It always starts the same way. You awake, trembling and alone, from a night of disquieting dreams, to find yourself transformed into a pastel* pony. You start and raise, unsteadily, to your hooves, stumbling as years of muscle memory struggles against a wildly divergent morphology.
"Bewailing my fate," you say to yourself, "is unlikely to change it." You huddle in on yourself against the chill in your flesh. The sun is low, the horizon is still tinged with dawn and the ground is cold. You see a road nearby, of packed earth. It might, you think, be the work of an intelligence that has assigned value to moving from one place to another with minimal difficulty. You follow it; perhaps you will find purpose at the far end. There none here.
You walk on. Eventually you see another pony, large and red and standing on a porch with a steaming mug.
"Good morning," you say. A conventional remark. You despise it.
"Eyup" he replies. He transfers the straw he is chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other. You attempt to divine meaning from the gesture but can not relate the symbol to the thing signified.
"Ah," you say. You walk on; you have long accepted that everything you say and do are unmeaning gestures made to an empty auditorium, but throwing senseless words into this other pony's bottomless calm exaggerates the effect and you cringe away from the sensation of pouring seconds. You have neither purpose nor meaning, just this brief flickering existence. There is no value in spending your short life in unoriginal monosyllabic exchange.
You walk on and meet a pale blue mare pulling a cart.
"Hello," you say. In response, she declaims her existence to the gently-rolling early-morning forest path in general. She speaks with the empty grandiloquence of one who is trying to convince themselves more than their apparent audience. You experience pity; however many she convinces of her greatness and power, she will never still the doubt in her own mind.
"I am Dorothy, the meek and small," you say. It is not true; you are not even a friend of hers. The path is not paved in yellow. "I do not believe that praising your greatness and power is the fulfilment of my life."
You walk on.
As you walk on you see bunnies on enormously long legs stilt-walking between the trees, grazing on rainbow-coloured apples. You see other ponies watching, faces stretched in comically exaggerated expressions of repugnance, but to you it is an unmeaning thing; a thing that happened, certainly. A thing that happened under the sun, reflecting its light so that it shone in your eyes, so that you perceived that it had happened, but not a thing more significant than any other of the things that happened that you did not see.
You walk up to the horrified-looking onlookers.
"Stilt-walking bunnies," you say. A fatuous remark. You are overcome with ennui.
"They were hungry you see, so I thought I would help them. Look how much they enjoy those apples, all crunchy and yummy in their little tummies." One of the onlookers is not like the others.
"Do you find fulfilment in these rabbits' well-being?" You are always hungry for tales of other sapients' discoveries of purpose, even though their purposes are often unoriginal and are always insipid.
"Well, I'm more in to the glorious chaos of it all. If I was being completely honest, I might even say that helping the bunnies was just an excuse."
You find this motivation risible.
"I can admire the technical mastery of rabbit leg length alteration," you say, "but I can't say that I see the point. Pre-change they would have grazed on grass and now they graze on apples. It's the same thing a little higher up, and it was the dull unmeaning routine of a creature mentally incapable of apprehending its place in a uncaring mechanistic universe to start with."
"What would you know about a good bit of chaos anyway? You're just an extradimensional visitor stuffed in a pony's body. I should turn you into something dreadful for insulting my chaos." You perceive a flicker of irony underlying his grandiose words.
"You could turn me into a thinking creature psychologically incapable of finding peace or meaning in a world devoid of underlying reason or purpose." You state the worst and only thing that you can imagine being in the only world that you can seriously contemplate the existence of; anything else is not you; any other world is not credible.
Without any apparent transition, you are home. You shiver in the draft from an open window. You are alone. You know that role identities and behaviours associated with those roles are important for people attempting to create the meaning in their own lives, so you sit down to write the lesson that you learned.
"Dear Princess Celstia," you write. "Today I learned that wherever you go and whoever you meet, whatever they have to offer, two things are unchanging. Yourself, and the endless fountain of unspeakable dread that we call the universe."
You stop and think for a moment. Outside, a bird sings. You perceive the notes as beautiful, clear and high. What they mean is this: IamhereIamhereIamhere. You identify with the urge to scream your existence to the uncaring sky even as you despise the practice. All your howls could achieve is to throw the cosmos's indifference to you into the forefront of your perception.
"No matter how far or how inexplicably you travel, you will always arrive shivering and alone, naked on the edge of the abyss."
*Translator's note: the German original word implies both small and pastel.
Well this was pretentious.
4499078 Thanks for the feedback. I've added a pull quote from your comment to the long description; hopefully that will help people find content that they enjoy reading. Ta again.
Now I see why you liked "Displacement."
Actually what they mean is, "Fuckmefuckmefuckmefuckme." Remember that the next time you go walking in the springtime.
