PROSE GROUP 1 Text 1 (Fragment): "Should Have Died Back Then" (Part 1)

1. Should Have Died Back Then (Part 1)

SHOULD HAVE DIED BACK THEN

(PART ONE)

He should have died back then, he now knew. He had realized it with quite some certainty by now, the moment she left him standing there was the one crucial moment that changed something inside of him, made him different. He should have proceeded, back then, with what his heart was telling him; the only way out was the ultimate way out. The rules of tragedy demanded for such an ending; but he had refused it, he had refused to make it happen and accept his fate, thus prolonging his existence beyond the time given to him. He had tried to cheat life, he had been stealing second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour; days, months, more than a year by now. He was just lying to himself, all that time, constantly telling himself that everything, once, would be fine. A lie, just another lie. There are no second chances, there's just the one.

Lying was he to himself, trying to lull himself into complacency while he was lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, but sleep had become his most unreliable companion, was deserting him time and again, to the extent that it almost made him crazy; he felt like becoming crazy indeed, losing his mind over the hours wasted lying on the bed, under this uncomfortable, heavy thin blanket, wasted even with watching late-time television of the more obscene kind, or late-night repetitions of those daily talking freak shows, more obscene even than any pornography could be; stupid soon-to-be con being proud of himself having cheated his equally stupid wife; moronic elementary-school-dropout telling out in the open of the criminal ways he was making money (hopefully with some doughnut-eater watching the show, preparing for an arrest afterwards); stupid little girl only seeking men with money, the length of a penis being the only size relevant to her, and money, as it is commonly known, appearing to be the most obvious treat to magnify the male reproductive and urinating organ. Yet somehow, of all the freak stories out there, every single one, however insensitive, stupid, ugly or beautiful, young or old, of whatever gender, seemed to be able to do the one thing missing in his very own life: Not being alone.

Should this be telling him something, should it make him aware in some way or another of some secret ingredient missing, of some psychological, be it not physiological, defect within himself disallowing him from pursuing the one thing he was seeking and wanting most? Love?

And still, what about love. The most common topos in culture, throughout all of history and geography, besides crime, religious zeal, war, death and cruelty of course, should that be the one thing torturing him right to the brink of insanity? Why this obsession, why this craving, why this declaration of defeat his logical mind had apparently signed a long time before? All you need is love, yea, whatever. Still, indeed it seemed true: How else to explain the loneliness inside of him, the emptiness and constant lack of initiative? A treatise on the topic of love, would that be his way out, finding something explaining it all, unlocking all those dirty little secrets the world had been protecting over and over again? His hopes, plans, preparations having all gone, all so hoped for, all so ventured, all intended, all invented, all invested, all so dreamed of, all so planned for, all it all broke it down, broke apart and smashed right down so, fell apart and down the gutter all just went - was this it? Was this the ever-powerful defeater of humankind? Was this the end of the dream, or the beginning of a nightmare? Was not he haunted by the dream itself, a dream superimposing itself over him, dwarfing him in his quest for a better future, in his quest for fulfilment, his search for someone to share everything with?

And still, he was being skeptical about the entire process; maybe that was his problem after all, he was thinking way too much, contemplating over each and everything, reflecting and probing and questioning and deconstructing; yet to what end, what would it have to come down to, finally? Was it simply biology, a function of a body craving for biological fulfilment, sticking itself into another, biologically compatible and genetically fitting one to spread its seed and procreate itself, one deoxyribonucleic acid seeking another to mix themselves up and create a new one with an history far too old and a future far too determined by what had happened. The curses of the past carried over from generation to generation, spawning new life from ones ages old already, the entirety of so-called civilization inscribed already, all the fears and hopes and obsessions coming right along genetically, only to be reinforced not so much later culturally. There is no tabula rasa, there is no forgetting, neither originality or the even more laughable concept of freedom. Liberty, perhaps, but freedom, never. We're caught in the web spun by us and our foremothers and forefathers; woe to the messenger who begs to differ. With all the ignorance around you, how could you ever suspect that anyone could be interested in anything else than ignorance again? Truth is for the insane, for those who take the risk of being called heretics and, nowadays only figuratively of course, we're all so enlightened, for those who want to be burned on a stake fuelled by the hybris of knowing what's right without wanting to subject their knowledge to reasonable doubt; don't you see, Satan, the big fairy creature invented to make us adhere to the powers that be, has been mixed up with Diabolos, with doubt.

You know what, frell that. Nothing's gonna change, ever, outside; and he knew that, it was the inside of him that mattered. Yet what if what's outside's just a reflection of what's inside? Living the dream, dreaming the life; and what if the dream was a nightmare, and life was death? Is it so surprising that sometimes it's the sweet nothing which is so much more attractive than any of the empty somethings surrounding us?

Where was I? Should I switch now from third person (the somehow objectified, and de-subjectified viewpoint) to the first? Would that be more honest, or would it just be some game to be played? What's the narration anyway, you may ask, and I counter, what narration! As if I'd be interested in inventing some fucked up story just to pretend something to have happened which, in fact didn't (or did, but told in the same distorted way as memory is always a liar). You see, funny thing, you can't even, by the rules of narrative, of fiction, identify the I with the author; isn't that a treat. The I in a story or poem's always a lyrical I, a pseudo-I, a lying I, an I that's in the eye of the beholder, not the writer, and the writer, don't even get me started, draws on all this cultural background she or (for reasons of political correctness) it is subjected to. Where was I?

I should have died back then. Once you see your life not anymore in loneliness but in the union with someone else, and that union proves to be either an illusion or an obsession or a distortion or a negation or nothing else but a load of pain and - beware - commitment, or something asking for truth, once you've seen it and are thrown out of it again, what's the point? Being alone is as little an option than trying to fuck yourself through the entire city. What does it come down to? How could I possibly start looking for the big emptiness again with having been so close to seeing the truth?

He (for matters of convenience and convention now turning to the third person again) had realized, maybe, the one thing that could have saved him: Love isn't just devotion or blindness or being able to see completely, it's something even more dangerous: The proof and constant reminder that you, yourself, are incomplete without the other, that you, yourself, will never be able to become something that matters without surrendering yourself to somebody else. In love, you die and are reborn to something different, but that new something cannot survive in a separated way. A broken heart isn't just that, it's a broken soul: You are separated from the unity you had accepted as the new reality, and whether it be real or not, that unity cannot be broken painlessly. He should have died back then physically, because he had died anyway as the person he was before and the person he thought they'd become: He remained stuck between those two poles, between the not-anymore and the not-yet; so that the final act would just be the confirmation of what had actually become the case already: And if it weren't for something else, something unspecifiable that continues to hold him back, he would have made that last step already. Instead, he was borrowing time, dying slowly every day.

(to be continued)

April 21st [HTML Version]