Monday, February 6, 2017

Impossibility as a Way of Life

Your memory of this particular aspect of the human condition extends back to the time in your life when you first tied your mother's apron strings to the vertical slats of a kitchen chair. This incident is far enough back in time to the point where mothers, at least yours, wore aprons while in the kitchen.

Through the joys and whims of this retrospective point of view, you are able to see the potential for more a more complex motive than mischief behind your gesture. You recall the surge of satisfaction when your mother, unaware of her new  burden, discovered it, then turned to you with the verdict that you were impossible.

In varying degrees and behavior, you've been impossible ever since. Likely, you were before. Nor was your mother your only target. Matter of fact, while you can remember that long past event, you can't recall more than the equivalent of eight or ten percent of your targets, which thought carries the suggestion that one of your dominant emotions was anger.

Being considered impossible sits better with you than being considered angry. Perhaps this is duet your generalized impression of being angry about any number of things, conditions, and outcomes over which you had neither say nor control.

The condition of Impossibility conveys a sense of a refined shield, draped over the anger the way large sheets are draped over chairs and sofas set away for storage in some attic or cellar. On the plus side, being Impossible suggests a range of satisfaction at outcomes where violence and such extremes as humiliation are key rewards.

You've known individuals with whom you bonded at first, thinking of your combined selves as kindred spirits. But when you realized they were after outcomes involving violence and/or humiliation, your most urgent need was separation from them.

No surprise to understand how you gravitate to characters you recognize as impossible. When their own peers, say immediate family and teachers, call them impossible, you feel the tingle of recognition and the satisfaction of a superior sophistication. In some ways, all the characters you've created are impossible. This opens up an entire new can.

Worms?  Perhaps so. Today's impossible characters are impossible well beyond the range of your own impossibility . Thus they provide attractive role models and simultaneous brakes, lest your own real life enthusiasms take a sudden turn to the sour and a physical manifestation of anger with its fangs bared.

The ordinary in most things holds little interest for you. Perhaps you fear your own ordinariness and recognize it as a poor place from which to set about your intended business. But perhaps because of such sophistication and ability to see nuance as you now possess, perhaps because of your recognition of depressing mounds of the ordinary at every turn, you aspire to greater levels of impossibility.

Your immediate goal is to identify the apron strings of your culture and then to tie them via some story or commentary to the vertical slats of the kitchen chair of received common sense.
You do not wish to have your remains interred as your parents did, but were you to do so, you'd want under your name and the dates of your entrance and departure the one word, "Impossible."                                                                                                    


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