sadoeuphemist (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sadoeuphemist) wrote2017-03-01 08:31 pm
sadoeuphemist) wrote2017-03-01 08:31 pm
Stop Reading
There is a tragedy at the end of this story, there is a monster at the end of this book. Stop now. Read no further. The deeper you go the more it'll hurt.
Poor lovable old Grover, a shaggy paranoiac, unable to realize that there was nothing worse than himself waiting at the end. But you're not Grover, nor am I, are we? We do not have his earnestness, his simple good nature; we are not fit for children. We can imagine worse than monsters. We can imagine things that are real.
Let's start at the most basic bad end: everyone dies. They die cruelly and brutally and unfairly, and they die because the story demands it. A pair of tragic queers, rendered profound and literary by death. You walk alongside these beautiful, lovable, relatable characters, you get inside their heads, you feel their joy and you feel their pain, and you watch them die. This is how the story should go, must go, does go, according to a set of dramatic rules written by a society that can only sympathize with you through tragedy. That's the one connection we all have with each other, isn't it? Everyone knows how heartbreaking it would be to have to watch our loved ones die.
So here's a worse ending: everyone dies, and you never saw it coming. You followed the clues, the hints, the premonitions. All the carefully placed foreshadowings. Here was a promise. Here was a beating, living thread running through the story towards a bright and subversive end. You thought you knew, you thought you understood, you thought that in the small moments of intimacy you were being promised a happy ending. You put your faith in the author, and they twisted the knife and betrayed you. It's so cruel in how banal it is, watching everything so carefully and lovingly built swept away by a cruel idiot god, the world capitulating to dull rote tragedy. Nothing that was promised came to pass. Everyone else nods along, satisfied by the rules of drama, scoffing at you behind their smiles. It's poison, isn't it, that sharp tang of disillusionment in your veins. How could you have been so fucking wrong? How could you have not seen it coming?
Here comes the intrusive thought. It's you, isn't it? You're the monster at the end of the book. It's been you all this time.
A story shouldn't be able to hurt you, not like this. An ending shouldn't make you sick to your gut, it shouldn't make you mentally unstable. It shouldn't make your shoulders tense up into a rock when you think about it, it shouldn't keep you awake at night. It shouldn't feel like a betrayal. What were you promised? What were you owed? How deeply did you have to scratch to get that one speck of reassurance? A story's nothing, a bunch of fantasies and indulgences someone else put together. Imagine putting your faith into that, into a commercial enterprise, into a vanity project. Imagine clinging to someone else's world and bleeding into it, contaminating it with your delusions, as if you had no greater dreams of your own. Get over it. Grow up. Write your own stories.
And here's how those stories end: you try, and you can't imagine anything better.
You know how happy endings should go; it's simple, a confluence of events. The right people ending up together. Long and lazy afternoons in each other's arms. Two faces drawing in together for a kiss. An avowal of love. A completion. Someone learning how to love and to be loved in return. But they're all so hollow and vapid when you write them down, just words without structure. You want to build. You have entire worlds to use as foundation. But it's not enough. It'll never be enough.
You can rewrite stories, you can go on tangents, you can imagine any number of better endings. But you don't want just a happy ending. You want all the happy endings, and yes even the sad ones and the bittersweet ones; you want a multiplicity of endings so that you can pick and choose at your leisure, so you can see a future opening up before you. You don't want to have to rely on your own fantasies, live inside your own head. People have built their own carefully curated worlds, and all you want it to see is worlds that have room for you in them.
Because it was your story, absolutely. Every story you read is yours, every story that you bite down on and read through. It's your own voice in your head narrating, your imagination bringing the characters to life and filling in the blanks. When someone speaks to you and shares their story, it's not complete until you understand them. This was your story too, your hopes, your anticipation, everything you clung to and adored and extrapolated outwards, this was your faith in another human being. And that's the real tragedy: that you're being allowed access into someone's head, that you're touching at their heart, that you're seeing their potentiality and imagination laid out in letters, and it's all so cruelly insufficient.
