Interesting to sit in a room with a big window to the East, big door to the West, facing a smaller window that looks out to the South. Over to the East, I have a riotous white sunrise, streaky with cloud (odd moment to think of bacon) but still too bright to look at directly. Over to the West, the light is blunted by rainclouds. A split day, just now. To the South, everything very still. The shadow of the house, then the sun shining round the end of the house, making a halo for the must-find-out-what-it-is bush. [I'm not the dominant gardener in this house, nor even the reserve gardener. I guess I appear on the cast list among the chorus, probably as Second Lawnmower Driver.]
Taking that guess about the cast list out of its brackets and into this paragraph, do you ever play that mind-game: if life is a novel, or a film, or a play, or a sitcom, or an HBO drama series now available as a boxed set, or a tale told by a - storyteller? - full of sound (yes) and fury (sometimes), signifying - what? - sorry, I'm losing my grip on this sentence - do you ever play that game, and if life is one of those things, what is your role? Are you the hero? The sidekick? The bad guy, even? Or one of the extras in the background? More important: is it comedy, tragedy, farce, failure or Broadway hit, and here's the big question, what happens next?
If you get the upgrade to this particular mind-game, you are, as you might expect, allowed to be the scriptwriter for whatever it is, and you get to decide what happens next. You can also run multiple games, in each of which you play a different part. There's another mind-game, which I suppose would work better as an assignment for a creative-writing class, where you get to pick a shop-window display, full of mannekins in exaggerated poses, or (better) the picture in an ad, full of people strangely delighted by their new phone, sofa, bottle of detergent, vacuum cleaner, and work out the back-stories of these characters' lives. What do their shrinks say about their air-freshener fixation? What joke has their new smartphone just told?
You remember that story about the emperor who woke up and couldn't decide whether he was an emperor who had just dreamed that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming that he was an emperor? As the wise man probably didn't reply out loud, maybe we're sheep, boss, and this is all a daydream anyway.
Taking that guess about the cast list out of its brackets and into this paragraph, do you ever play that mind-game: if life is a novel, or a film, or a play, or a sitcom, or an HBO drama series now available as a boxed set, or a tale told by a - storyteller? - full of sound (yes) and fury (sometimes), signifying - what? - sorry, I'm losing my grip on this sentence - do you ever play that game, and if life is one of those things, what is your role? Are you the hero? The sidekick? The bad guy, even? Or one of the extras in the background? More important: is it comedy, tragedy, farce, failure or Broadway hit, and here's the big question, what happens next?
If you get the upgrade to this particular mind-game, you are, as you might expect, allowed to be the scriptwriter for whatever it is, and you get to decide what happens next. You can also run multiple games, in each of which you play a different part. There's another mind-game, which I suppose would work better as an assignment for a creative-writing class, where you get to pick a shop-window display, full of mannekins in exaggerated poses, or (better) the picture in an ad, full of people strangely delighted by their new phone, sofa, bottle of detergent, vacuum cleaner, and work out the back-stories of these characters' lives. What do their shrinks say about their air-freshener fixation? What joke has their new smartphone just told?
You remember that story about the emperor who woke up and couldn't decide whether he was an emperor who had just dreamed that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming that he was an emperor? As the wise man probably didn't reply out loud, maybe we're sheep, boss, and this is all a daydream anyway.