Mortifying Mona Lisa. i flattery dripping flirt.

by gideon chumo
(kenya)

i. flattery dripping flirt!

‘Many times I have found myself on the Road to Damascus; many times I have been struck down and changed by the miraculous voice.’ In the beginning were those words. Those words were with my Facebook Profile. Those words were my Status Update.

Those words became my sentence, and ensnared me into a quest in a literary Damascus only to be struck down many a time like Paul, but unlike the Good old Roman bachelor, a romantic escapade was the reason why I was criss-crossing this lonely stretch. The expedition was as melodramatic as my update that day—if you had cared to notice—but with scandals overtaking me, announcing me a public enemy—to be despised by the majority—one of the few times in my life when I became fleetingly important for this to happen to me.

Since I juggle with words, many a doubting Thomas would put their best foot forward to create an impression that my stories are only sophisticated scheme of saying something simple, that fiction is a distraction in which writers obscure their semantics under artillery of words. At this, let’s quite gladly impose a short-term curfew of disbelief that amounts to pedestrian loyalty. Just suspend for a moment your poetic faith for you don’t need a miraculous voice to stop hunting with cupid arrows—or in my case, haunted—if a story would do the same trick.

May be stories are illusory stuff et al, or related, stuff that came to pass, in real life or in factual imaginings and dreams. But to presume that unusual events are the only truths, is a stain of misleading cupidity, as Hamlet said, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt in your philosophy.’ Peripheral phenomena encompass their own restricted reality, but there are superior realities beyond, and occasionally, spotted enigmatically in the trances of ordinary men, but more manifestly in the revelations of poets, writers, sages, and prophets.

From a juggler to a prophet—much for a noble title—that compels me to stand in moral Ararat and prophesise through my writing instead of just locking up these concerns in the custody of my mind. Let me digress a little—I assure you these ramblings bring as much boredom to me as it does to you—we’ll return to the story for we haven’t left home yet. A prophet is a fish that won’t keep his mouth shut and ends up in somebody’s throat even if its mouth is smelly like a king’s. A king would say ‘the buck stops here’ while words start with the writer.

If you won’t give a ‘damn’ for stories—I’d understand—the human race is full of self-appointed nobility and charlatans who take advantage of their own insignificance to imagine the earliest illustrious name that pop into their thick skull. But take it from me, you see, keeping quiet over some issue doesn’t work. Even for mortals like you, when you have a stalemate issue decaying in your thick skull or obscuring your mind's eye, laws of silence won’t work, that is similar to putting up the shutters and locking the door in a house on fire in anticipation that you’d stop thinking that the house is smouldering. Silence about an intriguing idea—whose time has come—amplifies it. It nurtures and cultivates steadily in silence, becoming malevolent like the still waters that run in bottomless depths.

In fact, quietness in itself is the grandma of remorse. She is a badge of infamy. Silence borders intimately with scandal as it is done in secret ‘inquititude’. That’s what our society is full of—mortified folks! Guilty individuals! People full of buried skeletons, full of gnawing pangs of conscience, afraid that their transgressions and misdemeanours will pave the way to hidden scruples and depraved infatuation of the past. People who have hefty personality enticements and refinements, but have nose-dived deep, however, into ghastly tendency to silence, having, as GBS explained once, whispered everything that they had to yell before they were thirty.

Back to the story—and I have to warn you again to expect more digressions in the future—because as a travelling man in this lonely terrain, my company is my own thoughts. Besides, I am going to write without airs, raw and unedited content from the heart. And every such writing, envisaged and written with vehemence, is a story of the author, not of the reader. You are simply the slip-up, the circumstance. It is not they who are exposed by the writer who, on the pages of the book, makes themselves unwrapped. The raison d'être in hesitating to go straight into the story is that I’m afraid that I will let you see in it, the under wraps and dirty garments of my own soul. I don’t like pitting myself against stories nor in scenes except on the shielded comfort zone of the theatre—where you can visibly see my plastic masquerade.

