Logo of the Museum of Vestigial Desire
The Museum of Vestigial Desire

Closure

tags: memory contraption congestion published on:

The desire to reach the end of loops, to escape recursions is basic and maybe even universal. But it is impossible to achieve, impossible to consummate. Invented narratives try to fill-in what experience doesn't provide. The unspoken is doubly spoken to make sure that the silence is not jarring. Open loops of experience, of give and take leak memory. Bog the system down, invent states of business even in comparatively unoccupied times. Lack of closure is also one of the reasons to live, drag on from week to week and month to month hoping for it to arrive. If you close, you might as well die. You might as well stop living, embalm yourself in a cave never to emerge again. Closure is death.

Born incomplete and coming to terms with it, why even treasure that is the task at hand. So now, we intern the desire to have closure as in this museum.

Everyone is thinking of everyone. No one is at peace, because they are alive in some mind, somewhere. Not being at peace is at an agitation, it demands a finality. A transition. Loops keep us in loops.

Follow me. There are tiny animals in front of you. Reptiles. There is elaborate orchestrated music playing on the speakers. The animals can stay alive as long as the music plays. If it stops, it is all over. There is no pause to reflect on the nature of the music. They might recognise patterns, but there is no time to reflect on them.

Follow me again. You are courting someone. Her face changes everyday, everything else remaining the same. You learn to graph one set of expressions and moods and then another and then another. But you always learning, analysing. There is no time to act, there is no time to move to second base.

Into this idea we can paint in a lot of pictures. You are playing a game. But your playmate keeps interrupting and declaring victory. No reason, just like that, "I win." What's to be done, what do you tell him. That he should slow down, that he should wait for the game to be over? The moment the game is over she is not your playmate anymore. So technically she can't win, she can only retrospect over a past victory.

And then someone made a movie that went on forever. It just went on and on. As the reel sixty-four was being screened, the team was shooting the reel hundred. It went on and on, after the actors were too old to act, their children replaced them. People spent their entire lives watching the single movie. And still it never made sense to them, it just kept growing in every possible direction. This movie was dangerous, people lost their hard on just thinking about it.

This specific film was singularly responsible for dismantling the whole business of film criticism. It baffled film critics. They couldn't say anything about the film at all, there was no point at which they had the benefit of hindsight. Other film makers lost their nerve, film schools closed down. Thus one film became cinema. Cinema of the incomplete, the unending. Eating in the kitchen, while the cook continues to cook continuously. Baffling tastes.

The children have bruises from listening to stories that jump too much. Those bruises are signs that they grow, slowly but surely.

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