Transcendently Distasteful Realities
After deep reflection and introspection, he finally concluded that he did not really believe in anyone, not even in himself. As long as interests coincided, loyalty was a possibility albeit not a certainty, but once they clashed, regardless of shared interests, loyalty evaporated into hazy rationalizations. And that made sense.
That was logical. No one was safely reliable. No one could always be counted on. Love made no difference, it was, by its nature, always potentially ephemeral and always frailly ethereal. And when dissipated, love all too frequently morphed into something very negative, something akin to hate or at best, disdain.
Disquieting? Of course. Sad? Terribly. But to expect otherwise was to delude oneself, something most of us did frequently, indeed, almost always. When we find reality discomfiting, we usually ignore it and delve into our own personal fantasies, … and not the fun kind.
There were people he could almost count on but he admitted to himself that “almost” was a positivist way of presenting a negative, and dangerously so. And it applied to himself as much as to anyone, and not just with respect to others, it applied to him in his roles with himself as well. How strange.
It applied to us as individuals but also to us as collectives which explained much of history, not the fake narrative Pablum we’re taught and force fed daily, but the reality of what’s been and why.
He wondered if this day, a day where realism seemed ascendant, was a very good day, or a very bad day, and the answer was a confusingly emphatic: “yes”!
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Originally published at http://guillermocalvo.com on March 10, 2024.
