Thursday, October 8, 2015

Questions

Why bother talking about love?

Why bother talking about the possibilities of cinema? Or of the novel?

Why bother talking about the transcendent, transformative possibilities of desire?

Why bother taking photographs unless from a distance, or in reflections, or with obscured foregrounds that make it impossible for us to meet the eye of whatever is the object of stealth?

Why bother talking unless it is in circles, laying out trickery and riddles like crumbs?

Why bother with thought unless it is fragmentary rather than the consistent intensity of deep, meditative reflection?

Why not procrastinate when it is concentration that is needed?

Why bother with all of this? Why stare into the eyes of your loved ones when it's their naked body you want to adore? Why try talk of hearts and needs when it is laughter you're looking for?

Perhaps it has something to do with what Milan Kundera writes in 'Laughable Loves':
“Why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth to be a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think?...If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told the truth to its face, it would mean that I was taking it seriously. And to take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness. I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself.”
Or perhaps it has to do with what he wrote in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”
Perhaps. Either way, why bother thinking about it when you only want to laugh in it's face.

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