Escaping the Byron in Me: The Trials of Self-Control

 

Self-control is a leash I keep chewing through. It is a fortress made of wet sand, collapsing the moment I lean against it. There are days when I believe in discipline, in measured restraint, in the noble architecture of a well-ordered life. Then there are days when I watch myself unravel with something between amusement and horror, as if I were both the reckless protagonist and the regretful narrator of my own undoing.

Byron would understand. He, that half-demonic, half-divine embodiment of appetite, lived as though restraint were an insult to the human condition. “I am so changeable,” he wrote, “being everything by turns and nothing long.” He devoured pleasure and let consequence snap at his heels. Self-denial was a game he refused to play, a cage he rattled with laughter. He is my foil — the specter of indulgence I wrestle with, the brilliant ruin I could become if I let myself slip.

But there is another side to it. To resist is to assert will over chaos, to refuse the easy ecstasies that dissolve into regret. To escape the Byron in me is to chase something harder, sharper, something forged in difficulty rather than surrendered to desire. It is choosing silence over a sharp remark, patience over impulsivity, discipline over surrender. It is saying no when every cell in my body is screaming yes. It is suffering now for the sake of something better, something stronger.

And yet, I wonder — does too much self-control risk making me a shadow of myself? There is a fire in recklessness, a poetry in giving in, that discipline can sometimes smother. Byron’s ghost lingers, reminding me that an unchecked life burns bright, even if it burns out. But I am not Byron. I refuse to be. I will not let indulgence dictate my story. The leash tightens. The fortress holds.

Wednesday, March 26th - #6

 

Wednesday, March 26th - #5

 

Wednesday, March 26th - #4

 

Wednesday, March 26th - #3 (Pond)

 

Wednesday, March 26th - #2

 

Wednesday, March 26th - #1

 

Trials and Tribulations of Learning Keyboard

 

Learning the keyboard is an exercise in frustration and fleeting triumph, a cycle of false starts, awkward fingerings, and brief, shining moments of clarity before entropy sets in again. The keys stretch before you like a field of possibilities, each one capable of harmony or dissonance, yet your hands — stiff, rebellious— refuse to cooperate. You tell yourself it’s only a matter of practice, but practice itself becomes a kind of existential quagmire, a purgatorial loop of repetition that sometimes feels closer to punishment than progress.

LCD Soundsystem’s Tribulations captures this experience with uncanny precision, though it speaks of heartbreak rather than hand-cramping scales. “Everybody makes mistakes,” James Murphy wails over pulsing, mechanical beats, a mantra that could well serve as the internal monologue of any fledgling pianist. There’s something almost cruelly apt in its relentless, driving rhythm—much like the metronome ticking away as you struggle to land a chord progression smoothly. The song is about cycles, about being trapped in a loop, about making the same mistakes over and over again but pushing forward nonetheless. What is learning an instrument if not exactly that?

The moment you think you’ve grasped something — an arpeggio, a syncopated groove — it dissolves, leaving you stranded in an uncanny valley. Your left hand betrays your right. Your timing, so steady in isolation, falls apart when you try to integrate it into an actual song. It’s like Murphy’s refrain: “You can shake it off, or you can go blind.” You either push through the failures, the stiffness, the maddeningly slow progress, or you let the instrument gather dust, resigning yourself to the silence of surrender.

And yet, buried beneath the exhaustion, there’s something else — an exhilaration, an almost illicit joy when a chord rings out cleanly, when muscle memory overrides self-doubt, when you stop thinking and simply play. The song Tribulations itself is a paradox — restless but hypnotic, full of lament but undeniably danceable. And so is learning the keyboard. It is an ordeal, yes, but one infused with the potential for transcendence. Keep at it long enough, and the tribulations become something else: a rhythm, a song, a kind of electricity in your hands.

The Sorceress and the Gaze

 

John William Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus (1891) is a painting steeped in paradox: it is at once alluring and ominous, classical yet Pre-Raphaelite, deeply mythological yet disarmingly modern in its psychology. A work of enchantment in both subject and execution, it captures the moment of temptation, the instant before metamorphosis, when power is held in suspension, just before it takes its final, irreversible shape. Waterhouse, ever the conjurer of doomed heroines and liminal enchantresses, renders Circe not merely as the seductress of Homeric tradition but as something more complex—an embodiment of control and vulnerability, dominance and invitation.

