Picture this: a man becomes fed up with it all, with life and not only his life, to the point of rage, lets the steam of bitterness build until he almost tips over, curses the insane stupidity of the world, but quietly so that no one could hear him unless he approached damnably near, which was rare, because for some time he kept his distance from the inquiries of others, kept away and alone from crowds large and small so that, in his sharp stolen privacy, he could inventory all the injustices he found in the world, count all the illnesses and take faithful note of all the blatant, unrelenting corruption. What did he do? Was it the predictable, like commit suicide or go for a joyride with joy in carnage through a band marching the parade, or through a holiday market, or some cheery or solemn time of a great many gathering in the square, some holy day, time marked off from the rest for memorial, dedication, and reorientation, or simply staying on the course? Or did he perhaps get on one of the news channels, or create his own channel on the video-sharing platform on the internet, so that he could bash this and flail that, so that he could rant without anyone stopping him, not even the spies for the many nations he slandered, on his own stage, which would turn out inevitably to be his bare bedroom, bare save a photograph of Nietzsche taped to the wall above the philosopher’s works, or from some street corner, for however long he could until the business owner, a woman dressed sharply in the latest fashion, coming out to smoke a cigarette rather unfashionably, told him You have to leave, you’re blocking my store and, with a smile sarcastically tender and teenage-like and unreasonably, said too Sorry, I’m just doing my job? Or did the spies and torturers for his own land or another actually catch him make one bilious post too many, or planning to some hackneyed coup with one too many rifles, and he was forced to while away a sentence of twenty-five years in a cold prison as a rather unimpressive prisoner, hoping all along he would exit life locked up with his own manifesto or tract, but instead came up the way he had come in, just another life churned and broken by the machinery, then spat out like a useless part? Or was he so distressed that he took to pharmaceuticals and the latest in psychiatry, complaining without break in a white office somewhere, the photographs of the doctor on the doctor’s desk, one holding a baseball bat, in full uniform and smiling, the other in mid-twirl, in the gown of a ballerina, about how vulnerable he feels and about how he has been made a victim of powers he could never hope to harness or control?
No, amidst all of these quite usual possibilities, or alternatives of response in the face of life’s nastiness and brutality, he did something else, something uncanny: he lived a life and only that, a life of conversation rich and inane among friends, shared fine and plain meals with others or enjoyed the meals alone, continued to maintain his home and go to work at three or four jobs, at all of which the bosses had some vague suspicion as to whether to take the man seriously, or if instead he is only playing a game and engaging in a ruse at the job, so full of smiles and jokes and jabs throughout the day. He even, after putting away what he could his hellish-long list of life’s ills, somewhere in a drawer in his room or somewhere behind memory, in those false drawers where, if things go into them, things disappear into an oblivion which is almost a forgetting, but is too deep to be called a forgetting, which is surface, surface all over, he spoke of life not with wrath and grumbling heaviness but only light cynicism at times, at other times you would think he had committed to life for the long haul and would endure the stress of living with supreme gracefulness, speaking of the human enterprise, shared by any living thing, of living amidst countless other powers as, not a travesty or something to bemoan, a gift given blindly, that is, as no gift could be given, to total and innumerable strangers. Though at times he seemed sluggish, this related more to the weather, to the dense humidity of the season than to some fated disposition, or indisposition towards life, at other and more times he seemed to dance over the pavement when he walked, his gestures were like that of dancers, even when he was asking the waiter in the local cafe to please fetch him another cup of coffee before his show starts across the street, before he gives life to the stage set set for the show across the street and set to start any minute, he waved his hand in the uncommonest of ways, parting the air around him, if it had threads or currents, with only the most delicate balance and mixture of body and gravity, he moved, even when in line at the movie theater or with his groceries, as though each step, though it meant nothing, meant everything as much as nothing when given its proper eye and proper art and heart or source, stood out because it was part, part always and forever, of a grand performance of other dancing things, the whole world itself dancing, and as a part the whole too, each moment like the spell under which every other was yoked in love. No one suspected of anything like a cancer of ill thoughts about the world inside the man, unless as in the case of his bosses frivolity could be considered such a cancer. He was well-disposed, this man of contradiction, well-liked by friends and the unfriendly alike, and was given over to enjoy life, if anything.
Where this happened cannot be said for sure, although Washington comes to mind, especially since, when it happened, this strange about-face, Washington, D.C. was in the midst of some simmering revolution and clash of contradictory powers itself, the whole town bubbled over with outcries and grilled at a low heat in resignation and slavishness in the face of what the world was becoming, a world more disastrous than even the former world, which defined disaster, either those or some madness or some nonchalance in between, one that maybe would every so often go to the computer keyboard, in loneliness but full of others and others’ voices nonetheless, to make some conspiratorial or self-help-like comment on a comment board, discussing in its cross-purpose manner the affairs of the day, which were many and in counting as the day went on. So it would make sense for the man we are recounting and who is capable of giving us a sort of inspiration for our times to have lived in Washington, D.C., and fairly recently at that. Still, it cannot be said for certain where the man lived. Come to think of it, it might not be certain either that the man lived, that he lived ever or at all. How could a human being suddenly move on from those curses that are bound to come and satisfy itself with some form of playfulness and jest with life and, seemingly, sometimes, at life’s expense? Wouldn’t there have to be some other motivation for the man, perhaps a bedrock illusion or his own stone of stupidity at the bottom of him, to continue in what he knows is more heinous than farce, not mere farce but culpability, crime? But no, if life has taught us anything, especially at our times, it is that possibilities, while cruelly so and often cruel, are inexhaustible, therefore surely the man charmed the earth at some time or other, although our times, again, seems best-suited for such a multifaceted character. Besides, he teaches us something else: that the greatest crime, take the crime Schopenhauer believed our existence, any existence, to constitute can be made into a comedy, in the decisive reversal of what Schopenhauer himself once pondered over, one somehow ruthless and therefore short-lived, no doubt, but a comedy nonetheless, a brilliant spark for the ages to come, or for all ages for that matter.
Love the Dust 