Back on the Road to Damascus—and take heed the thundering embrace of lightning anytime now—before I miscarried or was branded a hated scandalmonger by a group of other gifted scandalmongers, I had never chewed words, even as a talented wordmonger, nor used them as if they were debasing works of a cynical miser. I drip with fatty poisoned misanthropy, yes, but when these women descended on my Facebook Status Update like the subtle serpent of disbelief and transgression that emerged out of the blissful Garden of Eden, I was as guilty as charged as Adam.

Words from lips of flattery plotted successfully and I was undone; words beguiled a man who had summed up and assessed the civilisation of centuries in his mind. A man who discerned that all pretty girls were a trap, a pretty trap, and admonished other men to expect them to be. I never suspected their laid snare until it was too late and I was deep inside their disposable WC. They knew I hated all their lot. It was obvious from reading my countless stories that I hated the female characters instinctively and detested them by intuition. My leading bigotries and chauvinist heroes that I fashioned in my stories frequently intimated to the ‘weaker sex’ the remarkable rebuffs in the poetry of Jesus; ‘woman, what have I to do with thee?’ and disparaged them impetuously at every prospect, reflecting that possibly even God Himself hadn’t been pleased with the meticulous bit of labour!

You get a lucid impression from Van Gogh’s painting of that child made twelve times unclean. Or from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa’s bald-faced plastic smile. For me, she lured and ensnared the first man and still carry on her spellbinding craft—a pathetic mortal, treacherous, strangely disconcerting. What more? Her demonic fecund body camouflages nothing but a flirt with an ambushing soul. In my own estimation, God must have created her only to coax man and entice him. That’s why man had no better option in safeguarding himself but advance her with stealthy vigilance—if he were constantly terrified of surprise attacks.

Her body is, in fact, even created like a trap, what with her arms unmitigated and her lips parted for man? I am lenient only to old grandmothers, made innocuous by their invariable retiring senility and burdened incessantly by constant childbirths and childrearing. But still watch out because I am aware that, within their hearts, are humbled serpents reclining in the rock bottom of their abashed bodies—those tigresses so docile—is that eternal yearning in my mother, my sister or my aunt, which still blush sexually for me even if we are related by blood like Oedipus to her mother. I feel it in their alluring gaze—ever present innuendo in their eye than that of my father, my brother or my uncle—and that makes my blood boil because it is still woman’s love, carnal love. I experience it—this depraved craving—even in their submissiveness, in the charm of their chatty-chatty mouths, in their inferior eyes, and in their crocodile tears when I repulse them boorishly.

But when it comes to flattery and smooth talk, the shrewdest of men are the most easily betrayed, and anyone can be swayed to gulp down anything, even if it’s incongruous and outrageous, as long as it is flavoured with acclamation. Such experience may scratch one’s honour, but if one has need of people, one must be diplomatically immunised to have room for them, and if there’s no way of attaining support, well, then, the irresponsibility lies more with the flatterers than with those who want to be flattered. I think that is the only way I can explain and justify how I—an assorted, extensively read, urbane academic, who had nurtured and cultivated his brains with many philosophical droppings—could find myself beguiled by these self-same lesser creatures of romance and poetry. Listen to the wisdom of my friend Berta;

“I am woman,
I am spirit,
I am me.
I am the scapegoat for society.
I am the flesh for the vulture,
That devours the death of my culture.
I am the darkness that embraces the night.
I am the nightmare that brings you fright.
I am the gypsy upon life’s path.
I am the cauldron to men’s wrath.
I am the roar of the ocean’s tide.
I am the poet with pride.
I am the passion of a burning fire.
I am the whore you desire.
I am this and so much more.
I am a divine creation at eternity’s shore.”

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http://myroundsquare.blogspot.com/2009/11/road-to-damascus-imaiden-voyage-of.html