Tragedy: When to end a story

Tragedy: When to end a story

Samuel Bird

Moonlit brick and the reflective glass moved past me in the dark. On the bricks was a shape and in the glass a figure. Recognition was met with detest. I slipped between old brick buildings and away from anything that would remind me of that character. I flipped up my leather collar to slow the wind, just in time for it to funnel large wet flakes against my neck. Still, the heat at the back of my neck was so fiery, it seemed to be for the best. Past the hours even the wildest of people went to bed, I found myself walking the street. I knew the sequences of moments that led to then, but I didn’t seem to choose them. Or perhaps rather, it was all I could choose. Others may have been at home sleeping in bedrooms that neighbored those they loved. Perhaps whispers carried gentle words to those they cared for most. And yet, here I was. Back here. Not here as these particular buildings and this exact street, but here as in, I was on a street late at night. Nothing more than whatever thoughts rattled through my brain. These thoughts compiled were the parts of a story. As shattered as it was, the pieces seemed to fall into place into a tale I couldn’t look away from. No matter what joyous scene stood before my eyes, the narrator of this tale seemed to scream his story all the same. I knew what I thought the story was. As the focus of my life changed, so did the story. However, no wishful thinking could wish away what had happened. I saw a pattern of arms extended from a crib, the schoolyard, and the university. They stayed aloft in ecstatic invitation and also fear. The arms waited there until the shoulders grew weary. The only way I could control my pain was how long I waited there with open arms. However, if I put them down too fast, perhaps I would miss love. Surely this next moment would bring me what all the years passed had not. If I could only wait with a pained smile for one more moment, it would come. Arms extended and unrequited left shoulders chipped and sleeves with tattered hearts. I would find myself with him, the last person I wanted to be with. Back again we would be walking streets late at night, hoping that one day our thoughts would stumble on whatever we needed. I would go back, back to the story. I couldn’t pull all memories into my mind, but I could pull a pattern of larger ones into view. If only this tragedy would end. From my pocket, I pulled a flickering silvery shape.

The construction of the mind is observing patterns, inferring a structure, and then shaping instances into that structure. We look for what the resultant properties of smaller events are and what larger implications are at play. As Kant put it, we construct our experience, I additionally note that we then can alter it or at least be aware of it. As I have written on narratives before, we seek to find a story. From ancient tales told over flickering flames that cooked the evening's meal, to modern mediums for audio-visual storytelling, we look for a series of patterns to make sense of ours. The story of overcoming, mourning, or perhaps love, helps us make sense of and place within a structure, that larger series of seemingly unrelated and random events. As I critique escapism and suggest realness as a preferred property, I think stories have as much merit as we live them. I used the tale of Odysseus as a young man to make sense of the travailing I had to embark on. However, when these tales become more than a reflection of the aspects of ourselves and instead become a refusal to be ourselves, they function as a means for the greatest of sins: To not be engaged with existence. As we must structure experience and do so with what we experience as time, there is a seeming necessity that life will become a story. As we have access to different sorts of tales, we can steal what we need when needed. 

There are certain types of experiences that don’t fit into one story well. Their thematic and tonal elements are so far off, that while they can be in the series, can’t reside within the same book. These scenes and actions stand as a colossal beast before us and don’t reduce well to words and pages. Late at night the faculties of the mind churn and rage to fit this experience in all its sheer horror and violent unknowability into any sort of structure. Multiple methods may be involved and will yield different results. Social belonging, divinity, and ritual have been the favorite of my kind for millennia. Once the beast is no longer a threat to life, we can then seek to submit it further. We have successfully taken the random chaos around us and forced it into a tale, but not any tale. We have made this part of our lives a tragedy. While it may seem unfortunate to make a section of your life so, a tragedy adds an element of aestheticism. The more I talk to people and hear their minds emerge through words, it appears that what they call good, they mean to say beautiful. The way they want to see the world, what a quality character is, and what it must do, comes from more of a place of what emotive and atmospheric properties it gives off. This beauty moves things from the world around us to neatly nested within a mind. Beauty being a value, gives us preferential merit to things. Books with a fallen hero, plays of love lost, and a God suffering and dying, move from just the misery that is in them and become something we love. There are two types of facts in the world, ones we find good, and ones we can make beautiful. Our misery became something more than what it was alone. 

