Promises Broken Beautifully
on failure and completion in and of the future
I have been thinking about failure, and generally when things don't work out, and how to extract the beauty from it for myself for a personal dose. As in, I am not looking to learn more about Beauty and Failure but more about what meaning it has had in my life. What Notes can I make of it. What memories can I tie it to that are now personal myths, fables, warnings, prophecies, or just good vs. bad stories in the company of friends, relatives, or strangers. It's not satisfying right now, in this long right now, to stop at the talking doormat which says the same thing to everyone when they show up again to their life: Well, you wouldn't be where you are now if it had gone any other way. Any other way in this note means specifically if it had gone the way I had planned or originally wanted it to go.
For so long I have felt that things just keep going. I am no longer so secure in my understanding of what it means to 'complete' something, anything. This is sort of fine, and it checks out in art. It checks out in my art-making. My relationship to the idea of completion is less complicated there. But in the brick and flesh of life, it is and means to be something else, and it needs to be something else, or at least it seems so in the play at large though I am extremely skeptical, so skeptical that I don't even engage with my skepticism because it introduces me, because I am not responding as a human from an age where there is a consensus reality.
The whole notion of so many common words seem like they're just breaking off into dust. Skeptical, Gullible, that or the way we have been using them. It's not going to be possible in a short time to describe oneself in such a way. You won't be able to say "I am skeptical" or "I am gullible" and be understood the way you are today. Our fragmentation is going to come alive and introduce us and introduce us and introduce us. You will have no choice but to be everyone you are or, or depending, everyone you can. Not prophecy, not science, just law.
I want to understand as close to the lip of what's soon to be poured, what it is now to be an idealist or a materialist. I want to be as close as I can be in the new friendship to a person with that sense. All the leaders are secret and small until a time comes. I love the idea of poetry but it never meant you were absolved from the pollution of language. I am saying this because of the term 'true leader' and no one could tell me because my lens won't allow it that it 'should exist.'
I saw a quote from a book about the future that said we have to figure out what should and should not exist. I both do and do not know how we got here. This is and will be again and again what I mean about the future and the fact that it will show we have never been one person. I come back more than anything to what we all know but do not live. I swim out from there. I think of Baudrillard saying the city spreads out from the screen in his vision of America.
I kept myself intact as a child through countless hours of solitude by pretending someone was watching me on a screen. By pretending I was being filmed. I kept myself intact and at the same time held myself away and now I live in this fantasy with the rest of the world and it feels just as lonely when I find myself looking at the bigger picture.
I am building up a kind of confidence that I once had but it was false. I am building up something made of mostly my own fragments and what catches on them from what is not me. I see no other way to go about living, no other way to keep going, and a word I would use for the times is dangerous. How many dangerous acts do we perform in the most mundane situations. Are we taking note of them. Someone is. In light of a new word that means what promise meant, someone is.