Amor Fati: A Pinocchio Retelling

The horse’s hooves hammered on the dusty road with a determined trot with Pinocchio and Adone bobbing on its back, along with the bags they carried that were attached to the saddle of the horse. Dauntingly large fields of grass, sparse trees and bushes surrounded them as the sun assaulted them with its raging heat that humbled all that it touched. A large amount of fear took hold of the crickets’ calm demeanor as he clung to Pinocchio’s metalworks in fear of being rattled to death. Thankfully, the song of Pinocchio’s blossoming heart eased him, knowing that he was doing the right thing in guiding his pure soul. Nothing else mattered to Celso other than preserving Pinocchio’s goodness, especially through dark times. He was eternally grateful that the wooden boy was able to critically think on his own and that he made the right decisions.

As the cricket was perusing through some books in Pinocchio’s mind, a strange hum came from the window in his clockwork spirit. He placed a feather in between the pages and walked to the window to see that the cozy room was within a large body of moving water. The hum grew closer, revealing itself as an army of fish whose scales danced with the sunlight. But the closer he looked, the more disturbed he became by their uncanny designs. Some contained human qualities such as a nose or eyeballs or teeth. While it was hard to fully study the strangeness, he was wildly upset from the grotesque nature of them despite their shimmering scales, each one twinkling with the echo of a dream.

“Would you mind explaining what you dreamt last night, Pinocchio?”

Celso’s wings twitched as he slowly leaned his head out further to see if there was any more disturbing activity around the room. He moved away when he saw the watery shadows below dance like ink in the water. The fire-like shadows matched the rhythm of Pinocchio’s grating clicks of anxiety. Just as he catched the pattern, the sound of what he thought were wind-chimes clashed in his ears.

“A stranger spoke to me in my dreams about the Field of Miracles…”

Celso did his best to suppress his surprise when they both knew who the supposed stranger was, the metallic noises growing more cacophonous.

“In the end, he told me to bury the five golden coins I found in Mangiafuoco's corpse in the Field of Miracles.”

In a flash of lightning, it all came together. One of the two bickering prisoners he saved came into his dreams and told him of that special place. Yet even in the moment he saved them, he didn’t know if Kon would let go of his will to exact revenge. The intense fire in his spirit didn’t know anywhere else to go but towards the destruction of something. Then, in analyzing the fire in the man’s spirit, he noticed its turquoise color, the same turquoise color that set fire to the stage of their last play.

Roaring clicks of worry ravaged his wooden body, unconsciously wrapping his arms tighter around Adone’s slim waist. Despite the warmth, Pinocchio found a strange comfort in the sweat that began to soak on the man’s back with a lack of disgust. Adone, however, quickly noticed the sudden anxiety the doll exuded and instinctively craned his neck down to see the wooden arms looped around him.

“You’re clicking seems to be relentless, Pinocchio. Is something wrong?” the harlequin asked.

“Oh, It’s just- uh…” the wires in his throat felt like they were scrambled from the furious whirling of the cogs.

“It’s just that I can’t shake this unidentifiable fear I have buried in my head. I feel emptier as more of those bitter thoughts seep in.”

Adone sighed a hum in understanding and bitter empathy, loosening Pinocchio’s tight grip into a firm hold to stabilize himself on the trotting horse.

“Scared for the unknown?”

From the word alone, parts of his machinations squealed from the tension. The sound was enough of an answer for Adone, who placed his fleshly hand on the wooden one of Pinocchio’s around his waist.

“The way anxiety works is that it works with you by working against you. The trick is to not accept what it gives you as the only truth. It makes plenty of other possibilities seem pointless, so it's best to try and distance yourself from the anxiety rather than reach for something else. Through the distance you’ll naturally reach something better.”

The anxiety still swirled in Pinocchio’s mind and rambled his cogs, but the sentiment still split the dark clouds that gathered in his stormy mind to reveal the warm sunlight of hope. Even the winds that rushed past them felt a bit crisper and cooler than before.

