I Found a Reason

What keeps us going? It's a simple question, really - at least ostensibly. What is it that keeps us from leaping from a 10-story building toward the ever unflappable ground? Why do we endure unrelenting hardships, strife, sharp pains and the incessant aches that medicine can't palliate? I'm not sure. I guess you have to find a reason. We even need a reason to end it all, too; though in those cases a lack of a reason is reason enough too. We yearn for reasons and explanations. We hunt them; all pastel-painted and hiding. Sometimes, we find reasons when there aren't any. We're good at making them up when we need them; like those little portable black holes in old Looney Toons cartoons that could be placed anywhere.

A reason though, held too closely, steeped in too much conviction, could be hazardous. It can be a hole that half your leg is swallowed in. Or a pair of dark shades placed over your eyes, so black you can't see through. Never hold something so tightly that it hurts your hand to open it up again.

Holding on too loosely though, allows the thing to too easily slip away. It's funny - if you didn't hold on at all, you have neither problem. But what fun is that?

I don't know. Maybe having a reason is unreasonable. It's ever so slightly too forward thinking, enough to afford us a kind of myopic prescience, a retarded clairvoyance that keeps us always removed from the present. It's as though we only perceive the present through its juxtaposition to the future.

Why do we need it though, a reason? Why is it so important to know why? I realize the oddness of asking that question; to ask why we ask why is to affirm the fact. The snake eating its tail. We're trapped. It's all a circle. Wedding rings. Pizza and pie. The wheel. Areolas...well, sort of.

I remember reading an article somewhere that cited the top 5 most evil figures in literature. At the top of the list - at number one - was Iago, from Shakespeare's Othello. The reason (see what I did there) Iago is considered the most villainous of all villains, is because his villainy is incomprehensible. He is evil simply because he can be: showcasing a "motiveless malignity." It's telling that we find this kind of evil so despicable. It is the personification of death and danger and chaos - remorseless, indiscriminate, capricious.

"I do believe, if you don't like things you leave
 For some place you've never gone before"

- Velvet Underground