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

 

To learn the keyboard is to conduct a subtle inquisition upon one’s own fingers — to coax, berate, seduce them into unnatural alliances. The black and white teeth of the instrument grin with patient malice, offering endless permutations of beauty and cacophony, while your hands, traitorous appendages, stammer and collapse like drunken spiders across the octaves. Each note becomes an interrogation: why this hesitation, this shameful stumble, this limp approach to a C minor? You whisper assurances, promise progress, but deep within, the ghost of a knowing smirk stirs — practice is a euphemism, after all, for exquisite, deliberate failure.

The music one plays badly has its own awful majesty. Every flubbed scale, every fumbled transition, each octave misstep forms a sort of tragic counterpoint to the imagined music — that impossible, glimmering mirage which you chase, panting, through thickets of repetition. Time becomes elastic in this pursuit. There is no “progress” as such, only recurrence. The same measure, the same bar, looping with the maddening inescapability of a carousel playing a melody you used to love until it began to rot.

A certain synthetic anthem haunts this process: that glib, glinting dirge of mechanical heartbreak, repeating itself into delirium. Its pulse mimics the maddening tick of a metronome, its lyrical descent into mistake and repetition mirroring your own rites of hesitation. There is a sterile purity to its beat, like a disco inferno in a padded cell. One recognizes, in its squelch and throb, the ritual humiliation of aspiring to grace and falling short by a semitone. “Everybody makes mistakes,” it assures you — a slogan suitable for embroidered pillows in the waiting rooms of personal disasters.

To study the keyboard is to live in a cathedral of minor disappointments — but ah, what light slants sometimes through the stained-glass failures! A chord blossoms cleanly, as if your fingers remembered being birds. A passage, once thorny and cruel, slips like silk under your touch. For a moment — a flash, a flicker, a phosphene in the temple of sound — you play. Not practice, not grope, not approximate. Play.

And the music — the actual music — sidles up, wary and wild-eyed, perhaps to stay a moment longer this time. Then it’s gone, and you’re left again with your squinting hands and that smug little machine blinking 70 BPM in your face. But you’ve tasted it. The current has passed through you. What follows is not triumph, exactly, but a stubborn ache of desire — to touch that live wire again.

Such are the tribulations: not obstacles, but rites. Scars shaped like arpeggios. A suffering that, properly endured, begins to shimmer with something perilously close to joy.

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 provoke the mind’s theatre quite like those clustered along the heights of Notre-Dame. These sculpted grotesques — with their hunched spines, talon-toed poise, and the suspicious composure of creatures caught mid-thought — perch not so much as ornaments but as conspirators. They lean over the city not merely to observe, but to remember. Their gaze is not vacant; it is archival. What they have witnessed cannot be unwitnessed. They are not entirely beasts, nor convincingly demons, nor even convincingly real. They belong to that category of existence which architecture, in its rare moments of inspiration, dreams into permanence: the liminal, the necessary unreal.

Their origins are, like many of the cathedral’s secrets, half-hidden behind the veil of practical necessity. Rainwater, the ancient enemy of stone, had to be channeled outward, spat into the void with some elegance. From this sprang the gargouille — the throat of the building, the vomiting mouth, the feral gutter. But the medieval mind, which could not distinguish the functional from the symbolic without embarrassment, made a ritual of it. The waterspout became monstrous. The throat was fanged. And soon the question ceased to be “how shall we drain the rain?” and became “how shall we warn the soul?”

There is something undeniably theological in their contortions. The way their backs arc skyward, or their jaws hang open in mute judgment, suggests that they do not serve so much to repel evil as to embody it — in caricature, in quarantine, in confession. One suspects they are not protecting the cathedral, but rather serving it penance. They crouch in a permanent shrug: yes, the world is monstrous; yes, we let it in. What now?

And yet — and this is the devil's own joke — the most iconic of these creatures are not medieval at all. They are not the 13th century’s offspring, but the 19th’s. Born not of liturgical terror but of aesthetic yearning, they are ghosts conjured by Romanticism's gothic séance. When the cathedral lay gutted by the Revolution — defaced, unmoored, her sanctity desecrated with the bureaucratic coldness of modernity — it was not a priest who interceded but a novelist. The tale he wrote, ostensibly about a bellringer and a gypsy, was in fact an incantation for stone. And stone answered.

The architect who answered the novel’s call — a man more alchemist than mason — restored Notre-Dame not to what she had been, but to what she ought to have been. He invented ruins where there had been absence, revived legends no one had told. His gargoyles — chimères really, since they carried no water and no modesty — were hallucinations in limestone. The most famous among them, a slouching satyr with drooping wings and an expression of bored malevolence, does not spit rain but thought. He watches Paris with the eyes of someone who has read all its secrets and found them repetitive. His hands cradle his chin as if he has all the time in the world. He does.

