The Expectation of Interpretation

He was the last person I expected do that. On the other hand what were those expectations based on, not evidence anyway, assumptions, presumptions, impressions, abstract and theory with no substance, expectations which were based on other expectations, a trembling tower miraculously suspended with no base at all to rest on.

To describe him, we’ll pretend we’re at a party. He didn’t  speak to many people. They encouraged him first and then felt frustrated. They gave up. Rather than simply give up, they talked, they bitched. They made assumptions he did not like them. They decided to dislike him based on the false assumption that he did not like them.

As if a reason to hate someone is because they do not  love you. Something reasoned by its opposites absence. Reasoning something is beautiful just because it is not ugly. On the other hand, emotion, it’s a whole different ball game. If we had discovered a way to defeat it with reason, I would make the reasoned estimate that we would have done it already.

So why didn’t  he speak to many people? He had too many expectations and he feared disappointing himself. They bubbled up inside, the urgencies in every moment and intention with every word. Conflict surged inside, the drive for action competed with the desire to avoid, to avoid what he saw as the inevitable result; failure and all of that inner turmoil led to an external paralysis. All of that paralysis led to social isolation to everyone until he met me, yet feelings linger, they remain and cling even when their causes are eliminated and they influence the very way we think, the way we interpret all occurrence. All of this, was something he himself could not even express so how is it that I know this?

We discovered a way. I met him in college in medical school. We used to perform autopsies to figure out causes of death but there were so few bodies to examine, physical ailments and illness were all but absent and all who died, died naturally and painlessly (due to technology to predict death and the consequent administration of drugs to alleviate associated pain). Yet suicide rates were rising so much. Suicide was prevented in no case as the individual was deemed to  have full body autonomy and was even helped to achieve death painlessly on expression of the intention. We did not examine those bodies. The cause of suicide traditionally were an area for genetic predisposition but also one for social or societal circumstance, context, conversation and memory. Interpretations essentially. We had no authority to determine cause in those situations.

Your forgetting, we live in Utopia. Genetic predispositions are predicted now, they’re isolated and examined, even spontaneous emergence of a brain chemical can be determined with the regular and compulsory school health checks and either are offset with the excellent and effective medication provided free by the state. The context was perfection, it was no longer considered to have any cause in suicide, the same for societal or social circumstance. All that was left was conversation and memory of the person which are things held by others but in that regard these were then subject to their interpretation. The only factor we deduced that could give us a clue therefore was interpretation itself.

We needed to find out how an individual interprets occurrence, any occurrence. After years of painstaking research, in Utopia not only did we trust the state but the state trusted us and funding was given without application to all who pursued it and after this research we found a way. The problem was our way required access to the bodies. The rates were rising and we still had no authority to access the bodies. It was deemed illegal for medical students to discover the functions of thought itself by way of physically examining the mind and that is just what we thought we had discovered, the reasons for this illegality was that such a discovery upon the processes of thought itself would allow alteration of these processes, anyone with yearning for power could then alter the thought processes of others to make them lose their trust in Utopia, everyone trusted this declaration by the state and we saw some suicides as a necessary sacrifice to maintain the trust we both received and invested. It was the only illegality that existed.  As I said those rates were rising, on a personal level, I lost my brother for no determinable cause, I tried to defeat the consequent emotion with reason, reason that to find a cause would prove eventually dangerous to the state which we all loved, but as mentioned before there is no way to defeat emotion with reason (Possibly this could also be discovered after the defeating the one illegality that existed) and I was helpless in grief  We examined an option to steal them but it seemed impossible, all dead bodies were nearly immediately disposed of by incineration. There was almost no interim, we had advanced to a point where families and friends were able to grieve and accept without the tangible confrontation of a dead body. The state was so trust worthy in Utopia that everyone naturally trusted it and thus death was recorded and accepted automatically. Then he suggested something I had never expected him to suggest.

That evening in the laboratory, I was near breaking point, surrounded by the bodies that we did have the authority to examine the minds of, the natural deaths, in there we saw no conclusive end to our research unless we had access to a mind which genuinely wanted to commit suicide. Research on the other minds prove futile, the thought processes of their interpretation of any occurrence were expected and already known without any of our research at all.  What he said made something occur to me which had never occurred before during the years of our research and indeed the realization struck me as obvious as well as the definitive end. I knew why I was doing the research, I wanted to help, merely help not solve, alleviate, merely alleviate, not eradicate, some, merely some not all of my own grief by the discovery of why my brother killed himself and in doing so help others in the same position and yet I never knew his position and I never thought to ask and then I became all too aware of his reason.

