Escalator Echo Chamber

Or: Life Is A Strange Loop

Unsplash

Content warnings¹

An abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in an hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out.

-Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

Computerized female voices
populate the all but deserted cold tar-black but also white halogen lighted station shortly before midnight,
on and on into time that stretches
like chewing
gum.

–pause–
Girls scuttle through the waiting train, giggling,
exiting through the next door.
One of them, bemused, responds: "Fine by me, really."
–resume–
Shallow ripples on the surface of the deep deep river of life.

I miss S, his comforting silence.
The way he explains the world to me: obvious like the full moon in the sky.

Still the sanitized loudspeaker voice(s) go(es) on: "This is the escalator going down…"
Neon characters crawl across screens.
人身事故: Human accident, which is,
of course, code for suicide.
I am
an echo chamber
for computerized female voice(s).

"This is the escalator going…"

Midnight now.
Home soon.
Then sleep.
And do the work all over again.

"This is the escalator."

What is the work?
on and on into time that stretches
an echo chamber

This is the work: "To ease the pain of living."²

Author notes

This is

an experiment, obviously. Part of it was written that night, sitting on an unmoving train in desolate silence, part of it two months later listening to the haunting soundtrack of Oppenheimer.

I haven't had much patience for fiction lately. Instead, I've gravitated towards nonfiction, which perhaps explains this piece: at least 50% lived experience. Sometimes, things need to be said. This is my attempt at saying them. Writing is very much my way of making sense of the world for me, digesting it, making it palatable and drawing it into my world. Even if it doesn't make sense and there is no explanation (which is most of the time), at least we can create art from it, imbuing it with our own private meaning.

Tell me, if you like, what is your way of "doing the work"?

1. Depression, loneliness, suicide

2. From Memory Gardens by Allen Ginsberg