Fascination

[sadoeuphemist]

Here's the truth: I find you fascinating. That's a sick confession now, a display of prurient interest. It's like the worst thing in the world right now is to be boring. It's fine to be cruel or sadistic, to take pleasure in one another's misery; it's fine to be belligerent or selfish or predatory, to command a gibbering squad of harassers, to claw and tear each other down. The real crime is to not be worthy of the attention we've been given.

There's another idiot on Twitter shrieking about the end of the world - the end of their world - and a couple of thousand idiots all clamoring behind them. There's another white male savior. There's another public intellectual rephrasing common knowledge, stumping for the status quo. There's another armchair revolutionary. Pick who to follow, who to subscribe to, hold your mouth open for all the little trickles and daubs of opinion. This is what the world is now, this is what it means to be aware. All we are is enablers for the worst of us.

We can outsource our morality now, our aesthetics, our ideology. We're cyborgs, and the internet's all an extended repository, all the information and emotion in the world ready to be called up at a command. Reblog something, and it's someone else's best impulses, most artful phrasing, co-opted as our own. Or, conversely, we have our supporters hanging off us like prostheses. It's the loudest of us that thrive in this world, the most shameless, the most reducible into soundbites and snark. A stray neuron sparks in the brain and the body lurches, mindlessly, destructively, tearing apart lives at a whim.

Spin the wheel and take your pick. Are any of them worth listening to? Are any of them worth killing? If any of them were evil - if they were some urgent and existential threat - we'd be compelled to kill them or die trying. If they were evil they'd at least be interesting. But no, they're only people, in all the dull banality of the word. If it wasn't them, it'd be another figurehead babbling roughly equivalent words in their place. A person doesn't mean anything anymore. At most we're an echo, an appendage, swarming and replaceable. An individual is just a weak link, after all - a flaw, a vector for attack. It's the ideas that matter, the vast and monstrous ideologies that crush us by the thousands. Kill your idols. Aim your sights higher.

Take the worst person in the world and isolate them, and they're so fallible, so pathetic, so full of chaff. Without their followers they'd be useless. The worst thing that can be said about them is that so many gave them the time of day.

So who am I to say you're the one worth the attention? Are you so much smarter, kinder, gentler, braver, nobler, more insightful than your fellow man? But I can't help it, I find you fascinating. I could watch you for hours, over months, over years. I could watch the walls, watch matter transition between states, harden over and crack, lose its viscosity. I could watch the shadows of leaves on grass moving almost imperceptibly into night from behind the glass. There's a hundred landscapes in there, as if you could connect them all side-by-side and have a panoramic view of the world from your backyard. I could listen to you talk for hours about your petty thoughts and complaints, about the fleeting thoughts across the internet that you happen to reblog, I could listen to you talk about nothing at all.

Listen: art's greatest failure is in its purpose. In theme and theory, in climax and conclusion. It's over, yes, and satisfying, self-contained, but it's over. It's already receding backwards into memory, partially eclipsed by the next new thing, the logical progression. I can't read the same book twice because by then I've already consumed the story. It's in me, digesting, moving via peristaltic motion ever closer to being shat back out. You'd think if a work of art was so great I could keep coming back to it forever, that it wouldn't go inert with time and familiarity. That I wouldn't turn to it one day and find nothing left that I needed.

Life grinds all attempts at illusion to dust. We tell ourselves we are righteous, we conscript history to our side and convince ourselves our enemies will peter out and die. When all history is, is the the slowly-eroding surface of the world, the bodies fertilizing fields, nations boiling over and collapsing. We've subsumed ourselves in story, and even though it's not over yet, we've still projected an ending forwards, rehearsing our lines, worrying away at them like gravel between our teeth. We turn to history to vindicate us and see only the slow mindless convulsions of it, the lack of direction or conclusion.

We tell ourselves we're part of something bigger, and it grows and grows and grows. Until it is bigger, until it's something vast and amorphous, until it's something so big that it encompasses the whole blindly-whirling world.

You're a nothing compared to that. So many puffs of air. So many breaths, so many heartbeats, so many days, so many nights. So many pores gaping open on your skin, so many farts, so much dead skin. So many fuck-ups, so many fleeting passions, so many false starts and failures. So many fragments, so many half-formed thoughts, so many vitriolic opinions. So many insecurities, so many trivial needs and desires going unfulfilled. So many anxieties, so many conflicting hopes, goals, that you latch on to and nurture. So many little acts of kindness. You could go on forever without completion or purpose in sight.

I could watch the grass grow. I could watch the paint dry. I could watch the world keep turning. I could watch you forever.