“I want to die, I have no idea why, but it is a genuine intention, an intention which provoked me to carry out all this research in the first place and once I commit suicide you will have full access to my mind, in some way my mind won’t be ideal because although I had intent to die prior to the research, the motivation that my mind could then be used will somehow have influenced my interpretation of occurrence but I urge you to pursue our end regardless” He said.

Those were his words, the exact formality of his speech of the man I never expected to want to die and in that way the man I never really knew but the man I now know more intimately than I know anyone, even myself. 

There

There’s not a lot of places to go in my town. There’s an industrial estate on the outskirts, warehouses blotting the landscape. We went there as teenagers after failed attempts to get into the local nightclub. We sat on cold wavin pipes, concrete tunnels and wondered. Wondered about climbing the cranes that were always there. During the day it held none of the same appeal. Desolation and emptiness suited our moods, cars coming in and out of the car park, students attending the youth reach, people spending their days in blocks, during the day it was just ugly not dangerous. Dangerous. Thats why I can’t go back, too many memories. Danger used to excite me, not frighten me. We drank too much one night, idle wonderings about the crane turned into a reality. Sometimes my mam wheels me by on the foot path, we have to go by there because there’s not a lot of places to go in this town – I try not to look.

Secrets are like fire

You sit at your table and do your work. Your teacher might not talk to you because they are trying to control the class. 

The other children might not talk to you because you're not particularly noticeable although for no definable reason. 

At school you can get lost. Its peculiar that you still feel lost when everyone around you is there to tell you where you are. 

There are spaces outside school, spaces to go. She went to the football pitch at the edge of town, not the new one, the one across the railway tracks where no one goes. She brought her dog. He never asked any questions. She took the petrol from her dads garage, she took a lighter. Watching those flames consume everything, everything she had gathered. Weeks of careful selection of what exactly needed to be destroyed most. The things they would miss. The things that meant something to them . At the same time, those that were easy to steal. A favorite pencil top of a classmate, her teachers framed photo of her children. Carefully, carefully, day by day so it wasn't noticeable. In the end she had quite a collection. Watching those flames curl and smolder  she didn't feel lost. You can draw your most substantial sense of identity not from others but from the actions you carry out even if those actions are in isolation especially if they are maybe because you draw those actions closer to yourself to the point they become more a part of yourself,no one knows and no one judges. 

She doused the fire with more petrol, she watched the it burn brighter but now it rolled too, balls tumbling from the center and into the air. She did not cower in fear. 

Secrets are like fire, they have the potential to destroy what made them. 

The family dog never returned home. 

The Pleasure of Guilt

Everyone was laughing except you and that's why I noticed you. You were new and you wanted to laugh too and you would. 

 The night was so dark and the space was so wide, the sky curves to meet the horizon line, the edges in the field in which we walked. A barely discernible line at the front of our vision marked the elusive boundary where space meets solidity. Darkness holds more silence than light and in the distance the laughter seemed louder than it should. We circled a fire orange sparks sprinkled the air around us. Hug your coat closer, quickening your step now as the previously star lit sky is blighted by clouds moving in from somewhere behind.  Let your eyes rest on the edges of the surroundings before letting them travel up on the curve of the sky.  It can be discomforting  can't it like a dome or a boundary? The way the space stretched so far and the sky reached to meet it. Only if you think about it, but then so is everything if you think about it. Think is the operative word here if you haven't noticed.

 The clouds seemed to roll and gather, a deep roll of thunder reverberated around the rain fell hitting our faces, sliding and trickling down our coats. Frozen now, trapped in your thoughts, watching us from far away. 

And you were trapped, that much was obvious. You were imprisoned by your own awareness but we were trapped too but in a different way, we just didn't know. Ignorance had set us free, we were free by consequence of just thinking we were free, regardless of whether it was true or not, what you knew had enslaved you yet all you knew was that you were trapped. Knowledge will not set you free when the nature of that knowledge confirms the opposite. 

You approached. We met.  You felt the need to give reason to us even though we didn't want it. 

Oh we all have reasons. Justification is alike but reason is justified in its own different ways. It didn't matter that you had different reasons because you wanted the same thing. Outcome and result trump intention and motivation. Outcome survives, your reason will  live and die, die with you. Pleasure, its always right, its always justified. The very nature of its definition makes it self-justifying. I don't need to explain myself. It defeats reason, it destroys reason so why should I give a reason I pursued it in the first place. You arrived and you wanted to explain why, the reason you wanted to be one of us, your reasoning to become one of us was to eradicate that incessant urge to reason and justify everything, your reason to act was to destroy any future or potential reasoning for any other action your reason to act in the first place was so that you could eventually act without reason. 

