Cordial Discontinuity

And while I wait, I think of all the other people who are waiting. Not just in the present, but at all times. There is a wide splay of people, all waiting, through time waiting. Waiting for something other than the end of the world. Or so they think. But I know.

Personally, I don’t think of time as a process or a fluid or a space. I think of it like a block full frozen, like those pieces you can’t chunk off your windshield. And the past you and the future you, all of them, and you, they’re all frozen in time. They all exist simultaneously, even the impossible ones. Those are like the air bubbles. They lend shape and texture to the rest, form local contours, trap scents. You can look back through time at all the other frozen people, sitting or mid-stride or pre-thought or post-cry. Really, they’re all waiting. They’re waiting for the next moment, waiting for the universe to continue.

Waiting for the one time it doesn’t! That’s the never moment. It never comes, that relief. All these molecules and particles are like actors who’ve needed to be in character for gajillions of years without a single break. Let them rest! I can see their legs trembling, all shaking in unison, dancers in a forced dance forever. Even the still ones have such a grimace. They look towards the shadows but still I squint and see them, eyes full of pain. I touch my heart for them, for a moment, before I become entranced by some key figure in the front and center. It is an old hand costumed as a child, bounding towards me, joints cracking to perform once again the ritual of light entering my eyes, stimulating some familiar steps of thought. For some reason a German governess is there to the left, chanting von-toot-zree, von-toot-zree. I am swept into it and I can remember but I still forget that this is all just a production.

The moments of my life hang like beads on a catenary, so natural and taut. But I wonder if I would even notice if they were rethreaded into a different order, if a few trillion were pulled from the sequence to be reintroduced at some random point. Perhaps they could be completely scrambled, the string cut during some captive silence, and then they all spill out onto an ethereal tabletop, or even spill off such a spooky tabletop into some laughing eternal void. These…moments…spell…you!, it titters.

Why even insist on a restriction to myself? Instead of a string of only me, interleave it with others. Group us not by person, but by mood. All the pensive moments on one string, one after another in rapid fire. It’s a string of pensiveness. A string of people waiting, and you could be an entity experiencing all these moments of waiting in an arbitrary order, becoming all the different people joined by this shared non-activity. If I as a person am fully engrossed in the experience of waiting, if I am in a state of maximum waiting, to the utmost exclusion of everything else, aren’t I just the same as any other waiting person? Perhaps waiting isn’t the sexiest example. Try a person at peak orgasm instead, a mind-shattering orgasm, mind-erasing and identity-lapsing. Perhaps each of those are the same singular moment experienced by different people at different times. All strings threaded through the same, single ecstasy-bead. When I downshift into crushing heartbreak. When I straight chug a loving reunion. When I splat flat onto the battered nadir of despair. I’m not me then, I’m a moment. In those all-consuming moments my soul is fast fused with all other similar souls. What else could even be meant by outside of time.

The world has already ended. This waiting is a wish that has already been granted. You were always sitting there when you were sitting there, always waking up when you woke up, always dead when you were dead and never before. If only you could, by turning your head, look out across time rather than along it, you might see me looking at you, shrugging my shoulders, waiting with cordial discontinuity.

Yon Tame Narnia

I’ve written a lot of rants this year. Well, no. What I’ve done is I’ve stolen away to a private hiking trail which is like an unknown offshoot of a public hiking trail. By unknown offshoot I mean it’s just this one part of the trail where I walk off of the trail for about twenty minutes, navigating primarily by barklight and branchstellations, which is a bushy way of saying that I’ve gotten to know the trees around those parts. The first time and second few times I mistook a number of the local roots for dim rocks but now I know that no, those are tree roots and by now I know that I don’t even need to look at those tree roots. I can tell by the pressure and the rhythm of the pressure on my feet through the soles of my shoes, it’s so familiar. One time I went in the dusk which became in the dark and I still managed to find my way to that tall crevice I think of as an unlocked doorway to a very tame version of Narnia. It’s like Narnia except with no talking animals, no large open spaces, no convenient plot, and in fact it’s simply a small cave that I found. My main claim to it is that I don’t think anyone has ever peed in there. And I go in there and I “rant”, which really means that I talk to the stone, sometimes inaudibly. If I shout it actually hurts due to, it’s a cave not much larger than a helmet. So I either use my inside voice or my inner voice. Either way my lips get dry enough to scratch themselves and I get so hungry. For sure I’ve spit in there a couple times just to see if I had anything left. Always do.

In that darkness, one thing I heard is that not everything is possible. Most things aren’t. Most problems don’t have solutions, but I hate that though! I hate it so much that it makes me hate everything including myself and even the things that don’t exist like spiderwomen. Mathematically, it does make sense. Math teachers know that it’s incredibly easy to write a problem that can’t be solved. What takes effort is writing a problem that does have a solution. Actual math wizards dressed in numerical robes have even proven that for every solvable problem there are approximately an infinite number of unsolvable ones. It’s a very disproportionate possibility space. There are these thin lines of safety where things can make sense and everything else is a hazy mess labeled “don’t expect anything from this”, “here there be…not sure”, “someone will fix this later”. Only when we teach it, we teach it in a very distorted way where we make the small, thin, good part seem huge and all-encompassing, like how when ants have dinner parties and talk all posh.