Waterhouse’s Circe is not the static, detached sorceress of earlier representations. The Renaissance and Baroque painters, from Dosso Dossi to Salvator Rosa, had often depicted her as a distant enchantress, surrounded by an atmosphere of supernatural menace. Waterhouse, in contrast, brings her into startling immediacy. She does not recline in Olympian grandeur, nor does she melt into the recesses of a dimly lit chamber. Instead, she meets the viewer’s gaze directly, challenging, almost daring, both Odysseus and us to drink from her cup. This is no passive femme fatale, but a woman whose power is actively wielded—concentrated in the liquid she offers, in the hand that extends it, and in the unwavering stare that holds the entire composition in its thrall.

The setting, too, is telling. Waterhouse places Circe in a richly adorned, secluded chamber, but the space is subtly unstable. The mirror behind her reflects an open sea, evoking the world beyond—Odysseus’ world, the world of men, of war, of epic struggle. Yet the mirror’s reflection is distorted, bending reality, as if seen through the haze of magic. Circe’s lair is both a sanctuary and a trap, a space of sensuality and danger, its surfaces gleaming with a hypnotic sheen that speaks to the intoxicating nature of her power. Her throne, carved with serpentine figures, reinforces this duality—she is both queen and predator, poised on the edge of transformation.

And then there is the pig. Waterhouse does not allow us to forget the fate of Circe’s victims. The swine that stands at her feet, staring up in helpless recognition, is not a mere decorative element, nor a pastoral touch drawn from Homer’s account. It is a grotesque reminder of what is at stake. The presence of the pig transforms the painting from a scene of mere seduction into something darker: this is not just an invitation but a moment of judgment. Will Odysseus succumb, like his men before him, or will he resist? The tension is palpable, unresolved, locked in the stillness of a choice yet to be made.

Waterhouse, though deeply influenced by the classical tradition, infuses Circe with the sensibilities of the late 19th century, particularly the Pre-Raphaelite fascination with the femme fatale. This was an era in which the figure of the dangerous, unknowable woman — Medea, Salome, Morgan le Fay — pervaded literature and art, reflecting anxieties about shifting gender roles and the destabilization of Victorian ideals. Circe, in Waterhouse’s hands, is a product of this cultural moment: she is neither wholly villain nor victim but an enigmatic force, wielding both sexual and supernatural power in a way that unsettles the traditional male heroic narrative.

At its heart, Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus is a meditation on transformation—not just the physical metamorphoses that define Circe’s myth, but the psychological and narrative transformations that occur in the act of seeing and being seen. Circe commands the gaze, but she is also subject to it. Odysseus, though absent from the canvas, is omnipresent in the composition—his perspective is ours, and Circe’s challenge is directed not just at him, but at us, the viewers who, like him, stand at the threshold of enchantment. In this way, Waterhouse does not simply illustrate a moment from Homer; he recreates its very tension, forcing us to inhabit the space of decision, where desire and danger, agency and surrender, blend into a single intoxicating draught.

Stone Sentinels of Time: Gargoyles of Notre-Dame

 

Few silhouettes in the Parisian skyline are as instantly evocative as the gargoyles of Notre-Dame. Perched atop the great cathedral, these grotesque sentinels — half-demon, half-beast — peer down upon the city with an air of silent, almost knowing vigilance, as if bearing witness to centuries of human folly. They are neither wholly decorative nor purely functional, existing in a liminal space between architecture and myth, between the sacred and the monstrous. Their history, like the cathedral itself, is one of evolution, reinvention, and survival — a tale of medieval ingenuity, Romantic nostalgia, and the paradoxical way in which ruin often begets rebirth.

To understand the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, one must first recognize their origins in the practical necessities of Gothic architecture. The medieval cathedral, with its soaring vaults and immense stone facades, required an ingenious system of drainage to prevent water from eroding its fragile limestone. The gargoyle, then, was born of necessity: a sculpted waterspout designed to divert rainwater from the building’s walls. The word itself derives from the Old French gargouille, meaning “throat” or “gullet,” a fitting etymology for these open-mouthed creatures who, even now, vomit rain into the abyss below.

Yet the medieval mind, incapable of conceiving the merely utilitarian without also invoking the cosmic, transformed these spouts into something more: grotesques, chimeras, demonic figures whose twisted forms spoke not only of drainage but of the eternal struggle between the sacred and the profane. In the Christian imagination, gargoyles were more than mere adornments; they were guardians, symbols of the chaos and sin that lurked beyond the holy sanctuary of the church. Their presence, paradoxically, reinforced the power of the sacred by acknowledging the ever-present threat of the diabolical. They were the threshold between salvation and damnation, neither fully divine nor wholly infernal.