All drugs are legal, everyone can take them, when and how they want. In that way pleasure is not only justified because of its very nature but is also expressly accommodated for, it is deemed right and because it was deemed right no one could feel wrong about taking them, no one could feel guilt. 

They're not drugs, we needed a new name for them and we hadn't come up with one yet. The nature of drugs is that they have a physiological effect that effects the processes of mind or body and this was more. I wish I could explain how it was more, this was beyond mind, this was beyond body. Yes they were drugs in the sense that they were a chemical substance that we ingested and they gave us something that related to mind and body but they were different because they somehow managed to go beyond it. They gave us pleasure, drugs give pleasure but this was pure pleasure, true pleasure, this was pleasure with guilt, somehow we had discovered a chemical that gave us pleasure but at the same time made us feel like the pleasure was wrong, which subsequently further enhanced the pleasure. We lived for this. We abandoned everything, everything but to remain alive and feel like this. We had to keep it a secret, the chemical we had found, its discovery would be manipulated, used for control, if someone had control of it, then inevitably they would deprive others of it to control them, it was so addictive that anyone would do anything just to remain taking it, so we had to keep it a secret, we had to deprive it from those in power, those who would deprive it from us if they knew. 

Everyone was laughing except you and that's why I noticed you. You were new and you wanted to laugh too, we gave you what you wanted, you took it and you did. You laughed with us, you laughed without reason. You had so much pleasure, your reason was defeated because you were immersed. You weren't able to reason and without reason, things can't be justified, you couldn't justify it so you felt guilty because it wasn't deserved. Your guilt enhanced your pleasure. 

Please fill out the form clearly.

.

Please fill out the form clearly.

Reason/s for dying:

It was the time she stopped believing in the mission. Customer number fifty-three. Customer number fifty three was unremarkable at first, but then he threw the whole purpose of the mission. We sold him purpose and he came back and tried to return it. How we sold purpose is we erased their memory of buying their purpose so they felt they always had their purpose, that we didn’t simply create it for them because if you knew your purpose was a creation, a purchase you would not believe in it and the nature of purpose requires belief and that is why no one has ever tried to return the purpose they bought from us because they don’t realise they bought it. They think it real when it is a fabrication. Yet there he was.

- I want to return the purpose you gave me he said.

She glanced furious at me, something gone wrong in the memory erasing.

-What are you talking about, we don’t sell purpose because there is no such thing there used to be in the past but its extinct now, everyone knows that, it’s been proven.

-Well I have one, I don’t know how, but there are rumours about this clinic and I’m following them up.

-This clinic provides assisted suicide only. There’s no such thing as a rumour anymore, it is also extinct a rumour is a claim to knowledge that may or may not be true, all knowledge is known now, it’s been proven.

-Except for one item, what happens after death?

-Wondering what happens after you die is counter- productive in trying to live, that has been proven.

- I find it baffling that many of your customers come out alive with no memory of ever visiting here.

She looked genuinely scared. We should have prepared for this before number fifty-three, prepared that this was going to happen. That someone would realise, that they would shut us down, they would rob us of our purpose, the service we provide, taking our purpose away from us and making us like any of the population and then we would too have the desire to die again. That’s when she stopped believing because surely someone who now held the joy of purpose should have understood its importance should have understood not to take it from others. That’s why she said we didn’t have to prepare for this situation and yet there it was happening. So that’s when she stopped believing in purpose and the nature of purpose is that it requires belief.

 Life is not a gift, gifts can be returned. Yes we can return our life but then we face the unknown. When have you gone into a shop, returned a gift and instead of being returned the money you’re given a question, a question you can’t answer.  Maybe things would be more interesting that way. Some people find a thrill in the unknown. People like that might find the prospect of death the biggest thrill of all because it presents the ultimate unknown.

So how did we create the mission? The society we live in knows everything except what happens after death. Everything but that. This was great for some and detrimental for others, after all there are those who strive on searching, on discovering and there was only one thing left to discover and there seemed to be only one way to find out. The result was an increase in assisted suicide. She was one of those people like me. She was looking for purpose. She found me. We were in the waiting room of the assisted suicide clinic. Reasons for dying read the form, I looked over my shoulder, she wrote to ‘discover the unknown’.  A shock ran up my spine. Other people thought this way. Others had lost their purpose because of certainty. I spoke to her immediately

-Do you think we’re the same, of a certain disposition?