4499078 It's not pretentious if it's ironic. Don't you know the rules?
7613113
I'm not sure that "ironic" is the right word. I was certainly aware of the pretension; embraced it, took joy in it, revelled in it, even, but the emptiness of a life lived without meaning is real, even if I express it in stilted dialogue.
Sometimes the birdsong means "sod off! This bush is mine!", but "I am here" is both threat and invitation, and fits with my theme better :)
7617726 Have you read "A clean, well-lighted place"?
Now it's my turn to sound pretentious. I think the answer to that longing for meaning lies in fan-fiction.
I don't mean that you can find the meaning you're looking for in fan-fiction. I mean that literature (and now movies and songs) is where our culture stores and gets its ideas about life, and fan-fiction is one of the only places right now in which a literature that obviates that question can survive.
See, I don't think the search for "meaning" (or worse, "purpose") is legit. It's a Christian idea, a legacy of the Middle Ages. It comes from a mindset which says that life, love, meaning (in the linguistic sense), and reality itself all must not be material, and so must be injected into our reality from some transcendental realm, which the medievals called God. It isn't a legitimate search for meaning, which is all around us every day, but a hopeless quest for transcendental meaning--for a meaning which is validated by a spiritual reality, where spiritual is ultimately defined as "not real".
Ancient Greek art, literature, and philosophy, with its Platonism and rationality, were the original well of medieval ideas. Medieval thought crowded back into them as a safe hiding place while the Enlightenment swept the rest of human thought clean of such ignorance, and crept forth again from those areas to re-infect the world via romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism. Fan-fiction, however, grew up nearly independent of our 2,500-year-old Western literary tradition. It's more influenced by anime than by the ancient Greeks. I realized this when I read Fallout: Equestria and saw how different it is from Western fiction, in having cast off ideological blinders I hadn't even been aware of because they were so ubiquitous.
People will be free from the angst about meaning when they've grown up in a culture immersed in stories which don't have this ancient embedded assumption that reality is false and meaning must derive from somewhere unreal, such as an old bearded man above the clouds.
It's probably too late for you and me, though.
7618000
You may have found some sort of maximum limit to my pretension powers. Congratulations :)
I've read it now! Hemingway and his "iceberg theory" is like my authorial mirror-universe twin. It's possible I could learn from his approach, and skip some of the tedious detail of feeling that I've written, but I don't think I'd ever do it fully except as a style exercise; I do not normally reading Hemingway on purpose. I tried it once, but it was some of his White Hunter stuff, and all I got was a vague impression of rich white people sneering at Africa, and it rather put me off trying again.
The delay in this reply is because what you said about Christian/ western thought reminded me that I'd been meaning to read _Sickness unto Death_ - I'd say thanks for giving me the kick up the arse to get around to it, but I found like, one comprehensible (and frequently appalling) idea per chapter and then gave up somewhere around part 3Bb1i.
It takes a position that intersects interestingly with yours, explicitly stating that Christians, having confidence in the hereafter have deeper, more meaningful despair than non-Christians. I'm ... not impressed by the claim and it ties into some pretty repugnant things about non-Christians that he says later. Despite that, I'm not well read-enough to have an opinion on if Kierkegaard is just trying to re-brand existing existentialist thought to apply in a super-special way to his in-group, or if he's recognising the underling attitudes which gave rise to it.
Its not somewhere I was coming from consciously, but given that he basically wrote the challenge-to-Discord line in my story, I'm not going to say that I wasn't influenced by that way of thinking. "And the relation to himself a man cannot get rid of, any more than he can get rid of himself, which moreover is one and the same thing, since the self is the relationship to oneself."
I am much more willing to consider personal growth as important than he is- he took the idea of an eternal soul and decided that people couldn't change in meaningful ways, which is clearly super-wrong and based on a untrue assumption. Maybe one day I'll be able to fold birth and death in with my acceptance of personal change, but for now I will resent the time that passed and shall pass before and after my current continuity of experience. I mean - just think of all the cool stuff you have and will miss out on.
Fanfiction as the solution to cultural problems is not a new idea for me. Slant'sPartner is half way through a doctoral thesis which uses the idea that fandom communities form subaltern counter-publics where ideas contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the public sphere can be discussed and developed without being crushed by orthodoxy. Their interests are centred on consent and don't explicitly mention cross- pollination from other cultures, but I don't see why the idea can't be extended. Obviously there are a lot more fanworks which focus on relationships between people than there are which focus on people's relationship with their own finitude, but I like to think that that is implicit in everything.
To back off from the pretension for a moment, If you really enjoyed this one, can I suggest checking out my AO3-based efforts. The Futility is probably a place to start:
http://archiveofourown.org/series/64205