The original gargoyles of Notre-Dame were installed in the 13th century, part of the grand Gothic vision of Bishop Maurice de Sully and his successors. Though many of these medieval sculptures have been lost to time, their legacy endured in stone and shadow, immortalized in the popular imagination. Yet, contrary to common belief, the most famous gargoyles of Notre-Dame — the ones that loom over Paris with eerie, bestial majesty — are not medieval at all. They are the creation of the 19th century, born not of medieval piety but of Romantic nostalgia.

By the early 19th century, Notre-Dame stood not as a proud monument of Christendom, but as a desecrated ruin, a casualty of the Revolution’s iconoclastic fervor. The cathedral had been plundered, its statues decapitated, its treasures melted down, its very existence threatened by the secularizing zeal of post-revolutionary France. It was into this void of neglect that Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) erupted — a novel that, more than any political decree, saved the cathedral from oblivion. Hugo’s novel was not merely a story but a lament, a desperate plea for the preservation of Gothic architecture in an age that had abandoned it. The book’s overwhelming success spurred a national outcry, leading to the great restoration of Notre-Dame in the 1840s under the direction of the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.

It was Viollet-le-Duc, the high priest of the Gothic Revival, who reimagined Notre-Dame’s gargoyles, elevating them from functional grotesques to full-fledged characters in the cathedral’s visual drama. His most famous additions, the chimères — the nightmarish stone creatures that now haunt the upper galleries — were not waterspouts at all, but purely ornamental. These brooding figures, inspired as much by medieval iconography as by the fevered imagination of the 19th-century Romantics, were meant to evoke the cathedral’s lost soul, to restore to it an aura of medieval mystery. Among them, Le Stryge, the melancholic horned demon who rests his chin on his hands, has become the cathedral’s most iconic figure — a symbol not merely of Notre-Dame, but of Paris itself, embodying the city’s history, its ghosts, its endless dance between grandeur and decay.

The gargoyles of Notre-Dame have since taken on a life of their own, transcending their architectural origins to become creatures of legend. In the fires of 2019, when the cathedral burned, their survival was almost uncanny — a testament to their enduring presence, to their stubborn refusal to be consumed by time. They remain, as they always have, watchful, impassive, neither wholly of the past nor entirely of the present. Like Notre-Dame itself, they are relics of a world that is both lost and ever-living, a world where stone speaks, where monsters guard the sacred, and where history is not merely preserved but continuously reborn.

Danton: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Power

 

Few figures in the tumult of the French Revolution embody its paradoxes more vividly than Georges Jacques Danton. A man of towering physicality and oratorical thunder, he was both architect and casualty of the Revolution’s insatiable hunger for purity, a revolutionary of excess whose pragmatic realism clashed fatally with the fanaticism he had once helped unleash. His ascent from provincial obscurity to the zenith of revolutionary power was as rapid as his descent into the abyss of the guillotine — a trajectory that mirrors, with almost theatrical symmetry, the Revolution’s own violent oscillations between creation and destruction, idealism and terror.

Danton’s rise was inseparable from his mastery of the spoken word. In an age when speech could ignite insurrection and a single phrase could tilt the balance of history, his voice — earthy, resonant, charged with the force of elemental conviction — proved as potent as any musket. Born in 1759 in Arcis-sur-Aube, a town remote from the decadent intrigues of Versailles, he seemed an unlikely harbinger of revolutionary destiny. Trained in law, he gravitated toward Paris, where he honed his rhetorical prowess in the radical coffeehouses of the capital, absorbing the political turbulence of the 1780s as if by osmosis. The convulsions of 1789 provided him with a stage commensurate to his ambitions.

Unlike Robespierre, whose revolution was one of austere principle, or Marat, who reveled in the theater of paranoia, Danton embodied a revolution of visceral urgency. He was no theorist spinning metaphysical justifications for the social contract; he was an actor, a street-fighter in the political arena, a man who understood that power in revolutionary France belonged not to those who merely spoke of virtue but to those who could mobilize the hungry, restless masses of the city. His leadership of the Cordeliers Club — the epicenter of radical populism in the early Revolution — cemented his reputation as a tribune of the people. While the National Assembly debated constitutional niceties, Danton spoke in the language of blood and barricades.

