Seeing through blinding light

She cast her sceptical eye over the hands with no bodies as they traced the glass walls of the large box. ‘Is this art?’ she asked herself. In a world where art has no definition, where life itself appears not to, she was at once confused and lost. Could she decide whether or not it was a worthy work of art before she’d been through the experience awaiting her in the box, as she tended to before every art exhibit? She desperately longed to disengage herself from it all and throw into the wind all of her own desire to be an artist. ‘There was no point’, she thought, ‘it’s all nonsense’. Terrified of herself and her ambition, but most of all, the prospect of failing, she wanted to reject everything that might open her mind and make her better than she was. It was a never ending conflict between what she was and what she frantically didn’t want to be.

Finally the queue in front her disappeared inside the box and she was allowed in. She approached the mist cautiously, and saw her limbs slowly dissipate into the white cloud. A sudden chill shuddered through her body, as though to remind her that it was still connected with her. She could see nothing in front of herself. Everything was white, and it felt for a moment that she was entering the gates of heaven.

Bodiless voices called each other and giggled nervously all around her, and suddenly she felt utterly alone. In this claustrophobic box everything material ceased to exist, everything that had guided her through life was irrelevant. All that was left was the desire to get out, to retrieve control of the one sense she so heavily depended upon – her sight. But something urged her to stay. It was as though there was something within the mist that urgently needed discovering.

It came to her in a silent bang. ‘There is no point in trying to get out, the haze is everything you are and everything life is'. To find the exit so quickly would be a reflection of the solution to every problem she had ever faced. It struck her at that moment as entirely repulsive and cowardly. 'I will stay here and face it', she told herself. Sometimes one needs to be suffocated from the vision of reality in order to truly gain perspective of it. This is what the mist seemed to be whispering. ‘All our paranoia, all our fears are hysterical. Our society is hysterical. We are all hysterical beings thrown into a haze of confusion, and it is this essential buzzing fear that unites us but at the same time ultimately divides us’. She knew at that second that the only way she would ever manage is by embracing her fear and in a way use it to gain perspective of the positive in the world.

At last she decided it was time for her to leave. At the exit she was confronted by her friend who asked her how she found it. She replied that it was ‘alright’. She offered no explanation as to why she considered it merely so but it seemed unfair that one was allowed a few minutes of clarity and relief from the real world when you had only to return to it a moment later. You see, when her vision was returned to her and she was faced with the ugliness that surrounded, it was impossible to put to use anything that she had just learnt. Perspective, it seemed, was momentary, and though those moments came to be sacrosanct to her, they offered no solution to true existence. She was left with many questions, and few answers. Such was life, she thought, and headed home filled with the comfort of knowing that sometimes answers to life and ambition are in a practical sense, useless.