—a brief ode to Magister Ludi and the Game
Sometimes, I want nothing more than to read;
to clear my mind, to surrender to the vision
and the dream of words written, and, now long gone.
“What could it be,
that so prevents me?”
The tumult, distraction, and excess of our age
seem in part to blame.
The abundance in knowledge in wasteful excess:
of things, of happenings, and of times moved on,
put us in quite the peculiar and difficult position—
unique to our time.
The highest feat it seems now-a-days,
comes from our choices in negation:
“Of what will you abstain?”
I find it to be quite healthy—lo, the prerequisite to health!
—abstaining from the scurry, the fury, the worry of our time,
by retreating into thy self and thine life.
Not of pure and selfish desire,
but of rapture in some irreplaceably prized leisure-time;
dazzling us, and our mind’s eye.
Of my highest prize, there is no doubt:
the memory of a day disappearing in-to a good book,
as they once did when I was a kid.
Alas, the tide of time is relentless, and,
I have lost this ready capacity of sitting just so,
immersed in the words and the worlds that I read; complete.
Of late however, blessed by God,
I have had little trouble reentering
that magic literary bubble.
Be it the words, the story, the meaning, the man,
or all altogether—I cannot resist any return visit that I can,
unplanned, to the land of Castalia:
a most welcome phantasma.
Our primitivity is evident
when seen through the lens of this place, it seems;
for there we are known, as the feuilleton.
This phantasmic place, no doubt, and in no special haste,
renews in my immersion a long-lost child-mind of mine; back to when I was able to forget my self,
and to chase a papillon
simply, because.
Now, again.
All in thanks to these four hundred pages plus,
turning, turning on.
In our world of apparent void and point-less noise,
Castalia is, to make it abundantly clear:
A Welcome—
and Joyous
—Phantasm.