Saturday, July 17, 2010

feverish

I used to think drinks simply induced a sort of reckless abandon. Fun and full of surprises at best, awkward yet harmless at worst. But now I worry it’s also tinged with a kind of evil. Maybe that’s too strong a word, but it eggs on a kind of selfishness, capable of unraveling things that took so much time and care to be weaved. It also betrays the most worthless of desires…but this is, of course, old news.

Pure evil. Destruction. We often take so much pleasure in it, despite all of our sober consciousness’ efforts of denial. Though it has an easier time in the freedom from such efforts. The author of A Clockwork Orange meant for the title to symbolize a kind of mechanistic morality imposed on something full of juice and life. I will here, in a wild guess of optimism, claim that it is ultimately effective, but never quite the perfect fit. Spurts of incomprehensible bad sprout up from time to time, its refusal to be understood so very terrifying. The fear of not only what we are capable of but also what we can take pleasure in…it is…in a realm where words (among other tools at my disposal) fail me.

The breeze is streaming in through my window now, as is the sunlight. As the day creeps still further along, some of the fear leaves with the first blush of dawn. The cold sweat dries slightly. This time, though, something lingers from the night before, something tells me this lesson is not a repeat. I think what’s fundamentally different is that this time, the crime almost committed would not have simply led to self-destruction, but will have spread to others…would have spread to others…as it hasn’t happened yet (nor will it).

The writer of mechanisms and juice goes on to tout the importance of change. Characters must be capable of change, without it, no matter how sensational, the story simply remains a fable, never a novel. As I scramble to root my belief in his preachings, I barely register the irony that this nightmare I am trying to flee from turns out to be a fairy tale. The copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales someone gave me so long ago sits mostly unread, because there runs a deep kind of morbidity absent from Disney films…but maybe the lesson is that they are, in essence, all that fairy tales boil down to. In any case, it’s time for me to stretch into novels.

**

No comments: