“…shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.”
I’ve never experienced boredom in a way that I would consider problematic. I’ve never had much patience with people who announce that they are bored to anyone, online or in proximity. What I hear them saying is, “Attention: I lack imagination and have no interior life of substance with which I can engage.”
The corollary which naturally follows in my mind is, “You are the hostage of my intellectual paucity,”
I have, I think, throughout much of my life misjudged such people in some measure. In fact, it may be that my skill-set is so heavily weighted to negotiating the alternate routes in my own cognitive neighborhood, my false pride holding up the banners of my interior castles behind which I construct the myriad details no others can see that render my mental scenery less and less permeable to me, that I have been the victim of an incredible feat of self-deception and mis-direction.
There are now moments in which those people I discounted in the past appear as if upon a distant shoreline, still plainly visible but too far for me to reach, I shout and wave my arms, I bellow into megaphones all along my parapets. I even fire my cannons. I look through the glass that magnifies their forms, and I can at times even make out their features. They periodically stop and gaze across the water in my direction, the gulf ever widening between us, and from time to time I might even discerrn what amounts to recognition in the expressions they offer. But it is always in the nature of, “Is that Frank? Is he still working on that world he was building for so long? What’s he on about, then? You know, it always sounded interesting, and from, what we could tell, parts of it were even quite nice, even beautiful. But nothing of any real substance ever issued from it that would have given the rest of us an opportunity to set down our self-absorption and see what he sees, to know how we correspond, to enlarge our own, and his experience of life.”
“Perhaps, he is going to trot something out before he checks out for good, You know, I’d be interested in knowing what he’s been holding back all this time. It’s really a bit selfish on his part.”
“Well,yes, but that’s his schtick, you know. He whittled little baubles and trinkets from time to time and tossed them out to passers by. He even lured some individuals in intermittently, curious to see what great works he might be constructing, what ornate fixtures might exist in his Great Halls and cathedrals. It’s plain for anyone to see that with a skyline like that, and with the intricacies visible in the small carvings and unfinished sketches he left outside the gates for public view, even if unintentionally, that he possessed the necessary skills and talents to accomplish much.”
“What a shame it would be if after what amounted to a life lived long enough to be a manufactory of masterpieces he remained the boy afraid to dance or improvise, the man so ashamed of what he perceived to be his own lack of authenticity that he mumbled when he could have spoken in tongues sufficient to command a cohort of angels…”
“Let’s not get carried away, dear.”
“Well, we did always think it would be nice to see what he was capable of and to know what he’d been building all that time. If he passes off the scene without leaving a pathway open, then he’s nothing but another Potemkin.”
“Well. don’t you see though? Let’s assume for the sake of argument fhat he is, in fact, a Potemkin. It’s all a sham, The entire creation of his life’s efforts a facade. He perhaps doesn’t recognize that all those props, and the characters who jump from place to place to present new city-scapes at each stop are the bones of an entirely new creation with lives of their own that tell their own stories if he would but step aside and simply let them. The whittling and sketching that drove the speculation was the natural product of his failure to recognize that he did not have to see the results of creation complete in his mind in order to begin the works. He was supposed to open the gates and let the myriad inhabitants of his worlds come out into the light and show themselves and tell their own stories. He only needs to write it down. Let them jam and dance…”
“oh, not dance. His self-centered fears would never allow him to risk such an awkward display.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“Well, how so.”
“Consider our own conversation. How many of us are there to begin with? Who is saying what?”
“It doesn’t really matter. I am the voice of God.”
“Oh, shut up, Robert. You’re the voice of Frank, who thinks he is the voice of God. Which, he may be, but only in some vague sense that has no direct bearing on a moment that for our scribe is epiphanatic.”
“That’s not even a word, Charles.”
“It certainly is! This is my Mother Tongue, Linda. I know it inside and out. And all you need as evidence are the tears and snot being flung everywhere as he struggles with the compressed nature of a laptop keyboard and the lack of sensation in his fingers. He knows he waited too long to give us voice, because he was afraid of looking ridiculous,”
:”But who are we really, Charlie?”
“It doesn’t matter. You know how in dreams you are certain you are imagining your mother, but when you check it with some text on interpretation you discover that it’s usually someone else who informs those characters in your unconscious mind?”
“Mind blown…”
“Can it, Cecil. Go have another hit.”
“But there is none. It’s been weeks”
“Well, go wish you had another hit. You knew if you laid off it long enough that this would all wake up and begin to give itself voice(s).”
“Yes, but I’m never prepared. I can’t manage the flow, and I can’t make sense of any of it. I don’t know what story we’re even trying to tell, and I’m worried that I won’t be able to wow anyone with a clever turn of phrase or some descriptive acrobatics.”
“Cecil, your Frank is showing too clearly.”
“I know, but I think we’re done here for the moment. We should maybe retreat from this littoral and once more fade into the milling crowd and become indistinct figures in that blinding light.”
“Cecil, could you BE more pretentious?”
“Apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree!” Cecil retorted.
“That was actually a quince, Cecil.” Robert interjected.
“It was a medlar, Robert.” said Linda, “And there were five of you in a row once. I don’t even think you’re a legit character. Frank! Please take over here. We have to wrap this up, and you have to call your attorney. You get a pass to return to the grinding dailiness of life.”
And so they return to the crowd of Millers.
When I met Mac, I told him that I approved of van life, because it seemed “self-contained”. He countered that this was not an end to be desired in itself, but I forget his exact line of argument. However, I think I have arrived at the same point in my own way.
George once told me that my interests were by their very nature lonesome and solitary. However, he didn’t say it in a way to discourage the pursuit of my goals, so much as to prepare me in some fashion so that I could remember it whenever I might look up and be tempted to imagine I was unmoored and drifting away from human company. I miss George. I miss Mac. I am a little anxious about talking to my attorney, but only because it represents an acknowledgment that I will be embracing more of that institutional dailiness which has punctuated my entire adult life at fairly regular intervals.
I don’t feel like I’m dying today, but I think I am. And I believe perversely that I should be evincing an identifiable decline to match the narrative I’m selling to the world and to myself. I vaguely sense that by doing this I am missing the mark and dooming myself unnecessarily, but such is the nature of my limited imagination.
Leave a Reply