There is an unspoken kinship between these figures and the city they overlook. Both are accumulations of beauty and damage, pageants of the possible. When the fire came in 2019 — that improbable moment when the heavens seemed to demand attention by igniting their own effigy — the gargoyles endured. They sat in the smoke as they had in the fog, as they had in the lightless centuries when faith was less spectacle than breath. Their survival was not miracle but metaphor.

To regard them now is to see the cathedral’s subconscious carved into permanence. They are its dreams, its repressions, its unconfessed loves and loathings — the monstrous children of a structure that knows it is both house of God and theatre of mankind. They do not decorate; they diagnose. They whisper down through time, not in words, but in posture, in silhouette, in the precise angle of an unblinking stare. One does not know whether to fear them, laugh with them, or become them.

They do not care. They have already outlasted that question.

Danton: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Power

 

Few figures flung from the churning mouth of the French Revolution more exquisitely encapsulate its paradoxical ecstasies than Georges Jacques Danton. He was a man of coarse magnificence, as if chiseled from clay with impatient, brutish fingers, and then imbued — whether by some diabolical muse or divine mischief — with a thunderous eloquence capable of stirring the bowels of mobs and ministers alike. He rose, a Dionysian gargoyle atop the scaffold of Reason, speaking in gusts and torrents, devouring each opportunity to thunder his way into the bloodstream of history. The very excesses that animated the Revolution — its hunger for rebirth, for purification by blood, for moral impossibilities — found in him not an ascetic apologist, but a voluptuary conspirator. And as with all things revolutionary, the instrument he helped forge was only too eager to make of him a sacrifice.

Born in the remote provinces — a town whose name, Arcis-sur-Aube, sounds like the echo of a half-remembered oath — Danton was scarcely destined for anything more than a provincial practice and a rotund, happy obscurity. But there are certain men who, though born in mud, carry within them the tremor of tectonic events. His voice, basso and bawdy, steeped in wine and phlegm, could jolt even the most sedated salon into a state of nervy enchantment. In the coffeehouses and crypts of Paris, he metabolized the feverish winds of 1789, not so much thinking revolution as sweating it, exhaling it, his body a kind of grotesque instrument for collective desire. He was no philosopher, no disembodied virtue — but the Revolution did not initially demand such rarefied ghosts. It wanted flesh, thunder, speed.

If Robespierre was an icicle of principle — all sharp angles and lethal abstractions — Danton was flame and grease, spitting fat in all directions. He led the Cordeliers not like a theorist commanding ideas, but like a prizefighter organizing a mutiny. In him, the people saw not a mirror, but an amplifier. His orations had the gait of warhorses; they did not persuade — they assaulted, they overwhelmed. In the anxious nights of 1792, when monarchy tottered and madness sang lullabies from the Seine, it was Danton who galvanized the storming of the Tuileries with the precision of an arsonist choosing just the right draft of wind. Appointed Minister of Justice, he bellowed to the heavens and the gutters: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” — a phrase that burned across France like a comet, lighting fires in the hearts of patriots and prisons alike.

But the Revolution was a devourer of its own — a beast that demanded not merely conviction, but consecration. Danton’s pragmatic ferocity, so effective in birth-pangs, began to curdle in the womb of power. His sensualities — wine, women, whispers of gold — offended the new sacerdotal taste for incorruptibility. Where Robespierre fasted, Danton feasted. And soon, his true crime was not corruption but reluctance. The Terror, once a practical grimace, became a creed, and Danton, weary of its excess, tried to whisper clemency into the screaming void.

But the void had learned to sing its own music by then.

His retreat was interpreted as apostasy. His appeals for mercy — spoken with a voice that once could rattle cathedrals — were now met with the clipped silences of a Tribunal that had outgrown the need for persuasion. In 1794, that cold and monstrous year, he was summoned not as a savior but as an offering. Alongside Desmoulins and other “Indulgents,” he stood trial, his sarcasm flaring like dying sparks in a windless room. He mocked, thundered, prophesied — “You will follow me!” — but the guillotine is not given to reconsiderations. It is a punctuation mark that obeys only the grammar of extinction.

On the day of his execution, Danton met death with a scornful theatricality. “Show my head to the people,” he laughed, that macabre humor of a man already mythic. “It is worth seeing.” And so it was. A head that had dreamed of populist Rome, of forged republics and poet’s blood, now held aloft in the Parisian light like a gruesome reliquary — the end of oratory, the terminus of appetite.

