The Narrator’s Theory of Sweetness

The narrator is not a figment of the author’s imagination but a reality standing on his own. Once upon a time he desired the younger dyke. He never dared to express his feelings toward her. She desired him too in a physical way. Both of them aged and let time get the better of them. The queen perhaps had warm feelings toward the narrator. He hated the younger dyke for being in the way. It made him insane with anger. The narrator was contemptuous of the queen’s ability to portray himself as an eternal dependent. He shared the feelings of the younger dyke. Simultaneously he despised the younger dyke for her incapacity to feel. The world did not matter to her. She had the illusion of being an actress walking down a street. He hated that quality in her. She was desirable and he desired. The older dyke he felt was a bore. She was kind in a bothersome way. She might also have been in some ways humane. She was annoyingly dramatic about her piety and the narrator was certain her attempts at saintliness were foolish. Was the narrator aging with them all the while! The narrator was defensive when it came to a discussion of age and aging. His heart was rooted in nostalgia that came from romantic love. Irony helped him evolve and he struggled against himself not to be cynical. He shared the distance from reality that he saw in the queen and the two dykes. He felt a closeness to them and the desire made it seem incestuous. For a long time he wondered if their story was worth the narration. In a moment of madness he was seized by the writing ghost who forced him to relate their story. Like the characters whose lives he narrated, the narrator feared death and dying. This made all four of their lives intensely poignant. The misgivings of the world were unreal. The human person of the twenty-first century and the human person of the early tribes are similar. The ultimate question to neither has been meaning. The ultimate question has been how to fill the time and space given. What do you do between two points in the void? Occupation has been the question. The one way I could be myself is through occupation.

To the narrator the world was independent of the actor. The actor who occupies the stage knows that he does not belong here. To wish to possess is to believe in life in its primitive forms. The actor could dig holes or break sticks. Both the exercises are irrelevant if I did not declare that the hole and the stick are mine. I want the world to remember me. That the stage is molecules packed together in various combinations is a reality that the soul was not born for. It wants more than it gives. It gives when it is assured of memory that comes from betrayal. The human soul accepts betrayal more easily than it would like to admit. The human soul betrays with the same ease expecting to be pitied and loved in equal breadth. There is no life that passes through the world in full consciousness without knowledge of betrayal. The most human of all situations is to betray without explicit reason. The narrator understood what it meant to betray and how it felt to be betrayed. He betrayed his characters when he wrote a story about them. He knew that this piece of fiction could cost him his life. They betrayed him as well when they did not accept him as he was. He was a secretive rascal who lived many lives at the same time. He was practical to the extent that he knew how to keep a job. The rest of his life was theory. The beauty of the theory was that it had an abstract elegance to it. The theory left a sweet feeling behind because it made betrayal seem normal. It was not a theory of betrayal. It was a theory of sweetness.

Histories made no difference to the essential person...