-No, it’s been proven that people who commit suicide are a variety of different dispositions….Everything’s proven.

She ended rather bitterly then continued.

-Everything but what happens after we die.

-Is there another way to find out?

-No it’s been proven that this is the only way; it’s been proven to account for the slight increase in assisted suicide recently.

-Do you think it’s a bad thing? People like us dying

-Bad, there is no bad or good, that has been proven. No one caring about us dying is probably a consequence of that. Consequences are relevant only to those who care, no one cares anymore because when you care about something you believe it to be bad or good and now we know nothing is either bad or good. No one cares anymore, everyone just knows.

We sat in silence filling out our forms but my mind whirred. You can’t create answers, they have to be there, you have to discover them but what about questions.  Could we create questions? Answers came from questions so we indirectly create the answers. We are only given answers because we ask for them. So we should ask how do we create more questions and we would be given the answer.

-I have another question that we don’t know the answer to.

-That’s impossible she said, there is only one question no one knows the answer to and that has been proven.

-How do we make more questions? I whispered furitively.

Her eyes lit up. She had what I now had, she had a purpose, we both had a purpose together. We both possessed something unknown that no one knew was unknown.

-We can’t die, we need to find the answer

-I agree.

That was the start of our lives together. We truly believed that finding the answer would benefit humanity, that if we could find more questions and give them to people so they could also look for answers, then they would have purpose and purpose would make their lives worth living. We found the answer. Now we had to give people what we had. We called it the mission.

We live with many different purposes, but the nature of purpose is such that there can only be one true purpose. Life is the purpose. The only true purpose is to live. Some would say there is no way to die without having fulfilled that because only the living can die. Yet we kept witnessing the young coming to die, but you didn’t have to be young to have not lived, you just had to have not tried, which wasn’t your fault in this society where everything is provided and there is hardly anything to try for. This is where the mission has brought us. They filled out the forms in our clinic, it was for assisted suicide but we provided another illegal service. Reason for dying the form read. The answers varied but if they fitted the broad category of no reason, no purpose, no meaning, to find the unknown. We welcomed them, we told them we could provide another service if they were interested.

She is dead. I am waiting now. Has this answered your question?

Times Advance

Entertainment, hobbys, recreation and leisure

Temperaments like doormats

Minds that can be stilled

Thoughts like meek children,
easily silenced

A hobby is an insult to time

Satisfaction, contentment,
such mere solutions

Pleasure respects time,
overwhelms us

Obsession praises time,
envelops us,
obliterates all else

The point shouldn't be mere amusement

Time is not empty space,
that can be forgotten,
just because it is filled

The point is not to be distracted
The point is to be consumed

'Hero'

She feels old even though shes not. Oh but she never knew what the weight of this position would be and now shes bent by it; crippled under a life she did not choose. In her head she feels trapped, her thoughts relentlessly pace behind iron bars like a lion in a circus and just like the lion in the circus, they must be ready for performance, lest she let her guard down. She must perform, she must pretend and if she were to let her own thoughts free, it would be like the lion letting his jaws crush savagely down on the head of the ringmaster. The ringmaster would die and the audience would be horrified. However the lion would be brutally shot and the show would go on regardless. The banners strung and bright lights switched back on. The facade would continue. A new audience would come, that worried her most, there would always be a new audience, sitting on the edge of their seats, trusting, listening, ready to believe. The lions death would be utterly fruitless.

She gripped the edges of the sink, knuckles paling to resemble the white of the ceramic bowl, they so forcibly clenched. The back of her throat burned and stung with the pain of stifled sobs and pent up emotion. Her whole physical frame drew together in an attempt to hold everything in. She willed herself to stay calm. The shrill noise of the bell suddenly cut through her thoughts followed by the sounds of dozens of small bustling bodies, the clatter of their shoes or scuff of their slippers. Giggles resounded on the corridor and somewhere a ball bounced. She let her hands fall to her side and her back straighten up. She exhaled a labored sigh and attempted to cast a look of defiance into the bathroom mirror. On the way back to the classroom, she tries to actually prepare, she needs to fit a role and face her audience again but memories and images crowd in on her mind.

