narratives

Hello friends. I don’t have a grand ideal nor story today. Frankly I’m quite comfortable with the death of all narratives, aren’t you?

You could pick up… let’s grab the Kindle™… The Crisis Of Narration and flip through the first couple of chapters, but sometimes it seems like, how to describe it…

Are you aware of the big-endians and the little-endians? From Gulliver’s Travels. It’s a divisive topic in from the land of Lilliput, about how to crack open a boiled egg. Whether you crack it from the big end or the little end, and wars could be fought over this. They were. Kings lost.

Does the death of narrative mess up the average individual? Sure, if you still want to be such an individual. If you want to follow whatever is best for the individual, and which way to crack the egg, and hoped somehow to recruit others. What’s a narrative without a subject, or a listener to follow the subject and harvest the take-aways?

It’s nothing, though there doesn’t seem to be any rigidity to your form. Cells dying and reviving each moment. You say some parts of your body are surely indicative of you, and which parts mere extraneous functions, though there doesn’t seem to be an anchor. We could zoom out a million years and feel whatever remains of us found in flowers, tree sprouts.

Yes, the inability to have a cohesive storyline amongst the info overload is far more divisive than the big and little endians. Yet the titans look warmly down, wondering why it’s such a big deal for the populace frittering about and below.

We could talk about how to revive narrative. We could resummon old myths, dot them, throw away the hubris of the (post-)modernists and find ourselves nestled in tales of yore. Stand up some new villages, make some stand-up folks and some eschatological assurances. Why not! We love to animate ghosts here, don’t we?

That’s what we’re doing, in some sense. Most novels are past tense. We love to roam about pasts, potentials, futures and alternatives. But never here. A banal wink. But who wants to return when it all leads to this anyway?

Let the narratives end. Who cares. One may have once tuned in, once logged into Netflix in this random city apartment and reviving old anime and it doesn’t seem to last longer than an episode and a half. They were binged ten years ago…

To keep doing gymnastics on how to keep it all tied together. To still attach and unattach and breakdown at funerals. Looking at Christmas trees upon the city square so lights up all of these moments of a child you aren’t sure ever existed, and the movie plays again, and the movie links to another one, and now one could realize, standing at the bridge, one may as well be seeking the narrative that doesn’t end. They all end though, don’t they? It’s nice to torch these thoughts away; even yesterday is irrelevant to the hour.

Maybe it’s not about whether or not it’s ending. Perhaps whether or not one will see the blood pool as the bridge ends, or however much you rearrange the alphanumeric signals you’ll call on an alien civilization to help turn this world’s page.

Writing may be a form of prayer, but there’s no need to pray if there’s nothing more to save. There’s nothing, because it’s no longer narrated. Language terminating, and no more heroes and villains. No more twisted emotions and tortures, regrets, anxieties, validation and its travesties. Please let one rest.

If one could post this and it meant the whole site went down with it, the whole Internet imploded, that’s fine. It’s fine if it served its function. We’re just serving ours.

While we still roam about our hypotheticals until they surely turn actual, well, isn’t it great what’s pending?

You don’t need to do anything anymore. Everything is done now. The story of all stories is wrapped up now, the story you can surely discard and now submerge into wordless experience. Things may happen, but there’s no need to explain it, categorize and stitch it. To be born again. I wish I could smash my tongue and fingers if it meant such a trade.

Why salvage whatever was? You can keep trying to build the sandcastles while the storms rage. Go ahead. But why? The wordless and empty fullness awaits.