I Want the World to Be My Sad Dream

July 13, 2010

Everything dies. But only humans feel so goddamn bad about it.

We feel bad about death, about decay, about endings. Despite religion. Despite philosophy. Despite our enlightened minds and all the scientific knowledge we possess. We fear death, for ourselves and the others we love. In the same vein, we fear the lesser forms of death: pain, loneliness, anxiety over being. After all, we invented existentialism.

We are depressing, sad creatures, us humans, so no wonder we want to bring everything else down, too. Well, maybe you don’t. But I do. I’m a writer and a neurotic–and an agnostic, too. I don’t have the faith of the religious in an afterlife–the world for me is only here and now and all my stakes are tied down here, and all my love and loss lives here. So maybe that’s why I want trees to long for the past, balloons to suffer crises of faith, the sun to feel sorry for itself because it always misses the moon.

I keep reading reviews lately–in journals, on Amazon, online, most recently, I think, in the Georgia Review–where some writer bashes some other writer for excessive use of the pathetic fallacy (the gifting of human attributes, actions, and emotions to animals, plants, and objects), but I think it’s all a matter of taste and desire. I want the universe to be as crazed and miserable as me, so of course I’m going to love Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Others may find it too cute by half, but I say why not find solace in the fanciful thought that even ions can wander and weep and want, just like us humans? If existence has made me a melting mass of nerves and depression, then why can’t I define that existence any way I want to? Why can’t I mold it, box it in, expand it, frame it, give it the ability to share my pain and maybe my joy, too?

Some of us want to feel less alone in the world; we want the world to live and be as we are.  Some of us like to dream the world the way the world will never be. Some of us just want the world to be a dream.