They would discuss 'heroes' in her early college days. In bars resting on marble tables, places with blooming potted plants and green and red stained glass windows. Places filled with smoke and experimental jazz. Their table was full of energy, they would all lean together in earnest discussion. They considered real heroes, artists, writers, musicians; the immortals. They all thought they were going to be great of course, join the ranks of their heroes. The stream of ideas was constant and as the bar would grow fuller, the drinks would flow. Ural would sit beside her. He was doing a joint honors in politics and philosophy. He was always the most animated, most passionate, most prone to outbursts and eventual blind collapse on the table. He constantly evaded the present. 'The only reason that I'm in the present, that I'm living is to defy my own mortality, the only reason I'm living is so that I can live on' he would tell her with an intensity and seriousness. She never knew whether to laugh or not but somewhere she agreed, somewhere she could see that, that was how real heroes were made, that such was everlasting, unlike societies ever fluctuating concept of the term. However little did she know, how twisted and yet simple the creation of a hero was to become but that was still ahead then and the possibility was unimaginable in those good times. Now the bar was empty, the potted plants long withered and Ural was a faded memory. He became a disappeared man. O how dangerous youth and intellect is, she thinks.

She never thought it back then but if asked now, she would say her mother was a hero. She was a hero for what she didn't say rather than what she said. Every child will believe. She never understood the full malleability of youth until she found herself forced with words to feed them. Doing what your told to do is something imprinted and ingrained in you. The full implications of this simple premise, if not eradicated when need arises can prove disastrous. She was told to tell them to do what they're told so she told them. Every child will believe, that's why human nature is so dangerous because every person has the capacity to lie. Art can be like the telling of lies that are beautiful. Her mother would spin tales so detailed in their execution, she finds it hard to dismiss them as fiction even now. She would look closely at flowers, their fine veins were maps. The fine arterial lines running along their fragile petals could be interpreted and read she told her. When your able to read such a map, follow it and you will find a land full only of the beauty such is present in the heart of nature itself and devoid of the things humanity made to keep us constantly distracted. As a child full comprehension was lost but in her imagination she saw a land constantly festooned with the gaiety of the circus. She had not yet realized the pretense of the circus but perhaps that's what beauty is, everlasting pretense, an everlasting lie, everlasting art. So this is why she now saw her mother as a hero because she had come to realize that one with the capacity to tell such beautiful lies for no other purpose than their own sake could also have the ability to tell lies effectively for a purpose, for control but then these lies wouldn't be art for arts only purpose is in itself. Her mother wouldn't have been able to tell the lies she herself was telling but her mother had gone like Ural. Does a hero need to die?

Her home town was always grey but grey used only be a color. Now whenever she returns grey is the color of the sidewalks, the buildings and the expanse of sky but it is also the overbearing feeling weighing on a people. Her father was an artist but now its hard to know what to call him. Before his palette was limited in color, preferring to stick to charcoal and sketching pencils but now his palette is full of the colors of the rainbow. Red and white preferred for the slogans and the banners in the posters whereas the backgrounds shine of green fields and yellow sunshine. Her father is brilliant at his work and that is why even she too can feel transported by those commissioned works, plastered on every lampost, billboard and shop window but everyone else who looks at them do not know the man who painted them and the tears she over their very existence.

She feels the weakness that these thoughts are causing her and at the back of it, the sheer hopelessness in them. She knows she must go in as she has been standing outside the classroom for some time. She turns the handle with the practised calmness the routine requires. The class hush up and sit up straight immediatley. She assumes a stance in front of the blackboard and faces the rows of expectant faces. Along the walls of the classroom are the posters her father made. A solid solemn face gazes out at them. He has depicted a kindness and light in his eyes and an elusive smile to his lips. 'Yagoda our hero' is the message emblazoned on most of them, whatever is on them it never veers from jubiliant praise. She speaks to the children, today we are going to learn of the revolution caused by our hero Yagoda which brough us to have this most triumphant and brilliant of societys but first let us stand and pledge the creed of loyalty to our hero Yagoda. The children stand up in unison. Their faces are full of the blankness associated with the banality of everyday routine, the unquestioning acceptance of the daily and perhaps this is what breaks her or perhaps it is her memories which will still not leave her or perhaps it is the noise from the playground outdoors, the exclamation of 'lets play a game, lets play pretend' breaking through the classroom walls. It is this, it is the added realisation that such a monstrous act of complete control hsd been rendered over an entire population through lies; the urge to pretend morphed. The tears well and flow silently but continuosly from her eyes. The class stand in confusion and astonishment. It is as if the lion has collapsed at the feet of the lion tamer, unable to go on with the performance. The beast has crumpled and out of its mouth crawls a child from a carvernous costume, not a fearsome ferocious beast but a child, just like all the children in the audience watching, a child pretending. The lion tamer doesn't seem to serve a purpose now. This was a how a 'hero' was made.