It was in the crucible of 1792 that Danton’s star truly ascended. With the monarchy teetering on the precipice, he orchestrated the insurrection of August 10, the bloody storming of the Tuileries Palace that effectively ended Louis XVI’s reign. As Minister of Justice in the newly formed Republic, he proved indispensable. His call for mass mobilization in September—“We must dare, and dare again, and dare until the enemy is vanquished!” — became the rallying cry of a nation at war, his gravel-throated exhortations breathing defiant life into a Republic besieged on all fronts. At his urging, the sans-culottes surged through Paris, purging the prisons in the infamous September Massacres, a bloodletting that horrified Europe but, in Danton’s calculation, was necessary to prevent counter-revolution from festering in the city’s dungeons. To him, the Revolution was not a dinner party; it was a battle for survival.

For a time, Danton’s pragmatism and charisma secured his dominance within the government, particularly in the Committee of Public Safety, the organ that soon became the instrument of revolutionary dictatorship. Yet his fall was prefigured in his own indulgence. Unlike Robespierre, the incorruptible ascetic, Danton was a man of appetite — fond of luxury, flesh, and drink, reveling in the spoils of power even as he preached to the poor. His enemies whispered of bribery, of secret deals with monarchist agents, of a bourgeois comfort unbecoming of a revolutionary. But his true sin was not excess; it was moderation.

By 1793, the Revolution had entered its most dangerous phase. The execution of Louis XVI in January had foreclosed all paths of retreat; the Jacobin regime, besieged by foreign coalitions and domestic insurrection, turned to Terror as a means of self-preservation. Danton, who had once wielded violence as a necessary tool of state, began to recoil from its escalating frenzy. Where Robespierre saw purgation, Danton saw madness. He had helped establish the Revolutionary Tribunal, yet now he pleaded for an end to the executions, arguing that the guillotine’s insatiable thirst threatened to consume the very Revolution it was meant to defend.

This retreat into clemency was fatal. By the end of 1793, Robespierre and the radical Jacobins had consolidated power, and Danton, increasingly marginalized, withdrew to his country estate. But in the political inferno of revolutionary Paris, inactivity was indistinguishable from betrayal. When he returned in early 1794, hoping to arrest the course of the Terror, he found that the machinery of repression had already outpaced his influence. His attempts at reconciliation, his calls for reason, his appeals to humanity — all were drowned in the rising tide of fanaticism.

By the spring of 1794, the Terror had turned upon its own architects. The so-called Indulgents — Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and their circle — were marked for elimination. Their trial was a grotesque formality; the Revolutionary Tribunal, which Danton had once defended, now devoured him. Robespierre remained silent as his former ally denounced the proceedings with thunderous defiance, declaring to his accusers, “I leave it all in a great abyss — but you will follow me!” His voice, so long a weapon, was finally silenced by decree. On April 5, 1794, he ascended the scaffold, laughing bitterly at his executioner: “Show my head to the people. It is worth seeing.”

Danton’s fall was not merely the destruction of a man, but the annihilation of a revolutionary model — one that embraced the power of the people without succumbing to the logic of absolute purity. His demise cleared the path for Robespierre’s unchallenged rule, yet his prediction proved prophetic: within months, the same blade that severed his life would claim Robespierre himself. The Terror, having exhausted its sacrificial victims, collapsed into its own abyss.

In the final reckoning, Danton remains an enigma — a revolutionary who understood power but underestimated its perils, a pragmatist who embraced violence yet recoiled from its excesses, a man of both titanic energy and fatal complacency. His Revolution was not Robespierre’s: it was a revolution of flesh rather than dogma, of force rather than purity. And therein lay both its strength and its downfall. The Revolution that he helped shape could never accommodate such contradictions for long. It demanded sacrifice, and in the end, Danton — larger than life, brimming with appetites and defiance — offered himself to history’s unrelenting guillotine.

Serpentine Smile: Uriah Heep and Gríma Wormtongue

 

There exists in literature a certain genus of man whose villainy is not forged upon the battlefield nor declared with fanfare, but rather enacted within the crevices of language itself — a treachery of whispers, of sycophantic bows, of voices oiled and lacquered to the precise degree of subservience that masks their corroding aims. Among such creatures, Uriah Heep of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and Gríma Wormtongue of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings emerge as twin specters: two pale, obsequious shadows who inhabit the margins of greater narratives, murmuring decay into the ears of better men, each slouching toward their inevitable exposure with the inevitability of rot beneath a floorboard. Yet, as literary types, they are not merely duplicative; it is in the contrast between them that we come to understand the full taxonomy of parasitic evil—the Victorian and the mythic, the solicitor's apprentice and the wraith at the king's side, each lubricating power through the art of abasement.

