to you, sophisticated: it is not. Not at the level you will want to attain. Allow yourself to be subsumed into the thing around, within and through you. You will begin to sense your truths and untruths and their inbetweens in a whole different way.’
Sedartis to me seems like the philosopher from a different world who in his spare time drives a minicab in the towns I happen to visit. There is no other explanation. I would book him through an app if I had to, but he sits next to me, whenever I’m on a train. Sometimes—rarely—when I’m on a bench or at a cafe, waiting for a friend. Never when I’m having a drink. Is Sedartis only of the unadulterated mind?
What we want to see in ourselves we see in others, and vice versa. We need these icons, these exponents, these majestic figures, even though we don’t know who they are. And so we make them. Of whomsoever offers themselves up. We sacrifice them to our hunger for existence: build them up, tear them down, abuse them on the way, pretend to love them, really love them. Want to be them; glad not to be them, but feeling as if we were, because we know, deep down, their invention is monstrous. How strange, and, yes, how elated.
I separate myself from my intention and begin to float. That feels lovely. Nary a care in the world. Compos mentis and completely lost. In that agreeable way. Sedartis smiles at me and takes his leave, for the time being only. I know he’ll be back and tell me more. I just know.
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EDEN by FREI 