Marzipan

Bitter almonds are the natural state and non-lethal the exception. In the wild, most primitive state, full of violence and shocks, optimism and despair can be assigned external causation. For those lucky enough to live in a stressful, urban, place such as New York, or Tokyo, or Shanghai, or Paris, the tendency to rise and fall according to one's own internal fortunes is an advantage: the ordinary citizen is diminished by the crushing noise and relentless harassments. The manic depressive rises and falls with the cyces of the city. In phase, there is greatness. The city is the conscious mind of the troubled and they rule with the capricious whims of a tropical storm.

Only in the more placid cities, the San Franciscos and the Seattles or the quiet rural pastures is the cyclothymic individual left to wallow in his or her own inexplicable rhythms. A deep silence reveals an awful background hiss and warble, a fractal noise, which degenerates into a grotesque geography of Wagnerian cliffs and Biblical canyons the closer one drifts. Buccolic tranquility reveals true psychosis through a terrible absence.

Without obvious external causes, the attributed sources of mood shift to superstition and a dreadful acceptance of fate. For the palpating consciousness, the gods truly exist, and they are cruel, manipulative and capricious.

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