My world spins out in partially constructed sentences, barely remembered dreams, second hand fantasies and dictionaries of languages I don't speak. Photocopied pictures of people I know and like stare at me--copies of photos of people--this shows how far removed I am from reality now. Not even the image of reality, but the photocopy of that image. Purses of blank faced cartoon characters, handbags lined with black hole stars, pictures of sand castle cathedrals, it would all be the same if I were elsewhere looking at other things. These things are meant for my eyes, as dangerous as the solipsism is. Almost everything I look at has a face but none of those faces are talking to me. That's why it's not a solipsism--everything in my universe of one seems arranged to show me that I do not exist in that universe. It's the secret I learned while on shrooms, while sitting alone in my room. Soon I will be gone and the room will remain. The rooms, the houses, the blank walls, they are the heroes of our stories, enduring day after day and giving support and comfort and sustenance to those of us who spend a few minutes nestled within it. the buildings are Bogart, and the people are Peter Lorre, snivelling behind the white dinner jacket of his strength. We snivel, provide a crucial part of the plot, the MacGuffin, and then we're done. Our time on screen is over, and it's time for us to go.

Perhaps everyone who visits churches older than their entire country has to deal with this sad realization, but I think it's been a realization a long time coming for me--a secret only confirmed by the smell of sugar in all of the baked bread, or in the smell of hot water in the muggy air. After all, Molly and Dave took me out and showed me the city--the vast unending miracle of the city, wrought by the hands of construction workers and architects. If buildings are heroes, then men like Gaudi are something akin to the gods of Greek mythology--creating heroes from clay and unloosing them upon the world. This is the only thing I see now worth actually doing in this world--construction and architecture. All the rest of it is merely craven supporting-characterhood.

Even architecture isn't really the same as being the hero of our stories--merely the heromaker. How lonely a man like Gaudi must have felt at times, knowing that it was the products of his mind that would be the heroes of history, but not his mind itself. The gods, in short, are very lonely, little more than abstractions that somehow created us from their abstractions. We are their buildings, their movable cities of ones and twos, shifting about in constantly new constellations, becoming brief countries whose borders are the restaurant, the metro car, the wedding bed. To see your architecture in flight, moving through the zones of love and marriage and death, death triumphing over chastity, is to understand that the world is a place where ideas are made flesh, where concepts are given form and being, and almost immediately run like burning wax, begin to run off into the gutters almost after standing straight.

Again, who couldn't be in a city like this and not see men and women as burning candles, the force of their light showing briefly about their head even as they begin to run and bow and shrink under the strength of their own light?

[…]

And all of this loneliness would be fine, if it just wasn't so lonely. The buildings don't talk much, although they are excellent listeners. The world is not much of a people person, as it turns out. There are just so many nights where we can waver in our Peter Lorre Eigenstate before we start to long for something a bit better, or more satisfying, than the life of omnipotent cockroach. Because that's really what we are to the buildings that exist around us. We are their gods, we are their rodents. What worldview must you have if you must suffer through being infested by your creators? What odd sort of contempt would one develop in these situations? Behind their long-suffering facades, what resentments must begin to fester, manifest themselves as bad plumbing, as peeling paint, health hazards, exposed wiring. Our heroic buildings, with a rep to live up to as the strong silent types, just can't go forward and ‘fess up to being angry, annoyed, upset. No, for them is the passive-aggressive way of decay, or bad plumbing and backed up sewage, of gas lines that somehow still don't seem to work right, no matter how they're looked at, no matter what system is applied.

Bending, bending, the bough begins to break. Bending, bending, the world itself starts to bow under the weight of everything on its shoulders. Atlas would have been crushed long ago, since the number of industrial countries he had been holding up at the time were very few. And although this side of the world looks like jewelry from above, there's another side of the world, my side, where the ground resembles a circuit board, jammed tighter and tighter with chemicals, and bunkers, and compounds, and railroad lines, and housing development after housing development after housing development. You can live here in the city, or else move out to the rest of Spain which is substantially nothing, or you can live in America where the city now never ends, where the city and the circuit board and the repeating rifle have destroyed the idea of the frontier. There are no more lines to cross, there is no longer here or there, merely here and almost-here, the place that is kind of like a city, the place that is putting in the Starbucks, the place where we almost are what we are, as opposed to being in the city and having no choice in the matter. At least becoming puts off the terrible unopposable insistent weight of being, at least growing is not the dead end street that grown has become. I've seen roots, you can't fool me. They break through their earth, knock on your bedroom wall, work their way through soil and continue to grow, abut a house and then still keep growing. There is some terrible curse about life--as long as it is living, it is trying to grow, and to try to stop its growth is to try and kill it. Growth and death are the only two things life understands, just as light bulbs only understand on and off. There is no more to our world than this. Life and death. Growth and decay. What a world it would be if we could just stop growing and just exist for a bit or two.

That’s what I've been trying to do, but now I'm at the age where I realize that if I don't grow, the chances of me dying, and dying poorly, grow every day. The horrible burrowing sound of our own mortality, you can hear it if you stop and are quiet enough. It's like a widowmaker cracking and falling far off in the distance, in the nearby wood. It's the sound of the plaster falling off the walls, and the sink dripping all the world's water down the drain. It's the running of the toilet, running still, not done running yet, but when it does stop you’ll know that a certain part of your life will be over, and there will be nothing else left for you, only the blank wall the faces on the table and presumption of death, the death sentence that is being carried, that is literally being rendered by all of these things. Grow or die, that is the lesson that life has been trying to teach me, and I can't help but being able to see the horror implicit in both options. And yet I have no choice but to start growing because I turn 35 very soon, and I will not have much of a choice in the matter at some point very soon, and the sound of the sink dripping and the blue shift occurring outside my window has left me with very little say in the matter. The faces on the kitchen table compel me to move forward, even if I know that they will not speak to me, even if I know that the only message they have for me is the secret provided by their existence, not in anything they wish to say to me in particular. The world is too indifferent to speak to me, and I've been fortunate enough to learn valuable lessons from the silence.

[…]

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All material on these pages is ©2001 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.