That's the universal theme of tragedy, of loss, of severed connections. That's why all these stories have unhappy endings. That's all we have, each other, and if all we have is each other then it isn't enough.
Imagine even your favorite author, and realize that everything they've put into words is only a fraction of the overwhelming tempest that is another human being. Everything they've written up till now, their whole canon, every insight they've had that's touched you to your very soul, all that could be obliterated by a cruelty, drowned, swallowed whole; and you can't just close the book and cut them out of your life. This transcends fiction; this is a living, breathing reality. Someone out there is callously indifferent to your suffering, or wants you to suffer, or is suffering themselves.
Maybe an author is only as good as their society encourages them to be, and they bristle and turn hostile when you poke at their blind spots. Or maybe something worse happens. Maybe they sink into depression and try to abnegate everything they've previously created, destroying themselves entirely. Or maybe they turn their hostility outwards in a desperate need to excoriate their imagined foes. Maybe there's been something in them, something building, some dark and ugly bigotry that they need to expel, that they need to write down just to get it out there and done with. And if the worst happens - who would you be to deny them? You can't trust authors because you can't trust people to be themselves, free from dejection and bitterness and self-loathing. You can't stop seeing yourself reflected in their worst impulses.
Here's the worst end of all: you are drawn to these cruelties, in the end, because it's all you can really imagine. You were not made for happiness, that's why you so desperately seek it somewhere else. You imagine the world as a series of catastrophic failures, and you can't fully connect with another human being unless you see the same impulse in them, unless you're standing with them on the edge of a cliff, unless you're seeing them bloody and raw and touching the exposed nerve. An author subsumes you just as much as you do them, and you're in their head, an imaginary audience who they're pleading to for understanding. They write for you, and you imagine mental breakdowns, you imagine intrusive thoughts forcing themselves out onto a keyboard, you imagine unhinged moments of catharsis. You want to be privy to their pain. It's the only form of intimacy you can truly imagine.
There's a tragedy to end here, there's a monster at the end of this book. You must have seen it coming. It's me, and there's been no one here but me all along. It's just me. It is I. Here I am.
Poor lovable old Grover, a shaggy paranoiac, unable to realize that there was nothing worse than himself waiting at the end. But you're not Grover, nor am I, are we? We do not have his earnestness, his simple good nature; we are not fit for children. We can imagine worse than monsters. We can imagine things that are real.
Let's start at the most basic bad end: everyone dies. They die cruelly and brutally and unfairly, and they die because the story demands it. A pair of tragic queers, rendered profound and literary by death. You walk alongside these beautiful, lovable, relatable characters, you get inside their heads, you feel their joy and you feel their pain, and you watch them die. This is how the story should go, must go, does go, according to a set of dramatic rules written by a society that can only sympathize with you through tragedy. That's the one connection we all have with each other, isn't it? Everyone knows how heartbreaking it would be to have to watch our loved ones die.
So here's a worse ending: everyone dies, and you never saw it coming. You followed the clues, the hints, the premonitions. All the carefully placed foreshadowings. Here was a promise. Here was a beating, living thread running through the story towards a bright and subversive end. You thought you knew, you thought you understood, you thought that in the small moments of intimacy you were being promised a happy ending. You put your faith in the author, and they twisted the knife and betrayed you. It's so cruel in how banal it is, watching everything so carefully and lovingly built swept away by a cruel idiot god, the world capitulating to dull rote tragedy. Nothing that was promised came to pass. Everyone else nods along, satisfied by the rules of drama, scoffing at you behind their smiles. It's poison, isn't it, that sharp tang of disillusionment in your veins. How could you have been so fucking wrong? How could you have not seen it coming?
Here comes the intrusive thought. It's you, isn't it? You're the monster at the end of the book. It's been you all this time.