Of course, we kind of have to teach it that way. Or else kids would catch on even less than they do. Knowing how stupid kids can be, we have to give them every excuse to be smart. One thing you’ll notice about kiddy movies is that winning is always possible in the end. It’s mostly a matter of knowing the right people, stealing a really cool sword, or having an unhealthy amount of determination. This also goes for adult movies and fiction in general. It’s an overwhelming bias fiction has, a very broadly shared positive narrative that things can make sense. I would argue that it’s a bias that has grown stronger over time, but this is quite hard to prove. Instead, I will invite the reader to reflect on the enormous number of stories they have encountered throughout life. Even in the counterexamples I think you will often spy hidden support for optimism, cleverness, and effort.

It isn’t a bad thing. But sometimes too much of a not bad thing is a not good thing. I apologize for the mirrored words. In dreary, homely, tame Narnia we don’t have bad and good, only not bad and not good. At the risk of being controversial, let’s talk politics. In the political world there are stories as well, like the story of the lowly impoverished unwanted citizen who climbed uphill both ways to start a smash hit of a business. Later they get married and tell this story to their kids who then grow up to never do anything worthwhile and eventually perish with perfect haircuts lamenting their own lack of awesomeness. We all know the story, and some believe it, some don’t. I would say that those who have mainlined a steady diet of easy fiction will tend to believe it more often than those who haven’t. Because the story of the triumphant underdog is more than mere escapism. It shifts individual expectations and therefore group expectations. It shapes private conversations and therefore public conversations. There are people in this world who make a point to not partake of fiction. It affects them as well. These stories, when out in force and with no counterbalance, become a preemptive strike against those same lowly people who feed on such narratives. And when I say lowly people, I’m including everyone that exists because we’re all of us small who started small. It’s a very fun form of victim blaming, these messages of hope, because it’s indirect enough to go unnoticed. You start saying well, isn’t it my fault I didn’t do better? If I had tried harder, it wouldn’t have happened like this. Even if you get angry and blame the world, deep down you know it’s your own fault. You know it. You aren’t cut out to be a main character. If you didn’t get a happy ending, you probably didn’t deserve one.

Take it from someone who never had to try, someone for whom failure wasn’t even an option. I could have tried way less than I did, and still ended up completely fine. I could have tried none at all. That’s privilege baby. Yet I see people all the time filled with self-loathing. They choke down full loaves of it, because they believe they messed up. People who were abused, or not abused and just neglected, or they were poor growing up, or other people hated them their whole life for being a different color or a bad body shape, or they got in an accident and half-died. These people didn’t mess up. Sure, they probably did stupid, inept, and immoral things. But none of those were the main cause of the outcome. Winning was never on the table. Some problems simply don’t have solutions. Most don’t. And then there’s my case, which is like a test where you can write anything you want for a passing grade. Does this make sense?

This is not a good world we live in. There are war crimes, and mass killings, and in the places without open violence there are abused and sexually exploited children, enormous power imbalances with neither side deserving, even diet ice cream that will still make you fat. There are people who try to do good their whole lives and only end up making things worse. This place we’re in isn’t set up for justice or satisfaction or meaning. It’s a bad place. If this were a game and you were told all the rules and were offered to play it, you would never reasonably agree to it. Go look up some of the ways that people have been tortured, to death, on a whim, or by accident, or on purpose. Nothing is worth that. Rollercoasters aren’t worth that. Lemon meringue isn’t worth that. Growing old with the one you love isn’t worth that. What sort of sick bargain would that be.

Of course, nothing I say will put a stop to the world or any of the bad that is in it. My point is not to fix anything, mostly because I don’t believe it’s a fixable anything. I believe it’s unfixable. But it somehow makes it even worse to tell people that it can be okay. Because for people like me, that’s fine. It’ll make me feel slightly better and let me go about my day, continuing on until my last day. But there are people out there who, it crushes them, grinds them bare, like rubber off a shoe. It’s an added weight on top of everything, and it’s stacked so far up there I feel like they aren’t even aware of it. Then well meaning people say, you can do it! Express your yes. I’ll show you a movie about a squirrel that saved a forest! You need to read this cleaned up version of Blood Meridian called Posture for Dummies. Look at this gradeschool girl who restarted the sun so that her parents didn’t get divorced. Just hope! Take it from my favorite Walking Dead character: I believe, because I have to believe to go on, and therefore I go on. In the depths of the necromancer’s lair our young hero is bloodied but not broken. Teeth grit, the young hero summons the power of a mother’s love. This manifests in the form of nothing, because that isn’t something that can manifest. Puzzled, the necromancer steps over to the mumbling youth and gives one last good smack of the bone staff. Clean this up, minions. And find out who it was that tricked this poor kid into coming down here. This was just depressing, honestly.