Closure: The Writer as Negotiator

When something such as a performance or an event or relationship ends, you are led from experience with such things to accept a finality wrapped around some kind of emotional response.  

Most performances are structured to produce a complex braid of feeling, ranging from the joyous one to be had from the final portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to the cautionary one from either of Shakespeare's resounding tragedies, Hamlet or Macbeth.  You can, in most cases, anticipate a return visit to any or all three of these.

When an event comes to an end, you may be giddy with the overall pleasurable weight of your experience during the event or, still in the positive zone, relief at the event being over.  The ending of a relationship often produces a spectrum of response, ranging from abject grief, which is likely the most intense and complex of all emotions, to the kind of relief characterized by a sense of unfettered freedom.  Such endings can also be the occasions of anger or resentment.

The on-again-off-again relationship between conventional wisdom and your own experiences has left you with the notion of reality as a raw, mindless, uncertain condition that contains endings.  Indeed, what could be more of an ending in reality than the extinction of a species?  Yet reality appears to you to have more endless events than events with some sort of resolution.  

Aware that this vision of reality, say a forty percent share of nicely tied-off endings to a sixty percent slice of randomness, becomes a factor in describing the reality that is you.  This vision could, in fact, be tied to the observation that your own position as an outlier outweighs your sense of conventional behavior.

This leaves you often at odds with the things about you that have ended, distracted by a curiosity that leads you to wonder about randomness, and somehow caught up in producing written works wherein you provide an ending.  No question that your view of endings leans to the more ambiguous ones than those spelled out in detail.  

Ambiguity is the trampoline to curiosity.  You find a few drops of curiosity are more than enough to allay crankiness based on boredom with the endings about you that you tend to find manufactured or uninteresting.

You have of late become intrigued with the notion that the individual has a dramatic genome, one that makes the individual responsive to story in a deeper way than has been assumed.  Some individuals, say those with your approximate ratio of neat reality to random reality, require a sense of ending resolutions.  If they don't get resolved endings in reality, they will seek it in music, much of which is resolved, in story, which has significant degrees of resolution, or the kinds of essays that relate to endings of eras or events.

Those whose ratios tend to approximate yours find the need to read and listen to music, and also to create in some artistic fashion, in order to apply hands on to endings.  Or so it seems.

In many ways, reality has for you the analogy of the contents of a desk drawer--your kind of desk drawer, which is by nature one you tend to straighten from time to time, only to have its contents scatter without any apparent design or motive.

You have begun to see closure, the step beyond ending, as a neatening of a desk drawer you know will soon lose its interior design.  Such desk drawers mean a great deal to you for the surprises they often afford.  One of the very first places you look for missing things is in your desk drawer.  The second place is the interspace between the seat and back rest of the passenger seat in your car.  Each place has rewarded you with things you thought you'd lost, or with things you'd forgotten about and were delighted to rediscover.

Closure is more than ending; it is ending with a sense of having entered a contract with reality.  Closure is more than mere negotiated settlement, it is the kind of ending that appeals to the sense of you rather than the sense of convention.  Having closure with a performance (your own or those of other individuals), an event, or a relationship allows you to walk your path, head up, comfortable in your role as a negotiator.