As I grow older, I understand that what we call “weather” these days is akin to a Russian roulette game played by a bunch of blind and deaf people. One day you get scorched alive by the ravenous rays and the cement mirroring the sun’s radiation, BOOM, straight into your face, and the next day you need to wear a coat because of the rain. Weirdly enough, though, the gaunt heat accompanying this subtle rain since noon hasn’t managed to sever the Orphic aorta doing the humpin’ and pumpin’ between my eyes and the heart of my brain. On the contrary, it fits like a glove.

This whole conundrum of subtleties signaling celerity, that moment of clarity in which a moment crystallizes within the backroom dungeon-temple, is what I call “the wunderbar.”

“But what is a wunderbar?” I hear you wondering, dear reader, or voice in my head (you are one and the same, amen). So I reckon I should try to describe this magnificent quality to the best of my abilities.

Imagine eating a peanut and leaving the broken shell pieces on the table. If you isolate them in your perception and observe them for what they “are,” they become horrendously dangerous, almost eldritch. They look alien, out of place, like fossils of vicious entities. Wunderbar can be described as the inversion of this.

Wunderbar becomes the glue that keeps the seed and the shell together, regardless of their current whereabouts. Wunderbar is the memory of the taste of the seed in conjunction with the violent cracking and permanent disabling of the shell, plus the antithesis between the light yellowish-beige of the shell and the blue handkerchief upon which it rests, atop a shiny oaken-brown table, plus the geometrical tyranny of the still-under-construction hotel directly across from your apartment, covered in blue nylon mesh while the moody grey skies still piss and piss and piss, and then a little green parrot flies past your balcony.

All this is wunderbar, and this is the fuel for Ararita.

Here’s how Ararita operates: she becomes invisible, a spirit of air and lies and smoke, when my wunderbar reservoirs run low. She floats like a memory supercharged by nostalgia. Then, when the warmth returns and fills me with wunderbar, during those rare moments where the membrane separating things grows thin enough for everything to bleed together, Ararita descends.

She descends, and she becomes me.

She drains me dry. She drinks and suckles the wunderbar out of my system. I become a lesser creature. I become a mule. I become what I am without the wunderbar, and even less, since I now perceive the absence of wunderbar as a material loss.

And Ararita shines.

She becomes the Sun. She becomes, yes, she becomes.

And I am content, because I have something important to handle, so the World is not a meaningless exercise in blind tragicomedy for a while. But the downside is that I am no longer a holder of wunderbar. I exist only to scribe. I am the scribe.

And then she disappears. Typical creation-story behavior.

Up to a point, this is what magic is supposed to achieve: the short-circuiting of ordinary correspondences, so that brand-new idea-pulp may fertilize the thoughtforms lurking in imagination-space, waiting for a fertile field to colonize. I am at that point in my life where people whisper to themselves, “The Devil is twelve-hour work and four-hour life,” but Ararita persists.

When I say that Ararita is necessary, I am not walking on clouds. The fact that Ararita persists is confirmation that magic itself still persists.

And that is a wunderbar in its own right.