The Nature of Life

E.D. 2012, A Woman and a Skull, mixed media32X23

One afternoon when I was eleven, I ironed my underwear in the grandma's room. I was simply following Russian rule imposed by people like my parents who lived through the hardships of the WW2. Ironing killed germs. While the stainless boat of electric iron cruised pale underwear, my thoughts sank in painful memory. The day before at school I leaned forward to a girl sitting in front of me and whispered in her ear, “I, too, was at the local theater last night with my parents…” She didn't react, and I tapped her on her shoulder. Her discerning gaze electrocuted me, and I was burning since. My mother entered the room. “At what age children usually stop being ashamed for what they have done yesterday?” I asked. “This is a very grown up question,” she answered.

“Don’t say, don’t look, don’t touch, don’t dare,” still keep me paralyzed. Do I really want them to like me so much? I see them like through a fog. Who are they? What do they care? What if they don’t? This is even a creepier thought. What if no one watches, no one judges, no one orders, no one commissions, no one expects, no one notices? What if I am all on my own doing what I want to do?

I am in a crowded café, and people around me don’t care. The letters I type on my laptop are illuminating on the wall over my head. No one reads. I am locking eyes with a woman, who gives me a polite smile. Others keep chewing. What if a bomb goes off?

When a bomb goes off, a stranger doesn’t smile while others keep chewing. When a though goes off people take away their gaze from the screens. But thinkers are covered better than bombers in healthy societies. For a thought to be noticed, it should be born within a field surveyed by coworkers. Outside professional fields random thoughts primitive like viruses may be contagious. They may circulate effortlessly for a short time to give a way to the next variation. In healthy immune systems viruses pass away within a few weeks, but we don’t risk waiting. We use injections to kill germs without electric irons. It saves us domestic labor and is good for economy since it creates numerous jobs. Domestic labor spreads inequality. A girl standing alone at an ironing board kills germs slowly and ineffectively with the side effect of unchecked thinking unless wearing earphones. A girl stepping out of her grandma’s room with an i-phone next to her ear enters a flow and experiences delirium of global belonging. She acquires a holistic point of view killing germs and circulating effortlessly, changing variations as a flow goes. Everything is interconnected, pain can be numbed, consciousness, too, and the only thing hurting remains unseen.

The nature of life.

Tell me a story, or offer me an explanation. A woman conceives immaculately, and a rich dad gives an education; six cups of water a day keep me healthy as does colonoscopy after fifty, and the only thing to fear is unpredictability. Everything is interconnected, a stationary bike and a heartbeat, the world economy and psychology, my thought process and the mass media. The only thing still out of the loop is the nature of life and we are stuck in a long line to the only exit guaranteed guarded by the end-of-life multibillion-shit industry that keeps us breathing.