Lapin - Entries to an Option
Entry to an Option 1
Like standing in a dark silent room and seeing, hearing nothing. Like lying in an empty bed with the covers pulled up over your head. Like praying on your knees and knowing that no one, least of all God, is listening.
So videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate, Billy, so memory makes liars of us all.
And a whole lot like looking through a mirror and seeing behind a series of faces, some immediately familiar, but way more those of people now almost entirely strangers, people with names now forgotten whose young fresh faces have become but bare bones, the skeletal remains of a past so tentative and febrile that it threatens to crumble into dust before your very eyes.
How comes it, Billy boy, that all these memories are suddenly insufficient unto the day? How comes it, charming Billy, that the years gone-by have left your pretty dreams in tatters, your sweet young phantasies in shreds? I remember a time, Billy, when nothing seemed so easy as making dreams come true.
And perhaps, dear friend, they all came true too soon, too early for the taking. It’s a concept worth considering here in the dark and silent room. Here in the darkness, in the silence.
Entry to an Option 2
Let me put it another way. The life we have before us is both a figment and a fragment of the imagination. At best, we can at any given moment grasp but a shadow (skias) of its meaning and, even then, the very act of grasping instantly distorts and alters it beyond recognition. In this sense, we can say that everyone’s life is a fiction of their own making, that is, that their experience of their life is inevitably formed and mediated through and by means of their imagination. Memory, that most frail and forgiving (and perhaps thereby the most human) of all faculties, is itself a curious mélange of facts fused with phantasy, of convoluted imagery and contradictory ideas ordered and disordered at will and for the sake of merest convenience. And yet it is from that self-same flawed faculty upon which we are obliged to draw, as if from a poisoned well, when we seek to give form and substance to the “reality” that we call ourselves.
Indeed when we speak of ourselves or others as being the “authors of their own life,” we are tacitly acknowledging that it is we ourselves who, through innumerable acts of creativity and impossible leaps of imagination, produce the character that is our self to ourselves as well as to others. That there is truth to be discovered in both this the process and in the object created (that is to say, the life) is at once both the promise and the curse of human existence.
Like standing in a dark silent room and seeing, hearing nothing. Like lying in an empty bed with the covers pulled up over your head. Like praying on your knees and knowing that no one, least of all God, is listening.
So videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate, Billy, so memory makes liars of us all.
And a whole lot like looking through a mirror and seeing behind a series of faces, some immediately familiar, but way more those of people now almost entirely strangers, people with names now forgotten whose young fresh faces have become but bare bones, the skeletal remains of a past so tentative and febrile that it threatens to crumble into dust before your very eyes.
How comes it, Billy boy, that all these memories are suddenly insufficient unto the day? How comes it, charming Billy, that the years gone-by have left your pretty dreams in tatters, your sweet young phantasies in shreds? I remember a time, Billy, when nothing seemed so easy as making dreams come true.
And perhaps, dear friend, they all came true too soon, too early for the taking. It’s a concept worth considering here in the dark and silent room. Here in the darkness, in the silence.
Entry to an Option 2
Let me put it another way. The life we have before us is both a figment and a fragment of the imagination. At best, we can at any given moment grasp but a shadow (skias) of its meaning and, even then, the very act of grasping instantly distorts and alters it beyond recognition. In this sense, we can say that everyone’s life is a fiction of their own making, that is, that their experience of their life is inevitably formed and mediated through and by means of their imagination. Memory, that most frail and forgiving (and perhaps thereby the most human) of all faculties, is itself a curious mélange of facts fused with phantasy, of convoluted imagery and contradictory ideas ordered and disordered at will and for the sake of merest convenience. And yet it is from that self-same flawed faculty upon which we are obliged to draw, as if from a poisoned well, when we seek to give form and substance to the “reality” that we call ourselves.
Indeed when we speak of ourselves or others as being the “authors of their own life,” we are tacitly acknowledging that it is we ourselves who, through innumerable acts of creativity and impossible leaps of imagination, produce the character that is our self to ourselves as well as to others. That there is truth to be discovered in both this the process and in the object created (that is to say, the life) is at once both the promise and the curse of human existence.
posted by LifeWriter at 11:03 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home