Friday, 4/18/97 Donning the mask of illusion Hope, created in
mind, deceives by providing false impression of reality
By Dave Yu Daily Bruin Columnist I used to take a stroll with
Hope regularly. We’d meet for a walk about every other week. If I
had forgotten the exact date of our appointment I could check my
lunar calendar and walk outside and there he’d be, floating in the
night sky with his smiling pale face. I lost him though, behind
mischievous clouds and skyscrapers with their upright and
outstretched arms. Hope was in my class once; she had dark skin and
big black eyes. I tried to incite her to look my way, but when she
did I was startled, frightened to see that what I had thought was
merely a fictional notion or entity actually could exist in the
material world. Hope was once my friend. We would talk about music,
saying that "we should compose some pieces together some time." We
never had the opportunity because one fine day he decided to kill
himself. He jumped off the top of a 30-story building. I can
picture him there now, with his concrete lover, immersed in crimson
fire, blood making pretty brush-like dash marks where their bodies
intersected. I saw Hope once, sitting across the bar, and I watched
her. I secured her image in my mind, so I thought, until I set out
to preserve her essence in art. But the contours of her face and
her dimpled cheek eluded me, as if a fading image hidden at the
bottom of a pint of beer. When I was a child, Hope was music. I
remember sending the vinyl spinning on the old turntable and I’d
lie on the floor with my ear pressed against the speakers,
absorbing every note of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. I
found serenity in the gentle current of the brook and simple joy at
the peasants’ gathering, voiced by their comedic but merry ensemble
music. When the storm would break my heart would beat wildly and I
would jump about the room with clenched hands in the air, filled
with fury. I was thunder, I was lightning, merciless, terminating
the peasant celebration without reason, if only for the sake of
being able to. I was inevitable destruction. When the storm died
down I was Hope, that which survived the tempest, manifested in the
lyricism of the Shepherd’s Song. Hearing the music now no longer
affects me so. Where has the Hope gone? What is "hope?" The
Webster’s Dictionary defines it as "a feeling that what is wanted
will happen; desire accompanied by expectation." Necessarily then,
the issue of what effect one can have on the future must be
addressed. Do we really have control over our lives? Events in our
lives are pre-programmed and our mental state has no effect on our
destiny. "Hopelessness," the lack of "Hope," is our natural state
of mind, and the feeling that we control our futures is brought on
by illusion. The illusion of "Hope" is ever changing; one moment we
associate it with the people we meet, the next with the beauty of
our surroundings or the act of creating art. "Hope" is merely an
invention of the mind so that we can live with ourselves every day.
There is no rational justification for such optimism. Our body is
more in tune to this external reality than our brains are. That’s
why sometimes we have difficulty getting out of bed in the morning,
we fall ill, our backs hunch over and we get headaches. That’s why
our body says "the fuck with it, why bother" and shuts down when we
are in our 60s or 70s, 80s if you are more ignorant. So where did
the "Hope" go? Pick your poison. On a particular occasion, over a
year ago, it was those "little things" that on their own might not
have much impact, but in succession forced me to see through the
illusion. On the academic front, the MCAT was coming, there were
about 50 midterms to prepare for and a classics paper due. My
parents, due to unexpected complications, had to move from their
dream house. As if a rite of passage, just a few weeks before the
move, the family dog was taken by prowling coyotes. That poor
fucking dog. He was one of those little Shi Tzus, completely blind
and without a single savage bone in his body. He’d wait eagerly at
the entryway inside, waiting for someone to come home, and when he
heard the garage door opening he’d race across the house and paw at
the door, whimpering with anxiousness to greet you. Our family
loved that dog. The coyotes gutted him and dragged his maimed body
halfway across the yard. We found him the next day, his eyes still
open. He was looking up at the sky, asking why he had to be stuck
on the side of the lawn where all the ants and trees were. He
looked up at us asking why we had let such a thing happen to him.
And so on … I began to show the symptoms of Hopelessness and out
of habit wrote a story. It was supposed to be a tale in which the
protagonist triumphed over his evil captors, but, as is typical of
my writing personality, my words were laced with melancholy, and
the hero was of the tragic persuasion rather than pure of heart.
Whenever he opened his mouth he would spontaneously reveal all his
weaknesses to his enemies. I tried drawing but I miscalculated the
velocity, acceleration and slope of the line and the endeavor only
exacerbated my condition. Back then, in these activities I found my
standard tickets to relative stability. This time they were of no
use to me. I contemplated searching for Hope in liquid form, at the
bottom of a Rolling Rock or a Scottish, but paid a visit to a
childhood friend first. Though hearing the music could not help me,
perhaps actively creating it might. The sun began its descent,
began its crash-landing sequence with the horizon by the time I was
done with classes. I made my way to Schoenberg Hall and slipped
into Room 1421, where a sleek black-bodied creature waited for
someone to raise its arms and summon its sonorous fury. I sat at
the bench for several moments in silence, staring at the keyboard,
the white keys reminding me of a full moon, the black keys of
attentive wide eyes. Could they possibly exist in the real world? I
sat in silence for a while, finally summoning the energy to reach
over to the keyboard to determine if it could be. Upon contact
electricity flowed from the creature through my fingertips, and a
sound, soft and sweet, emanated from its belly. At first, I tried
via improvisation to find purpose, but quickly felt myself being
corrupted by the destructive capability of the creature and forced
myself to stop picking. Silence again. From my backpack I procured
crumpled sheet music, one of which contained the words, "Andante
con moto," of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 57 (sometimes referred to
as "Appassionata"). Those familiar with this work may find it an
ironic piece to be playing in my melancholic state. The opening
theme, in my opinion, is a somewhat mathematical endeavor, meant to
be played with a sense of majesty and pride, with its rigid beat
and grand chords, and yet, with some comedy, self-mockery perhaps,
with its strange joke-like motif of four descending notes at the
end of each of the variations. The Andante con moto, a melody with
an equivocal message. To play the piece correctly, in my opinion,
one must curtail all emotion extraneous to this sense of grandeur.
The piece should be played with subtlety rather than the extreme
hopelessness I felt at the time. I felt myself being corrupted
again, tempted to load the passages with sorrow as well as
belligerent questioning. I held fast though, focusing on giving
sound, giving life, to those notes on the paper as if they were the
only thing on earth worth living for. But when the clear-eyed
arpeggio-ed variations set in I could restrain myself no longer,
releasing my chaotic thoughts in the form of hammer striking
resonating strings. The sense of movement of the arpeggios seemed
to point to a strange finality, and I felt the indomitable pull of
the forthcoming explosive Allegro ma non troppo. Opus 57, I
realized, was a disturbingly appropriate metaphor for my state of
mind. I could see the future in the last movement when a storm
would break and leave no survivors in its wake, no Shepherd’s Song.
Is this my destiny, I asked, is there no escaping my future?
Perhaps angels heard my awkward playing and dove down from up high
and answered me. Perhaps electric moths stripped me of my sadness
and lifted my cloak of shame far far away on their backs, powered
by glistening outstretched wings. Who knows what forces are at work
in music? But the sadness left me in the shape of the free-floating
sounds filling the dimmed classroom. In place of chaos in my brain,
a different spirit filled me with restored vigor and hope. Emerging
from Room 1421, I hopped on board the bus home, returning to
regularly scheduled programming. Yu is a microbiology student who
can be reached at daveyu@ucla.edu. In external reality he’s not a
professional nihilist but a happy-go-lucky kind of guy.