R1 of RR Debate Tourney: USM vs MiG

Note: from the voice of a fellow (and former) patientI must confess that I do not possess any finesse to recount my tale about Nate. But there is no figure like him—a man retreating to the outskirts of an inner world that he had crafted, with only the comfort of a gently-receding sea that in its open embraces, would gush and profess its caresses onto the nearby rocks. He remained fixated on it—particularly the lower breach, where the waters parted at the rim of a base barred from human presence. There was an indescribable longing invested within him, and he would be there seated at his little sessions of painting (which he dedicated, in the act of retreating from human community), staring at the caresses of the sea, undomesticated with the rawness of its impurity. He seemed to retain his attachment to art, with his painting hours resuming now and then. I would joke that if perception was not a medium, art was—and a fine one at that for a man with only color and structures. It appeared that despite his irregular cycle—he would sleep little in the evenings, awake to watch television, and then resume sleeping, his paintings were always finished in spite of the short intervals that would preclude such a prospect. Dr. Sorenson noted this herself while she collected them for interpretation and was, indubitably, astonished to see one—a little girl under the imposing shadow of a flock of migrating birds—full of stroke and flourish from what had appeared for days—a juvenile piece of work. Here was the feel—the tresses in the waters, the ledge, the softness in draped blues, all of which human energy, not inertia, was devoted in creating a lovely marriage of scenario. All this stark and light-hearted warmth would appear to be his only trademark. Nevertheless, I learned of a far more decadent side to him—to which I discovered when, out of curiosity, I peeked and looked through his room. In a set of painting on the easel, there was one that arrested my attention: the sea was girded, but with a small coastal land as its belt. It was morose—with hues that were darkened and made duller, and in this sea of darkness, there stood a lone personage upon the unfettered, grassy belt: a young boy flying an indistinct kite. Neither sojourning nor engaging, he was here—in the monochrome, tonalist world, an epitome of the sheer blueness, fixed within the belt of grass and corralled there; of the darkness he was the progeny—and with it, they were one. I knew he was a philosophical man indeed and appeared somewhat baffled at both the sudden culmination of energy that had produced such a work. I could not ask Dr. Sorenson who could not account for this other than an increasing will to live his final days and thus, with uncertainty, chose to ask Nate himself; I set up a writing conference outside of the edifice and near a small uplift of the prairie that opened to the sea to permit some comfort to him. Looking at him—and his tired eyes that bore down with some ineffable burden, his face greatly strained by the duress, I found it somewhat remarkable for a man to suddenly espouse a burst of creativity for himself—to garner it suddenly. Hesitating no more, I asked him—bluntly, of the significance of his recent painting—which I, struggling to overcome the injury to my left hand, held up. Somewhat startled, he quickly scampered to write upon the easel and, with a decided look of conviction, perhaps in conveying what may transcend the very barriers of speech, scribbled—crossed out out a message. It read-- “My destination”, a pithy statement that nevertheless, in his usual, opaque manner—circumventing the more obvious channels of conversation, summed up the involuntary termination of his life; in response, I voiced such an implication and he assented, pointing—squarely at the figure, immured in the world of Pacific darkness. “I see that you have now entertained this little dichotomy of—life and death”, I responded with an air of affected derision, “but it is not customary to not complement a notion without its antithesis, my friend”--as an appeal to the philosophical tendencies that, like overreaching tides, had overwhelmed him, perhaps in the minute confinement of a minute. He, however, shook his head as if in denial of such an assertion and, with a confidence, pointed to the farther reaches, where the mouth of the sea parted into a series of rifts crafted by the sand-bars that lead, indistinctly, to the foot of a promontory; it was of such a distance that I could not perceive it as of the moment until after a few moments of mongering and searching across the reaches of water. “White”. He had tried—in spite of some sort of assumed contract of reticence—to articulate the word, though only obtusely and thus resorted to holding up another painting. There, within the frame and setting, a solitary figure stood upon the precipitous cliffs, clad entirely in snowy white, and now captured, in time, in the same poise as his counterpart—and brother, Death. Sensing a sort of productivity arising, I quickly asked him--“Why is death near, but life far—FAR away?”After a few ponderous moments, he suddenly tabulated his thoughts in what may appear to be an exposition, compared to his early, pithier remarks: “You may think that I did so, consciously, considering the nearing end of my life. But I value myself as much as man does to dirt, and would not bother if I were to sleep—or to die within the days.” And with that, he was regaled by the announcement of lunch and quickly proceeded to shuffle off whatever mortal coil there was by divulging the underlying secret by walking away. For the next few days, I lay in reverie, somewhat bemused by the conversation; here was a man who spoke in reverie, lived by it, and sought to convey it from the eye to eye, and was entombed within the grasps of reverie, I thought. He had—as I had discerned—in the very act of crafting this internal world—devalued himself as he proceeded in retrogression, for his body was to him as dirt to a flower, a waltzing rose, that propagated in the very sphere of representation—artistic perception. By virtue of a common association between sleep and death, he had juxtaposed the sleeping man's routine across a trek of several days with death—the submission of conscience to the threshold of the unknown. Thus the waking man is to die, and his conscious life, now enclosed in some sort of a series of vistas, is to die, metaphorically-speaking; and yet, that conscious life, now constrained by the retrogression, was stagnated, and whatever powers it conferred to the waking man is now leased. And, I posited— perhaps, under a specific delusion, he had tried to garner these impulses in a time where his conscious being would not impede—sleep. I dismissed this as a farfetched notion, for the constraints of reality, let alone those of the individual, preclude such the manifestation of such a concept, but quickly reminded myself—that Nate—neared the end, and men whose lives involuntarily decline are most suspect to wilder and more frenzied eyes. To see one's life border the intransigence would to pit all the contributions that a single man can gather in a chassis—thrown and dispersed in the wide sea: family, life, work, ideas, and so forth. Under this hypothetical premise, which I admit to be superficial, I resolved myself to commit to a whimsical experiment—for I had none to entertain in those days--: watch the man sleep, and see if he pursues his “artistic enterprise” there. It was surely—for merriment, in one sake: one would expect a sleeping man to....sleep, and to wake in the vicinity as expected but I, with my old shenanigans, nevertheless enjoyed the prospect of witnessing an incarnate of an...unconventional idea. There is no work like that of an experimenter, and I set out to fulfill my expectations as one. Recommendation of story's course. The narrator will prove his "hypothesis" but albeit in a brutal confrontation. He will realize the "truth".