Declaration of War

By Christopher Greenfield

“Vanity is an iron curtain cursed upon those who choose to wield it”


So reads the last line in the foreword to Christopher Greenfield’s newly renowned Declaration of War. Influenced by the anti-normative likes of Charles Bukowski, the envisionary idealism of Albert Camus, the ruthless cultural critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the naturalism of David Hume, Greenfield calls into question via a series of short stories and poems the essential tenets of the human condition; what it means to truly be free, why we desire love and belonging, wherein hatred and bigotry are rooted when we seemingly desire quite the opposite, and the subliminal functions of power and authority that relentlessly work to keep us enslaved to our own primal self-destructive tendencies in the midst of a society that has far outgrown the need for them. Knowing first-hand what it’s like to be deemed the “black dog”, “rebel”, and the “heretic” of social circles, Christopher Greenfield was intrigued by the curious fascination of his friends and colleagues. The collection of works contained in the Declaration of War are based on real conversations, debates, and experiences that serve to allude to the grander image of human strife, will power, and the nature of one’s own suffering; that which, if able to be harnessed, may be used to create something beautiful… beyond the absurdity of the ‘superficial and mundane’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781669801863

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Christopher Greenfield.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 11/26/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

837833

Contents

Foreword

Declaration of War

The Girl Who Dreamed of the Sun

Saviesthes

Dreaming of The Sun: An Anecdote essay

Afterword

Melancholia: Chapter 3 (an Excerpt)

Foreword

Dear Reader,

The book in your hands is a compilation of poetry, short stories, and philosophical dissertations that I’ve compiled over the past few years based on a combination of life experiences, imagination, and my insatiable thirst for dialogue and rhetoric in everyday conversations. There are a few archetypes I base a majority of this published work off of, namely ones created by the two short stories contained entitled The Girl Who Dreamed of The Sun and Saviesthes, along with an essay that my College Writing professor at Kent Salem nullified as it didn’t fit the theme of the project at hand called Dreaming of The Sun: An Anecdote.

The formermost is narrated from the first-person perspective of a grandfather in an undisclosed time and setting in the far future. A majority of the dialogue throughout the story is instigated by the narrator himself to his grandchildren, and it calls into question the nature of will amongst the unrelenting but conditional trials of a life controlled by social forces beyond one’s own control. Pay close attention to the allegories illustrated through this particular story that come into play when Aleksy brings to attention the fervent vegetation growing upon the snow-covered foothills. The unnamed girl, Ambrosia, who becomes the romanticized focal point of the dialogue is based on a real person that I came into contact with two years prior to publishing this book. I had once been told that her city was so polluted with lurid smut and smog that it made the limited view she had of the sun translucent, and that the sun became a glaring hole in the sky. Inevitably, this desire to see the sun in its fullest light drove her hopes beyond the bounds of her city: Autárkeia. Autárkiea isn’t described at length because it is not the prominent focus, so it is left unnamed. The notorious quote penned by Albert Camus in Summer (1954) that reads In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer is meant to be personified by Ambrosia’s esotericism and alienation, hence the adoption of heavy metal into her character. When I was a junior in high school, my Honors English teacher fell in love with The Girl Who Dreamed of The Sun when I turned it in as an assignment for a unit on tall tales and American Regionalism. We were supposed to write a short story that encapsulated a dialect understood by only those that read it, such as if we were telling a story to one of our friends, and so I took it into my own hands to create an entire regional dialect of my own apart from any real time and setting. The poems that follow this short story pertain to my personal experiences surrounding the adoption of that narrative both before and after meeting her in June of 2020.

The second short story, Saviesthes, reels the observer into the psyche of a living twisted anomaly of nature based on the Ancient Greek gods Hades and Persephone. The narrator here is speaking from a past-tense, third-person, omnipotent perspective to the audience in an emphatic tone meant to center itself around the vivid depictions of Saviesthes--the bastard child to Hades and Persephone. Saviesthes is condemned to Tartarus from birth, but his sheer brute force allowed him to overpower the Hecatonchires guards and behead them. Prior to the story, Savieisthes had been lurking around the depths of Tartarus, forlorn and destitute of any purpose due to the fear he instilled in any prisoner that happened to catch sight of his scorched eyes. The fact that even his misantropic counterparts, including Prometheus, had deemed him an abomination of nature drove him to the despicable act of killing his mother. The symbolism present in this unspoken encounter with Prometheus prior to the story alludes to the fear of perpetual hellfire and damnation in Abrahamic dogma set contrary to what humanity desires after Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. The poems that follow the myth of Saviesthes fall under the plethora of societal forces which work to alienate, deteriorate, and eradicate the fabric of human nature: to live freely and fervently into one’s own accountability for the actions and beliefs they choose to enact upon themselves. Whether it be organized religion, systemic racism, proxy wars, sexism, climate change, speciesism, or famine; all these topics archaically stem from the innate sadist that works in opposition to what everyone wishes to experience within the world we call our home.

The essay Dreaming of The Sun: An Anecdote speaks of personal experience. The anecdote begins with the description of an afghan I had made from scratch for Ambrosia. As the afghan grows closer to completion, it comes to represent our conception of time and the value which we tend to place on it. In a spurt of nostalgia, the reader is taken to an early place in my childhood where my father was hardly present. The development of this scenic