Diabribe of the Small

This is a text I wrote a couple of years ago that would like to include in my novel (Original in Spanish). Cleopatra says:

The problem is that, to be an artist, to create, it takes a bit of courage; actually, it takes a lot, not a bit, a lot. That's why not everybody makes it. It has nothing to do with talent, but with courage. The courage to say and do whatever it takes, whatever it has to be, however it comes out. Courage to make it known and show your face to declare with all certainty, this is mine. That's why we couldn't. We lacked courage.  I don't think we lacked talent; we had enough of that, imagination, craziness.  We used it to live. Life was our canvas and there we put it all. But we got scared. We got scared of leaving a mark, indissoluble, in time. We were afraid of leaving something concrete behind as we passed by. We were afraid of saying, yes, this is me, so what? We thought that perhaps the others were not going to approve. And who are the others? Our parents, first, our family, our friends, the community where we interact, live, the community of artists, of those who do the same things than we do, the world. We are so worried about what others will say and think about us that we cannot do anything. The worry paralyzes us. We hide. And that's why we replace doing art for living this strange life, captivating some times because it is so out of the ordinary, outside of the rules. We smoke to forget reality, to make it a bit more fantastic and less repugnant, less like it is. Maybe we are the repugnant, not the reality.

It's just that we hate ourselves so much. We hate our bodies, so far from perfect, our bodies with extra pounds, with wrinkles and signs of decay. They too show us that time goes by and we got stuck there. We hate our minds that entertain us with frivolities, stupidity, small every day things. We hate those small things! We hate our small and inconsistent lives that take us nowhere, only to more small lives and more days like these, trivial, repeated. We hate our smallness and cowardice. We hate the world because it crushed us and forced us to accept a reality that we didn't build, which we fell into almost out of laziness, fear, fear of the unknown. We are as small as the reality that surrounds us every day, and that's why we hate ourselves. We hate what we are and what we will never be. We hate that possibility that got lost at some point in history. That possibility that didn't happen but that made us dream and hope and think that sometime it could realize itself. We hate our hope, and what is left of that desire for improving ourselves, the desire of maybe getting where we wanted to be at some point. We hate that small desire because it keeps us wanting and alert but it happens that the only thing we really want is to disappear, not to be, to vanish like the smoke that comes out of this pipe, we want to burn like these dry leaves that at least, while in combustion, are useful.

We hide. We play this game of saying that we want to do something, but we don't do it. Why? Why don't we do it? Because, if we did it, the game would end, and we are afraid for it to end because we may lose. Maybe at the end of the game we realize that there were others better than us, damn it, and if we don't finish the game we would never know, right? So we keep playing, hiding once in a while, coming out to the light for a few seconds, and hiding again. For a few minutes we think that we have something, that we are onto something big, for a few instants we imagine that yes, this time we will be able to, that this time we are behind a great idea. But, after a little while, we start losing speed, losing the impulse, and without noticing, we are out of the game again, watching life behind the glass windows, looking at the others playing, thinking of how much we would like to participate but we don't have the time, we don't have the money, don't have the space, we don't feel like it, and yes, we don't have the only thing we need to have: balls.

That's why the smoke helps; it creates castles in the air, fables to which we can hold onto. We hang from those little smoke tails that fly in the sky and take us with them for a few hours, to float over everything and see the world down there, small. Then, for as long as the effect lasts, we are giants, we are on top of the world, on top of everything and everybody and the schemes don't matter anymore, we feel superior and powerful. We are the gods of everything and everybody because we forgot who we were. Until it ends, and life goes back to being small, ugly, absurd, and inconsistent, like us.