I was just thinking, with my head tilted to one side to loosen any cerebral fragments that could prove themselves beneficial in the aftermath of an admittedly preposterous conte, when everything fairly unheraldedly made total sense: It never made sense in the first place since it was never supposed to make sense. I never wanted it to make sense. I schemed it to be as pointless as possible from the very beginning when I put down the first and giddy word of an intentionally predictable tale.
Short stories subsist on brevity and often follow an immanent and coherent pattern: exposition (in medias res), complication, escalation, crisis, climax, the end. Some of them can lead to a resolution, some of them simply tell an open-ended plot.
And at odd times no end is the best end a story can find, sometimes we simply play for the sake of the game and not in order to win. Ludus gratia ludi.
I must confess, however, that this thesis leaves me with a sense of unease and residual sceptisism. I am really passionate about ends and endings. I like to pull things through. I am into full stops. I am either in or out. Up or down. Straight lines fail to please me. I am Sisyphus' disowned sister. I find no trouble in starting all over again. Again and again. I get a kick out of it.
The hitch with a story that ends without having an end is that it doesn't lend itself to a new start. It's like robbing Sisyphus of his rock.
I need my rock. I need my end. Moving a story into absurdity a priori and pre-designing an end-less end snaps my neck although or because I claim to be entirely d'accord with Camus and his (un)systematic ideas.
I have come to terms with absurdity and accept it. So, one ought to think that I shouldn't have an issue with any form of nonsensical phenomenona. But I do. Due to the fact that in this instance I tripped over my own mastery of absurdity. I managed to not only cope with the senseless condition of the present but carried it a little too far by orchestrating a game that I very wisely announced to lead ad absurdum before it had even kicked off.
This gambit certainly saved me a rude awakening but then again it can't do any harm to be taken by surprise when it involves life, can it?
Becoming blunt in the field of absurdity might make one impervious to disappointments but it will also cause indifference and apathy towards any kind of surprises and life per se. And apathy and deadness should for sure not be an objective.
And so I will make sure that this will have been the last time I stormed towards absurdity compos mentis, willfully and on purpose. Accepting absurdity is one thing, provoking it is simply suicidal for someone who has found the indubitable senselessness of existence to be the best impromptu source for unpredictability and as such stimulus and consequently life.
And after all absurdity is only genuinely absurd when it has no sense. Tricking absurdity by turning it into an aim and ambition gives it a meaning, which naturally deprives absurdity of its nature and thus de-authorises my own understanding of existence. Life doesn't make sense, and I am fine with it. But still I won't strive for it being senseless. How absurd would that be?
"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It can become fruitful." ~ Albert Camus
