Tuesday 19 March 2013

The Too Easy: a collection of not overly convoluted, not overly worked upon fragments


There’d be no work for tinkers’ hands. We have another life. It shadows the life we actually lead. We occasionally become aware of it, particularly in those moments where we step outside of what it is that we are, and reflect upon, for better or worse, how it might have been. We are presented with, in that moment where we have become exactly whatever it is that we are, another who is not us, but who also is. This other us is a type of intimate personage, a subset of our self. The life we have not lived is always, at the very least, conceivable and therefore, remains subject to us. Or anyway, we are attached to it somehow – it seems to haunt significant crossroads and drags us back there. To shake ourselves free from the melancholy hold of this shadow, we consider the innumerable variables of existence, and multiply all the other others we also might have been.  By means of conjuring up the possibility of other lives we also did not live, we relativise the significance of the life we actually failed to bring into the world. But these other others are categorically distinct from our intimate stranger – they are merely the lives that we have not not lived. We are never presented, in moments of regret or celebration, with the roads that are not not taken. These possible computations of existence have no substance for us, they are like the fantasies of others, wholly uncompelling; their improbable coilings and writhings permanently accompany our every moment without our ever giving them the least attention. They do not ever achieve the compelling and haunting form of our other self, that spectre who fixes us to who we actually are.