We have done it. Consciousness has viewed a world that didn’t offer what it needed and even sought to tear it away, and yet in its tearing, it found more. Our tragedy born as an event has now become mythic and full of room for the human spirit to wander about. Our reveling and mourning breathe new life into what were dead facts that fought against us. Tragedy as savior offered a new means to construct our experience. This dear friend that came when none other could, what then must we do with him? When we have found that a method aids our ills, we often run with it long after it is not needed or even wears us down. Tragedy, there when none other was. Now we are here, on the far side of horrors, thanks to its celebration of life from facts of its death. While we never write the premise, we continue to write our character into the future and restructure the past premises into stories. Knowing what worked before, we continue that tragedy that saved us. We add to that same volume until the day's compilation to page results in a width difficult to bind. With glue and thread, we seek to stretch this story far past its time. As we write the characters, they make choices with the story in mind. What are they worth and what can they expect? What does the future bring and what can they change? How do they relate to other minds and will they find deeper connections? Within a run-on story that is made to handle woes, the character as co-author sees only more woes. A vibrant flower is noted as soon wilting. A wondrous cloud as a chance for cold rain. A warm smile as an attempt for someone to hold power over you. The facts we see in the world begin to bleed into us as everything that could have been something more, could have been a new tale, are shadowed by the great force that once was our savior. I now ask you, please let your tragedies end.

When you need to, see your life in terms of its beautiful misery. For cold nights you walk alone, it can be all you have. However, when the time comes the moonlight shines on an open door with gentle voices coming from within, don’t let your pattern of thinking carry you past. I worry to tears as I write this that you may be carrying on a tragedy that needed to end long ago. If so, as much as I feel for you, I understand why. I have wondered what it would mean to my honoring of my suffering or those I love if I simply started anew. Didn’t I promise to remember? Didn’t I promise to never forget? How could I move on and be happy, when they never could? Does this treachery on my part invalidate what I had penned until now? Be comforted to know that you will never throw away that book. You will keep it by, reference it, and share it with honor. It will live on with you, but you don’t need to let it be what you live. If you can’t feel permission from anything internal to start on a fresh page, I give you mine. Take a moment to feel grateful for that episode as it was, but let it dawn on you that it was only beautiful, because it passed. No more, will chances for a gleeful tale be turned down. No more will the solemnity of mourning flow on moments that call for something else. No more will self and world be seen through a dark lens needed only to see when walking amongst hell’s bright flames. If tomorrow you find yourself sitting down to write in that old book, there is no shame in having a habit. When you recall the new story you write however, set down your pen and be free to write your story. Whenever a story ends and a new one is afoot, I feel this intense sense. “Now what?” This is the question that is before me. After all that happened and all I did, now that I can do anything, what will I? Weary warriors, wedded lovers, and successful inventors know this sense. Me telling you to start a new book doesn’t help with the fact that you only stayed with the old one because you had nothing else to write. Let your mind consider the possible, the desirable, and the beautiful, and let creation be your means. What will you do when you can do whatever you will? Whatever you will. Any apprehension you feel is perfect for the setting of a new tale. 

My tragedy didn’t come from the violence, scarcity, or desperation of my youth, but from a failure to belong. Paramount in this was a love I had for a woman that transcended the lover. More than just when that love was no longer reciprocated, but additionally no longer accepted, the permission to exist seemed to be stolen from me. Every sense of being a part of no one and belonging to no greater group became abundantly more clear. All the battles won up until then felt small in reference to such a catastrophic loss. I had no home, no people, and no love. I walked the streets and roads late into the night, living out the tragedy that was imminent from the facts. The tragedy blossomed and the beauty emerged from it. While I recommended and permitted you to put an end to your tragedy, I felt a deep sense of shameful hypocrisy. I carry and wear on my smallest finger, the ring that was meant for her. A simple silver band with the words inscribed of a poem I wrote. I carry it with me to remind me of the pain of love lost. It was a reminder to stay clear of belonging as its failure nearly destroyed me. The needed token became more clearly morbid until now when I realize it is the last artifact of a sad story that was self-contained enough to end. Midway through this paragraph, I walked to a table near me in public, placed the ring down, and walked away. While I thought of throwing it from a mountain or into a river, perhaps someone else could use it. While we have our stories, as they exist in only the mind, there is no fact of that ring that would bring on the misery around it. As I advise, so must I live and this story can now come to its end.