Light Fiction

She said “You live your life too much like a bad movie”

She said “You don’t know what love is”

She said “You try too hard”

She said.

I said “Life is what love is, and what’s the point if you don’t try?”

I come back to her again, after years of silence. You get lost in the moment. You don’t understand yourself. You don’t care. I say things over and over again, in different ways. I get back moans of displaced experience, signs of her indifferent ways. Where am I supposed to go with this, I ask her in earnest. But, it’s no good, her eyes are glazed over again. She’s lost in movies and pills, and she would call them films as I look upon her in some shakespearean sense. Seeing what’s good and beautiful in a life ravaged by living. Probably more a life torn by lack of tears; her, needing something stronger to make the years of apathy and coma worthwhile.

I  found the meaning of life, I tell her. She smiles lasciviously. No, I’m serious. She continues. Well, you’ve just got to care about people and try hard. Take god out of the picture, get rid of the super-noumenal, the non-phenomenal, and everything’s so simple. The big questions get a lot smaller. We’ve spent five thousand years blowing everything out of proportion, cycling in upon ourselves, and thinking that our thoughts were real. Maybe closer to a hundred thousand. But now, like waking from a dream, like a swift kick to the balls, like finally looking in the mirror, we’re starting to understand all the amazing things: who we are, where we are, why we are. And it’s beautiful like the rainbows in oil-slicked puddles, and it’s beautiful like last night.

People talk about the end of music, the end of history, the end of people and the end of everything. And lie there and smile at the ceiling and I’ll just keep talking. This first literate culture is making us cave in on ourselves, we’re starting to see how short our range and how fat our fingers and how big the big red button that marks the end of the world. The human ear can only hear so many tones, the mind make sense of so many beats per minute, and eventually we’ll run out of ways to say things. And all the best ways will have been said. But then, also, we’ve only got so much soul, and so many ways to put emotions together. And eventually all of these will have been done. And if it weren’t for writing this would not ever have become an issue. If not for Gutenberg we would still be living every day as though the thoughts we are having are somehow unique, specially unique. And of course, you know me, I am a strong believer in uniqueness among us. But eventually everything worthwhile will have been said. Will have been said better and truer. And frankly I don’t think that we’re that far off. And will that make us better or worse? And what will be the point then?

Right now it’s easy: nothing is perfect. Be nice to people and work hard at what you love and everything will turn out great. But I’m scared of a perfect future. And I’m not satisfied by the equilibrium-breaking of the second law. I don’t trust it to work forever. Hopefully I guess we will be constrained by other physical fundamentals and we will always have something to work towards. Some new beauty. Some new revelation.

And that’s all anything is, isn’t it? Revelations in sequence. What is art without revelation? Expression and innovation are just petty words for revelation. . .