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Giorgio de Chirico, Gladiatorial Arena, 1927
At cross-purposes, wearing constellated masks, two actors perform what they
are scheduled to perform, and they may not turn to applaud each other’s skill,
even as death’s birdsong can be heard. They just turn their heads aside. In the
amphitheater that looks like downtown Worcester, they do not notice how the
small waves lap the lower steps. They do not notice that these waves are
getting bigger, that dolphins are circling the pretzel stand, that their feet are
very cold, or that their shoes had started to squeak many centuries in the past.
In spite of our great freedom, it is difficult for us to be other than who or what
we are. Collapsing the wave function, by violence crafting a location for the
socially-programmed self, we pull one story from the oceanic flux of all
potential versions of that story.
We would far prefer to believe that we are conscious. We would far prefer to
believe that our talents are our own, that our names are not detachable. We
would far prefer to believe that the ignorant hear what we say. We would far
prefer to believe that our actions all make sense, that we know where we were
born, that a luminous tide was not waiting to retrieve us, as though it were
possible to have an “up” without a “down,” or a shore without a seabed. No
artist should ever feel misunderstood. No teacher should ever feel that his gift
has gone unvalued. Things should happen when we expect that they will
happen. How troubling it is that they do not.
It would be so much easier to come equipped with all we need to know at
birth. To forget, of course, is the reason we have chosen to be born. There are
crimes that a nonexistent culture once committed, wells that we filled with
blood. There are books we wrote on the wind that we grew too drunk to
decipher. There are suns we threw into the bowels of the deep. There are
gods that we dismembered, orphans we indifferently let starve, close family
members that we struck down in a rage. There are vehicles that we
miniaturized so as to tuck them in our pockets. We have accidentally turned
these pockets inside out.
In moments of sudden illumination, we can, on an almost tactile level, feel
how all the bits and pieces of our story fit together. The satisfaction that we
feel, however, may be anything but complete, for the whole of the story can
seem to have happened to someone else. The Perfect watch from the upper
benches of the atmosphere. To themselves, they appear hunched over and
attentive, with lamp-like elbows pressed on lamp-like knees. To us, the
Perfect are no more than abstract points, just barely visible, but we can sense
that they have some say in how the drama will be judged. We would probably
go blind if we looked at them directly. It is a good thing, then, that our eyes
just barely work.
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