His demise did more than clear the stage for the lean specter of Robespierre. It marked the extinction of a revolutionary modality — one of human heat, not sacred frost; of compromise, lust, contradiction. Danton was, in the final tally, a man of too much: too much appetite, too much sound, too much presence. And yet, without such surfeits, no revolution could ever begin. He was both its indispensable midwife and its intolerable heir.

We do not remember him as a saint or a martyr, but as a storm. A necessary vulgarity. A voice that rose from the sewer and aimed for Olympus. That he failed — that he was obliterated — does not annul his grandeur. On the contrary: it is in his annihilation that the full tragic poetry of the Revolution becomes audible. He was not a man of the Revolution. He was the Revolution — in all its appetites, betrayals, raptures, and suicides.

And as such, he belongs not to history, but to theater — and not even as protagonist, but as the very stage upon which the drama could unfold, and upon which, inevitably, the curtain had to fall.

Serpentine Smile: Uriah Heep and Gríma Wormtongue

 

There is a certain species of villain that does not so much erupt into narrative as seep — a dampness of personality, a mildew that spreads along the baseboards of story, staining its moral architecture. This genus is not marked by tyrannical roars or theatrical blasphemies, but by something more insinuative, more erotic in its perversion: the sycophant as saboteur, the flatterer as fungus. He does not occupy space but infects it. His crimes, like his speech, arrive breathless, eyelid-lowered, fingers clasped, apologizing as they strike. And what delicate horrors await in the comparative study of two such glistening worms: one, a tremulous clerk with fingers the colour of dishwater; the other, a whispering adviser whose breath is a kind of anesthesia.

Uriah Heep and that other trembling counselor — ah, what was his name, that muttering mascara of a man at the elbow of a dying king? — are not merely types but echoes, recurring sonic disturbances in the symphony of literature. Each carries with him a timbre of moist servitude, of humility so performative it curdles into threat. They wear their deference like a poisoned robe. They stoop so low that from beneath their lashes one sees not reverence, but ambition knotted like a tumor.

The former, that Dickensian eel, announces himself with lips pressed into oblong smirks and syntax curdled into condescension. 'Umbleness' is his religion, yet also his cudgel — he genuflects with such frequency one begins to suspect it is not the floor he bows to, but the necks of others he hopes to throttle with guilt. He is not content to be low; he must render others shameful for being above him. That is the true venom of his humility: it obligates. It accrues moral debt.

And how precisely bureaucratic is his evil! His is a villainy composed in ink and grease, a calligraphy of decay. He does not wield a blade; he files a document. He does not commit murder; he adjusts a will. He is the demon in the deed registry, the spirit haunting the linen paper. One imagines his soul as a sheaf of parchment, dog-eared and stippled with mildew. A man of such loamy persuasion that one half expects mushrooms to erupt from his collar.

His dark twin, the medieval shade — pale, insinuating, perfumed with decay — is the courtier whose every sentence is a curlicue of slow disintegration. He does not advise; he undermines. His counsel is a drip-feed of cowardice, administered intravenously. While Heep suffocates through ledgers, this one suffocates through lullabies of despair. His genius is soporific. He sedates the king not with lies but with a reality softened and turned inward, as if language itself had become opium.

And yet, what nobility in their defeat! For they are creatures of speech, and it is speech that destroys them. Not swords. Never swords. But the bracing, stinging clarity of honest words — a confrontation spoken, not shouted, like the sudden cracking of glass that had long been presumed whole. Heep recoils before exposure as a slug beneath a lantern; the other shrivels when addressed by a voice that does not ask but commands. How telling, how damning, that their unmaking is simply the act of being seen.

But perhaps it is too easy to sneer, to condescend to these crouched saboteurs. After all, they are not architects of hell, merely its administrators. Heep is manufactured, not born; he emerges from a world that first taught him to loathe himself, then punished him for attempting to transcend that loathing. His villainy is a misdirected performance of virtue — a grotesque mimicry of the very values that spurned him. And the other — our specter in the hall — is not so much evil as possessed: a filament in the greater machinery of corruption. His whispers do not originate in his mouth; they echo from deeper caverns, from the will of another rotting mind.

In truth, they are not central figures but capillaries through which larger sicknesses circulate. Their presence is diagnostic. That they are allowed to whisper so long, to stoop and scrape and nod and leer, tells us not about them but about the hosts who tolerated them. The systems, the kings, the ideals — all of it — had already begun to soften, to mold. The parasite only feeds where there is something to drain.

So we return to the smile that is not a smile, the compliment that constricts like a velvet rope. These are not villains in the old sense. They are not generals or gods. They are insinuations. They are afterthoughts grown fat. They are what happens when vigilance is traded for comfort, when language loses its sharpness, when truth is postponed for the sake of peace. They are, finally, not destroyers — but reminders — that all rot begins within.