something kinder
Near the end of The Magician's Land,
describes the world as a "fucking awful...wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long."If I'm honest, some days I think it's worse.
Some times I think that it's the gravity of cruelty and misfortune that keeps the planets rotating in alignment around the sun. Sometimes I think that life is the universe's own kind of gallows humor, and humanity is the hangman's joke.
Maybe it's true.
Maybe we are.
But, somewhere in the direness of our circumstances, in the desperateness of our situation, in the inescapable cavalcade of our traumas, heartaches, loves, and losses, in the overwhelming hopelessness of our fates, we find a way to smirk in the face of the absurd, to wink at the arbitrary nature of the noose, and find some laughter, beauty, and meaning in the overarching insignificance of it all.
Maybe that's what makes us special.
Perhaps, even magical.
Maybe that's what makes us worth believing in after all.
Matt Haig says that "The world affects us, but it isn't quite us." He says that "There is a space inside us that is independent to what we see and where we are." It's in that space that the magic happens, that razor-thin instance that makes all the difference.
A split second of misdirection.
A hand quicker than the eye.
Everything we've been, everything we are, and everything we become emerges from "our capacity to pause between stimulus and response", says Rollo May, and "to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight". This, May says, is the source of the incantations by which we demonstrate our "capacity to create ourselves". The spell that can reshape a section of the world into the image of something kinder.
P.S. ICAD 336-339 - all collages features are available for purchase here.
Smirking at the absurd sometimes is the best move. I like the Rollo May quote about stimulus and response. Perhaps reactions is what is anticipated by the absurdity of some things. I like that line from WarGames: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
There is a space inside us that is independent . . ."
Untouchable by the world. And also, not ours to control . . .a sacred space.
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Also Duane, these palettes of earthy neutrals with shots of color are beautiful and surprising.