A Moment of Clarity

Behold, the defining moment that instills fear into the supercilious mind-frame of the emotionless deadman. He who directed his actions to best suit the desired image that he was led to believe would define his character. Everything he was, and the life he called his own was fathomed by an overbearing self-gratifying consumer industry that’s currency traded on a malnourished sense of self-belonging and perpetual worth.
In a market driven civilization where nothing ever has value until it is sold or stolen, our anti-hero was the epitome of self-proclaimed definition.

He knew his place in society and anchored himself onto identities whose profiles were of more value than his own. His complacency came from the marketed masses that would anchor themselves to his own fatuous image. As long as he was emulated, he was adulated. This value of self-importance is the fading memory that keeps the cold truth at bay. Because of this day, and for every new day to come, there is no sense of value or importance, only a decrepit shell of Metropolis to remind him why. The city streets that were once the epicenter of life are now the decaying tombs of the deadmen. Happiness is no longer a commodity bought through single subscriptions and ready to wear tailored power suits. It is forgotten, buried long ago with the conceited advertising giants and the insipid visions they set about in place.

The deadman is entombed within the memory of an existence that gave him purpose and laboured by an expanse montage of decay (his ‘paradise lost’), to which he chooses only to see whatever best suits the life he now holds. It is when he is alone with his prolonged sense of doubt that he endures a sad and pathetic moment of clarity. It is not until everything has been taken away that he realizes there was never anything in the first place. The magazines told him what to wear, what to eat, who to talk to and what to say.
He had studied their demoralized ideals and often sought to become the seasonal whored identity.

He sits alone in a cold and lifeless room and opens his eyes to the pitiful mess he helped create. It is now that he succumbs to the reality that things may never go back to the way they were. Control has been sold. The memories fade gently into his mind as yet another missing person on a wall full of broken dreams. Amidst all the ruins of history, hope has taken many forms. All that is left now is to prey to the grey lifeless image of that perfect moment when everything they said would happen; didn’t.

With a tunnel view of what he has become, he looks for strength within himself and a defining character that exists without the marketing dream. He still chooses to relate himself to his surroundings for some sense of worth. He feels he is nothing without his accessories and begs a question that he dare not answer himself. He realizes he must almost start from scratch and put aside his memories of who he was and find significance in just being alive. He has invested too much in his memories and more often the not, closes his eyes again and again to chance an impossible dream.

He has always been truly amazing at everything he has ever done. This day though, it seems would evolve into a moment of pure terror that does little to quell the decisiveness of disappointment, the self-preserving educator dictating the motive for change.

This man, enduring this moment of clarity, stands with the poise and stature of accomplishment, bearing the physical scars of his limitless potential. His clothes sit lifeless, tattered and torn on his broken body, yet to look indirectly, one would suspect that this man wears this blood and urine soaked suit like a scar and it is tailored to fit like chain reaction. To the well-trained eye, this unrehearsed moment appears to almost paint a still life portrait that warms to the marriage of suffering and adversity.

This apocalypse is the genesis that only mankind could conceive.

This man truly is a broken vehicle, siphoned clean of all identity, and serving absolutely no purpose whatsoever. His open arms float like weather beaten doors, flailing helplessly on its rigid joints and only serve to highlight this immediate sense of incident (that feeling deep inside when you just know that something bad happened here). His arms serve to shake the fevered chill of abandonment that courses through his veins feeding the insecurities of innocence. To be born again into a new foreign sense of independence is ever so frightening the second time round with a full catalogue of what now appear to be irrelevant memories. The people, the cities, the countless human tragedies, the history of a the society that recognized identity, those that were loved and those who dine alone, and the cultural significance that lost all meaning; if at all there is any relevance at all in meaning.

This moment feels like an emotional collage of all those heart-breaking and terrible things that can happen to children when they are left alone. Oh what it must feel like to be aware of all that has happened, what is to become and even amidst all the prowess of human understanding, bearing the overwhelming emotional weight of a single isolated child, alone and vulnerable, with no reason whatsoever to believe that hope should exist at all. The physical suffering takes little course in relation to the infant puppet master pulling the casualty strings of the meta-physical being.

This will be a moment indeed.