The ebony horse with a dark brown luster assumed a gentle walk as Adone leaned back and gently pulled the tassel towards him. After giving quick instructions to Pinocchio, the wooden boy grabbed the navigation music box and wound it up to check if they were on the right track. When the first notes began to sing, the ghost of a pink fairy flew out of the music box and made a line of fuschia colored light towards the horizon. Adone groaned into the heavens as Pinocchio gently placed the music box back into the pouch. When he heard the click of the locking mechanism, Adone kicked the legs of the horse to make it neigh and bolt towards where the fairy’s essence flew. If Pinocchio wasn’t bound by Adone via a belt, the wooden doll would have flown into the air like an autumn leaf.

Shadows evaded the raging light in the everblue and forsake them as their horse ran through the open fields. Up until this point, Pinocchio had never rode on a horse or had even seen one run like the one he was on. To him, it felt like he was channeling the horse’s animalistic energy to do what it was born, designed and bred for. Dark memories of Martino filter through the channeled joy to fill him with a sickening disgust. He began to understand the guardsman’s speech on Martino’s authentic way of life, but the visions of the grotesque joy that that crooked doll felt as it ripped their victims limb from limb still made his insides churn.

“Does authenticity have to be so disgusting?” Pinocchio thought, inviting the ghost of the cricket into his own to expand his knowledge.

“Wel, that depends.” The cricket chirped, knowing exactly who he was referring to, “Authenticity to an animal is easy, but for a human it is a lot more complex than for an animal, for humans can house many temperaments and hunger for any and all sorts of desires that animals can’t possibly dream of.”

“How can someone ever enjoy seeing such a disgusting display of amorality? Doesn’t that go against everything I’ve been taught about what it means to be a human?”

“A lot separates animals from humans, but they’re still bound by the laws of flesh. Humans have a greater potential for a much cleaner grace, or authenticity as you put it. Humans are also more cruel than any animal because they can betray themselves and others the most.”

Celso morphed his body into that of a human's to comfortably lie a long bed as he ensconced himself in the warmth of the hearth within Pinocchio. A primordial hum echoed through every part of the lavished chamber of geometric impossibilities he resided in.

“What you view as disgusting is simply you viewing the world through the myopic lens of a human being, which is perfectly fine. Through their greater cognitive power, they are able to meticulously classify all kinds of things they see and don’t see. The very existence of classifications such as that of good and bad shows how desperate humans are to try and interpret the world despite lacking the abilities to do so. They think that cognitive abilities like cognition, a critical mind, consciousness and a conscience is sufficient, but that only deludes them into thinking they can figure anything and everything out. It would be like stripping the legs off of this powerful stallion; it would lose its function and its most potent asset. You can humorously classify humans as slabs of meat and bones infused with a chaos so great that they can’t ever dare to fully decipher its complexity. Using the word complexity would be an insult to its magnitude and magnitude is an insult to its being in the universe.”

For that moment, Pinocchio thought that Celso helped him glimpse into that primeval chaos he was talking about. Slipping into realms the mortal mind can’t put into words or translate into sensations, he planted himself into the womb of life and made his roots pierce the veil of death. Lost in a dream of the undreamable, he got a taste of what it was to be human all too human.

Pinocchio’s metallic snore sounded like crackling fire to Adone, the same warm comfort of it invading his nerves as he rode on. His wide rimmed hat couldn't save him from the sun as it pierced light through the cracks of his psyche, illuminating what he didn’t wish to see. Cecilia’s smile became burned in his retinas after their last encounter, conquering his gaze as he could only see her in the fields around him. From the amount of sweat he produced, it felt as though his scars were bleeding profusely as they ached. In the wake of the past’s presence, the gentle wind of the future was enough to kindle a fire in his heart. It was like a flower that bloomed within him, one carrying the scent of change, hope, life.

In the rage of the heat, his mind began to seek refuge in the rhythm of the hooves with the howl of the light. The further he went, the louder the melody became, swallowing his entire mind until he only heard the clopping of hooves. As the rhythm seemed to multiply every second to become a cacophony, Adone noticed a scent attached to the color of Pinocchio’s eyes, containing none the charm of the doll’s gaze. Instead, it reminded him of the turquoise fire that burnt the stage, immediately instilling a profound dread in him when he also heard the color in the terrible cacophony. It transformed from hooves to a mixture of heavy raindrops and meat sizzling in its own fat. Before he knew it, he heard the laughs of a man and a woman as the movement on the horse felt like the ebb and flow of his body riding watery waves.

The rustle of leaves and birdsong sent Pinocchio’s languid mind back to reality, where his turquoise eyes landed on a white blackbird who was hopping from potted plant to potted plant. Its chipper song shocked his senses back into wakefulness after feeling so distant just a moment ago. Yet with every passing second, the distance between him and that dream increased until it became nothing more than a minor fleeting laps in his cognition. All of his sensations embraced the serenity of the flora around him along with the sun whose burning rays pierced him less than before. As he arose from the platform that could have easily been mistaken for his final resting place, he noticed a large canvas on a stand with a palette plate dyed in dried oil paints of earthy tones. Pinocchio couldn’t help but feel naked after looking at the painting, as if seeing a piece of him he didn’t know was missing and exposing itself for the world to see. Insecurity and fear of what others would think of him infiltrated his head. How they would call him a monster, a sickly creature that can’t find their way in life. A being that shouldn’t even exist who struggled with accepting its own existence. Something he was that he despised to see around him. Fury overpowered his serenity, kicking the canvas to the ground to make it one with the flora surrounding him.

“That’s not me! That’s not me! No! No! It’s… I’m… It’s repulsive!”

Pinocchio quickly grabbed his head in fear of it splitting open with scorn and self-loathing. It felt like he bore witness to a part of himself he wished he never could’ve related to. That he never wanted to have. To shield himself from bursting open, he hugged himself and sunk his wooden fingers into his clothes and gripped with unimaginable strength. The urge to rip himself apart, to rip off the part he saw of him, was all-consuming. The all too familiar stranger in the painting mocked him, clinging to him like a shadow and nestling itself in his deepest cracks.

“Don’t you think it’s beautiful?” a woman's voice echoed. Pinocchio’s world crashed all around him and thinking it’s all a nightmare, chose to ignore or fully acknowledge from who it came from. He covered his eyes from the world around him to find solace in the nothingness he wished to invade.

“No! It’s disgusting!” he shrieked.

“... Then that just means that it has fulfilled its purpose. The truth is often quite painful, especially if it's a truth that someone rejects so strongly.”

“It’s- It’s not true! I’m not like that. How can you make me feel so defiled with nothing more than paint? You don’t even know me!”

The woman snickered, “And do you truly know yourself?”

The wooden boy fell silent.

“I just painted what I saw in you and it was beautiful, even if you don’t see it. To me, it is the masterpiece that stands above all over masterpieces. Besides, I know more about you than you think.”

When his head whipped to the other side to face the woman, she faded away with ethereal grace and left him that distinct smile as her turquoise hair flowed like a flame before fully vanishing from his sight.

All that time, Pinocchio begged to get rid of that part of him he was disgusted by. He begged to be freed from carrying such darkness. But when the lady with turquoise hair appeared and disappeared, he felt like a hole was made in his chest that couldn’t be filled. A feeling of incompletion he wished to bury deeper than any truth he was forced to confront before. Absorbing the fragrance of the flowers and letting it exfoliate the chaos in his mind, he breathed in deeply and thoroughly in an attempt to clear his mind from the episode.

“The more you resist your true nature, the deeper the hole will grow.”

Staring at the painting, he was pierced by his own gaze.

“It may seem scary, as if that void will swallow you whole once you’re near it. But the closer you are, the more you embrace it, the smaller it becomes.

The lady with turquoise hair let that piece of knowledge usher in his soul like an undying echo. Despite the vagueness, the wooden boy took it without a second thought and glared at the painting one last time before walking away from it. With a lighter spirit, he explored the botanical garden domed by glass walls with elaborately designed ribs that held the large sheets of glass together. The emerald paradise, too, was like another part of him he was able to see all around him.