Many words on Siri and Merin
Hello again.
As some of you probably know, the best story that I have ever read and my model of beauty (here I don't know the right word to render the Russian "эталон красоты") is the sixth tale of Dan Simmons's "Hyperion", "Remembering Siri".
In this entry I want to tell what in this tale makes the deepest strings in my heart tremble.
Warning! Spoilers. I tried to insert 'cuts' and 'spoilers' but the big gaps between paragraphs are lost. This text is too important for me to let this happen. So, please, bear the full text.
For twelve years this story was for me mostly about Siri and time, and consciously living through time. The ultimate beauty for me is cherishing every little moment of limited time while being fully aware of how much or little time there is for you.
To love a person and to be with him six times during a life. To wait for ten-eleven years for a reunion - several days.
I think, I can imagine how this waiting feels.
At first the deafening silence falls. A world without. And you walk and listen and try to immerse yourself in some routine just to get the hands and the head busy. Sometimes you look up from what you are doing and try to listen to the silence. After several attempts you actually find out that the world is not silent, it's just the world. Turning and continuing.
And you think you'll be okay. You get back to your life.
This "okay" lasts for, I'd say, 2/5 of the whole time. Then the time stops and you face the eternity of never coming back. For you one month or one year are the same. It's endless and empty. I've written "one month and one year are the same' because I remember this feeling very clearly but now as I'm outside this feeling these words sound off, not likely to be truth. Still they were.
If you are lucky, some time later a moment of clarity comes. "Don't be so self-centered". And you finally can greet and embrace the fact that it's not only your time but also time for the person you are waiting for, for beautiful things to happen to this person. And you start respecting this time.
At some moment, I'd say, 1/6 till the end, the time starts spinning more and more quickly, you start to gain speed. It's like going down a slope, preparing for a... ski-jump.
As the waiting is closing, and what is left is relatively nothing compared to the painful infinity, you feel this tight and happy feeling in your chest, and you just wait for a bit more, counting days and hours.
And the last minutes of waiting, when you know that any moment you can face the person you were waiting for, you turn very attentive and try to remember everything to the smallest detail. Actually you even want to stop the time on the verge of meeting. You are relaxed and anticipating and you feel good and you say to yourself that you did great.
And then you see him (if we make these suggestions about Siri who is definitely a she).
You think that this moment only is worth all the waiting. You think that this moment is enough. Just to see this person, without any hello, for a brief moment - it can all end here and now. You can wait for another eternity for one more glimpse. But then you realize that you have more than one glimpse. Actually, you have time. And you get...
euphoric, ecstatic, furiously happy.
Not for long.
Then the despair comes: you have waited for ten years and you have only a few days with. This time won't be enough even to update on your personal history. You won't have time to do all the things you longed for, you dreamed of for ten long years. Beginning something will be fruitless because of too little time to do something big and beautiful together. You can conceive a child, though. A child who will never know his father.
Somewhen amidst this despair you suddenly relax. You don't have time for anything big, you don't have any future - you have the eternal now. Moments with a person without any personal history, just someone whose being you love. A new kind of eternity. At the same time you are fully aware that it will end but you concentrate on fully living through each and every moment of this miracle of being together. And you relax and just live.
Close to the end the time is again fastening like the sand in a sand watch, it seems, is falling faster when there is not much left. And you are full like a vase of peonies with memories of being together you've absorbed every detail you could notice, you are full of voice, smell, touch, presence.
Then you part and the silence falls. And the cycle repeats.
I don't know anything more beautiful than such a living through limited time with ultimate awareness and consciousness.
And I was thrilled and deeply grateful to have tried it in my life. An unbelievable miracle.
I never looked deeply into Merin. My Faraway Friend asked me two questions about Merin, 1) why Merin took upon himself the leadership in the Siri uprising though he was aware of its potential failure, 2) why did Merin come back to Siri though it was always shocking and painful for him?
I didn't have good answers to these questions. I never thought much about Merin.
Till today.
The most painful in this, I think, is the gap.
Merin continued himself. Five years passed for him while sixty five years passed for Siri. Between the reunions he had about nine months of ship duties and all the rest time he spent in cryogenic fugue. I believe, you don't change much on a spaceship, even during nine months. Merin was more or less himself, he continued himself. In Siri he always saw a revolution happened. Every time he met her and saw the entirely changed system of values, beliefs and ideals. Different appearance, different everything. A complete stranger. Maybe the eyes look a bit familiar. The abyss between two people, the gap of living and experience, which is getting bigger with every reunion.
Imagine that you wanted to return to someone waiting for you but you see this person coming to meet you and realize that this is someone innerly different. You thought that you had someone to return to but that person is gone. You loved someone who is gone now. Even if you think that you know the person deeply in your heart the part that you have known feels unreachable.
You are terrified to the core: the person you knew from your memory was warm, and shining, and close, intimate, but now you feel as if she is hard and unfamiliar and unreachably distant, alive to everyone else but you.
You know the old rules that you have worked out together during the last time but your partner is so brand new that she doesn't want to keep these rules. You try old words but the person speaks new personal language now and you miss some important sense in what she is saying because you simply don't know the context. You think that you know how to live your life but this person has already some more powerful technics, the ones which you haven't heard of. You don't know what to try: you are afraid to be rejected and ridiculed by someone who lived ten years of full and engaged life while you served your monotonous days on a spaceship.
The best things you know are outdated. You try to grow up quickly, just to keep up with what she is saying and then you feel deep shame for that insentient being you were five minutes ago or during the last reunion. You want to take back all the childish words you said and you feel that you are still the same child comparing to the person who lived a meaningful decade. And you'll never ever catch up.
It's excruciating.
But you want to communicate and thus you start rediscovering a person, you try to invest into the relationship, to learn a lot, not to feel so painfully out of time, outdated.
You'll never have time for this. You catch a glimpse of the new person and then you are gone.
The next time it repeats. The best things that you have rediscovered are long expired and outdated.
You have no one to return to.
If Siri is beauty then Merin is pain. One can not be without the other.
It's balanced. The person who stays should have more time and experience than the person who is away. If it is an evolution for the traveler and the revolution for the one who waits it's okay.
But if it is a revolution for the traveler and an evolution for the one who waits...
The travelers just don't come back.