A story shouldn't be able to hurt you, not like this. An ending shouldn't make you sick to your gut, it shouldn't make you mentally unstable. It shouldn't make your shoulders tense up into a rock when you think about it, it shouldn't keep you awake at night. It shouldn't feel like a betrayal. What were you promised? What were you owed? How deeply did you have to scratch to get that one speck of reassurance? A story's nothing, a bunch of fantasies and indulgences someone else put together. Imagine putting your faith into that, into a commercial enterprise, into a vanity project. Imagine clinging to someone else's world and bleeding into it, contaminating it with your delusions, as if you had no greater dreams of your own. Get over it. Grow up. Write your own stories.
And here's how those stories end: you try, and you can't imagine anything better.
You know how happy endings should go; it's simple, a confluence of events. The right people ending up together. Long and lazy afternoons in each other's arms. Two faces drawing in together for a kiss. An avowal of love. A completion. Someone learning how to love and to be loved in return. But they're all so hollow and vapid when you write them down, just words without structure. You want to build. You have entire worlds to use as foundation. But it's not enough. It'll never be enough.
You can rewrite stories, you can go on tangents, you can imagine any number of better endings. But you don't want just a happy ending. You want all the happy endings, and yes even the sad ones and the bittersweet ones; you want a multiplicity of endings so that you can pick and choose at your leisure, so you can see a future opening up before you. You don't want to have to rely on your own fantasies, live inside your own head. People have built their own carefully curated worlds, and all you want it to see is worlds that have room for you in them.
Because it was your story, absolutely. Every story you read is yours, every story that you bite down on and read through. It's your own voice in your head narrating, your imagination bringing the characters to life and filling in the blanks. When someone speaks to you and shares their story, it's not complete until you understand them. This was your story too, your hopes, your anticipation, everything you clung to and adored and extrapolated outwards, this was your faith in another human being. And that's the real tragedy: that you're being allowed access into someone's head, that you're touching at their heart, that you're seeing their potentiality and imagination laid out in letters, and it's all so cruelly insufficient.
That's the universal theme of tragedy, of loss, of severed connections. That's why all these stories have unhappy endings. That's all we have, each other, and if all we have is each other then it isn't enough.
Imagine even your favorite author, and realize that everything they've put into words is only a fraction of the overwhelming tempest that is another human being. Everything they've written up till now, their whole canon, every insight they've had that's touched you to your very soul, all that could be obliterated by a cruelty, drowned, swallowed whole; and you can't just close the book and cut them out of your life. This transcends fiction; this is a living, breathing reality. Someone out there is callously indifferent to your suffering, or wants you to suffer, or is suffering themselves.
Maybe an author is only as good as their society encourages them to be, and they bristle and turn hostile when you poke at their blind spots. Or maybe something worse happens. Maybe they sink into depression and try to abnegate everything they've previously created, destroying themselves entirely. Or maybe they turn their hostility outwards in a desperate need to excoriate their imagined foes. Maybe there's been something in them, something building, some dark and ugly bigotry that they need to expel, that they need to write down just to get it out there and done with. And if the worst happens - who would you be to deny them? You can't trust authors because you can't trust people to be themselves, free from dejection and bitterness and self-loathing. You can't stop seeing yourself reflected in their worst impulses.
Here's the worst end of all: you are drawn to these cruelties, in the end, because it's all you can really imagine. You were not made for happiness, that's why you so desperately seek it somewhere else. You imagine the world as a series of catastrophic failures, and you can't fully connect with another human being unless you see the same impulse in them, unless you're standing with them on the edge of a cliff, unless you're seeing them bloody and raw and touching the exposed nerve. An author subsumes you just as much as you do them, and you're in their head, an imaginary audience who they're pleading to for understanding. They write for you, and you imagine mental breakdowns, you imagine intrusive thoughts forcing themselves out onto a keyboard, you imagine unhinged moments of catharsis. You want to be privy to their pain. It's the only form of intimacy you can truly imagine.
There's a tragedy to end here, there's a monster at the end of this book. You must have seen it coming. It's me, and there's been no one here but me all along. It's just me. It is I. Here I am.