You’re wondering if anything you’ve done on this strange ball spinning in outer space amounts to something crucial, am I right? It’s a slow lingering thought that follows you like a snake that’s fallen in love with you. You should be flattered but all you feel is a juicy sense of the ominous.
Maybe you too grew up reading Western philosophers. It’s the thing to do if you’re interested in sounding clever and being a part of the human race. Camus, perhaps? The human condition is absurd, he said. You must have agreed with him because why wouldn’t you?
Nothing you do feels sufficient. In your stomach is a powdery, electrical knot. It reminds you your destiny is to fail, and to keep failing. The image of Sisyphus rolling a giant boulder up a hill sticks to you like flies to your mango lassi during fly season. It’s been this way for a long time. It’s so much the soil you wallow in that an invitation to live feels like an attack. You’re trying to find meaning in a universe without meaning. That’s what Camus said. Poor you. What will you do?
Life isn’t triumphant, you decide on the hangover after your 30th birthday. You don’t want to open your eyes. Most mornings you don’t. No, you don’t really want to put the kettle on and brew tea even though you do have a favourite sultana biscuit that could make you want to leave the bed but most days, you need more than a biscuit to get you sparkling although sparkles long left your lexicon of living. Once, when you were young, a new toy car collection was enough to spring you out of bed, you didn’t like to sleep anyway, life was too exciting to squander on sleep, and you marched out of your room, defying your parents’ bedtime policy, just to gaze at the objects you’d become obsessed with. In fact, you remember the mood and world of various shades of colours when you were a kid, don’t you? The magenta-red rubber ball you played with on evenings is mystical in your mind today and then there’s the first taste of Kickapoo Joy Juice fizzing on your tongue that had inspired you so much you created a crayon drawing of your sister’s bright blue BMX bike and the papaya trees outside your house.
You didn’t want more than a celebration of the excitement of drinking Kickapoo Joy Juice. It in itself was enough, and then the drawing came, and the drawing by itself was enough so you pasted it on your school uniform cupboard with cheap gum and although your mother scolded you for ruining the furniture, it was okay because you’d had your delicious private moment with earthy-smelling pastels borne of another delicious private moment with your very first Kickapoo Joy Juice.
It’s easy for kids, you love saying on your darkest days, they haven’t been punched in the face by life. No one is going to be waxing lyrical after the 300th Kickapoo Joy Juice. It’s your way of sounding seasoned and wise to your friends who have been withering for decades. It’s hard to return anyway. Memory is a cool addition to the human experience but there are also people who lose their memories and what happens to them? They don’t have the luxury of holding onto stale reminiscences as a way to keep believing in life.
The thing, you suppose, is to remember it had once happened. It was possible at some point to marvel at a colour and be fired up to live, then to drink Kickapoo Joy Juice, eat char siew pau, laugh with friends, invent stories, paint on smooth white canvases, and be fired up to live in the knowledge there is nothing more.
Sneakily, like the snake that fell in love with you, the curiosity for accumulating arose. When, how, nobody knows, but it happened.
And you went with it as every normal, insane human does. You surrendered to the craving. You live in the craving because the thought comes: the next thing could possibly be it, the thing that unlocks the horrible mystery of this existence and you’re done crying over the consistent certainty that it never does, and nothing ever will, now that decades have passed and you’ve seen with your own muggy eyes the impossibility of accepting the ordinariness of a glass of water in and of itself to confirm for you that somehow you got born and are expected to live this out until the end: sleeping, waking, eating, shitting, singing, reading, driving, drinking, bowling, jumping, hopping, crying, wailing, laughing, fighting, hating, loving.
Why won’t the end arrive?
You imagine all the ways the end will come until one day, ten days from now, you’ll finally see it. Something will occur in your imagination to take you back in time to your future to lock in your present: the Kickapoo Joy Juice moment will effervesce in your mind and shock you into realising Kickapoo Joy Juice exists in the present and in the future too (unless they stop manufacturing it in which case there’ll be another pop to get poppy about), and you’ll start to wonder what you’re missing now that you had before and would it be possible to resurrect it? Yes, heady time and space stuff—you’ll start reading Eastern philosophy because you want to free yourself of time and space, cause and effect, and you’ll realise you’re so stuck in your misery and apathy and indolence because you married the impermanent thinking it’s permanent.
You’re not supposed to come out of this alive, you realise, and then one day, you’ll pick up a seashell and look at it as though you’d never seen a seashell in your life and you’ll smile and you’ll paint a picture of it and someone will look at your painting of the seashell and they’ll write a piece on how wars in the world start and continue because we’ve lost the ability to connect with the feeling of home which is a feeling of non-separation which a common seashell is able to evoke.
So then, it really doesn’t matter, you’ll say to your children, if a machine can write a poem or curate information better than you, the point is that you can feel the excitement pounding against your chest at the sight of a seashell (the machine can’t), and you can feel the raw rage peeling your heart open in your protest against the war in Gaza (the machine can’t), and the point is that you can experience the very indolence you detest in yourself as a warm heavy sensation behind your belly button and deep inside you know you’ll miss not being able to feel once your body joins the sea as ash.
It’s about being in first person, you’ll finally scream, not second person, not third person, not omniscient, but first person in the thick of eating a dhal-soaked chunk of roti canai, and in looking into the eyes of someone who has royally pissed you off. No machine is going to do it for you. No amount of googling is going to explain to you the reality of your expression, what anger is beyond its dictionary definition. And you’ll have your reason to bounce out of bed.
Then, suddenly, ten years from now, you’ll see nothing really has been crucial except for the simple fact you are here and your ‘I’ is an ‘I’ and, really, that is all there is and you’ll scream in one of your paintings which you know the machine is also able to produce but you don’t actually care at this point: Nothing matters and everything matters because I am here and you are here, and won’t you ponder through my painting the question that takes me out of bed each morning before the rooster crows—because my experience cannot be outsourced, does that not make me vital and why shouldn’t I be greedy for it every second of every day since there’ll come a time when none of this will be possible and who the hell even cares if any of it is crucial other than the fact that I am and so are you?