Consider Heep first, the "umble" man, his very speech dipped in the viscous treacle of self-effacement. His villainy operates not by brute force but by insinuation — a slow seep of influence achieved through the relentless performance of servility. He is the shadow cast by a society obsessed with class and upward mobility, a creature who learns to weaponize humility itself. His every utterance, from his first introduction, is a rehearsed curtsy of the soul: “I am well aware that I am the umblest person going... My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode.” Dickens, who had no particular love for lawyers and less for those who ape virtue in the pursuit of gain, gives us in Heep an anatomy of the social climber corrupted by his own self-loathing, a figure who ascends precisely by reminding others of the lowliness from which he rises.

There is in Heep's villainy a peculiarly bureaucratic horror. He is the evil of ink-stained fingers, of ledgers manipulated in candlelight, of property signed away under the legal aegis of good order. Heep understands that, in Victorian England, destruction is most efficiently administered through the silent recalibration of documents, not swords. He is the demon of the office, the infernal clerk whose power emerges precisely from his invisibility within systems designed to obscure malice beneath procedure. Like Kafka’s minor officials, Heep thrives in the interstices of paperwork, his malevolence amplified by the cold machinery of law, his crimes executed in duplicate and triplicate.

How different—and yet not entirely dissimilar — is Gríma Wormtongue, that pallid fixture at the side of Théoden King, whose influence flows not through ledgers but through breath. If Heep is the embodiment of the Victorian office, Wormtongue is its medieval analogue: the courtly advisor whose proximity to power allows him to bleed it dry. His name is not subtle — Gríma, "mask" or "specter," and Wormtongue, which suggests both serpent and rot. Heep's "umble" is replaced here by poison administered via language: the slow, sibilant undermining of courage, the carefully planted suggestion of despair, the architecture of submission constructed word by word in the king's failing ear.

But where Heep seeks advancement, Wormtongue seems to lust after decay itself. He is less interested in inheriting power than in hollowing it out from within. His is the nihilism of the parasitic intellect that would prefer the corpse of the kingdom to the flourishing of a realm in which he has no rightful place. If Heep’s evil is transactional—a lunge upward in the social order — Gríma’s is apocalyptic. He serves Saruman not for personal gain but because he has committed himself to the machinery of entropy, to the unraveling of all that is hale and good and green.

What unites them, however, is their shared understanding that the most enduring victories are secured through the corruption of language. Both are rhetoricians of ruination. Heep binds his victims in the sticky web of feigned humility, his every phrase a rope knotted around their ankles. Wormtongue administers words as anaesthetic, dulling Théoden’s will until the very memory of strength seems a quaint abstraction. And both are, in the end, undone by the sudden reassertion of clarity: Heep by David Copperfield's unmasking, Wormtongue by Gandalf's arrival and the cleansing of Théoden’s mind. It is a notable feature of both narratives that speech, which had been the medium of the villain's power, becomes the instrument of their defeat. Exposure is a kind of exorcism, and truth-telling the final antidote to the poison of their insinuations.

Yet there lingers an ambiguity about these figures that resists complete moralization. Heep, after all, is as much a victim of his station as he is an architect of his own downfall. Dickens is careful to suggest that the society which spawns Uriah Heeps will never lack for them; his grotesquery is not congenital but cultivated, a mirror held up to a culture that thrives on the abasement of the lower orders while sneering at their attempts to rise. Wormtongue, too, is less a sovereign agent of evil than a creature bent under the yoke of greater powers. Saruman’s spell lies heavy on him. He does not destroy Rohan alone; he is merely the intermediary of its undoing.

And perhaps that is the deeper horror these figures suggest: not merely that there exist men like Heep and Wormtongue who would see good things reduced to ash, but that they are always accompanied by a larger structure that rewards such behavior. Heep's legal machinations are only possible within a system that prizes paper over principle. Wormtongue’s venomous counsel finds purchase only because a kingdom had already grown complacent enough to let him speak unchecked. They are symptoms, not plagues; the shadow cast is always proportional to the light permitted to wane.

In the end, we are left not merely with two cautionary portraits of sycophantic evil but with a meditation on the fragility of fortresses — be they legal, political, or personal — against the slow, whispering corrosion of the trusted insider. The smile that bows too low, the tongue that flatters too well, the hand that fawns as it filches: these are the avatars of a quieter doom, the ones that, when history does not notice, manage to undo us entirely.