Taming

Alas, friends, today I awoke with a headache between my ears! Then I looked out my window and saw the world all etched in gray and melancholly! I quite like the rain, though today, it merely drizzles with an indecisiveness that aggrieves me. I may admire it through the thinnest pane, and listen to the gentle music of its tumult upon multiforms. But may I confess my partiality for extremes? I would rather be soaked than splashed. All of life overtake me, or else in purgatory, let me slumber between sheets of too-soft satin!

Though moderation is humanity’s hallmark, yet I wish for the edge! Life is a concentrated formula. All the better, we say, for the goodness of our dilutions. We are as a milk upon the land. Our passing is smooth and sweet.     

My fellow humans, do I misspeak, or is ours the veriest of mollifying touches? We come upon this world, doctors, with our hands ever ready at a cabinet of palliatives. Our patient is diseased Nature, whose symptom is hysteria. All the day long, and the livelong night, she cries an agony of chaos and abandonment. She heaves with unchecked emotion, and in fits of exuberance, she is unkept by even a moment’s soundness. We select from our store, the drug “Civility”, which is known above all else, to calm. We apply it generously, wherever her anguish is most. And at length, she dreams. Her eyes grow filmy, and her lips quiver, as with a word unspoken. While she sleeps, we whisk about her face until it is properly that of a lady. We comb her fearsome tresses, and relieve her of trimmings that terrify good taste. Now we dress her in hems and ruffles, and sharp-heeled shoes. When the last of sleepy visions has passed from her eyes, she will gaze in a mirror, beholder of an image she never thought possible. But how prettily she makes up! And she will thank us most graciously for our patience and dedication. And while our praise is not undeserved, yet we will accept it with humility.

But something is wrong! The lady comes to with a start! Her eyes are the untrained wilds of madness. She kicks off her shoes, and makes flurries of ruffles. She tears at her hair, as if searching to find a poison root. Long before she gazes upon her made-up reflection, she has shattered the glass by the force of her wailing. What have we to do, but dose her once more, and once more, and once more. Long-term side effects aside, sooner or later, we shall succeed with the lady in our care. Now, at least, she does not spit back our medicines. We call that progress, and it is the foundation of our ascendancy.

But I ask you, friends, at what cost do we civilize Nature? Are we not ourselves, that raven-eyed nature and the doctor who tames? Ours, too, is a nature in contradiction.