Scenes

As part of our humanity, each of us has, etched in our consciousness and playing through our souls, scenes, stories, and viginettes, comprised as much of raw feeling and thought and emotion as of visceral matter. In each of us, these scenes are crying desperately to be released.

Some become playwrites, capturing their scenes on paper. Some become actors, hoping that through portraying the scenes of others their own scenes will emerge. Some become musicians, expressing their scenes through lyric, though melody, and through the raw vibration of air carrying feeling between player and listener. Some become sculptors, carving their scenes into mighty marble and granite or freezing ice or tenuous clay. Some become painters, layering and nuancing their scenes gently or angrily, carefully or quickly, beautifully or harshly, onto any surface that will bear them. Some become dancers, expressing their scenes wordlessly, soundlessly through whirling, graceful, jarring kinesthesis.

Some become athletes, laying their scenes out on the field, on the track, in the air, under the water, to be won, lost, but seen. Some become tycoons, enforcing their scenes by executive fiat. Some become preachers, exhorting their scenes from behind the pulpit and weaving them with holy words and divine truths. Some become missionaries, telling their scenes to the far corners of the world or the near corners of their own suburbs. Some become teachers, instilling their scenes into minds which will be shaped by them for years to come.

Some become warriors, carrying their scenes on the tips of swords, spears, and guns. Some become rulers, tyrannically enforcing their scenes on all they touch or coaxing, inspiring, and subtly insinuating their scenes into the collective consciousness of the ruled. Some become criminals, twisting and perverting their scenes with hatred and injustice, writing them in shattered glass and spilt blood. Some devote their lives to reporting and recording the scenes of others, and with every line and every thought their own scenes are knit in, tightly and surely.

Some choose to write their scenes in verse, letting meter and rhythm and dissonance and understatement rule the day. And some simply prefer to write their scenes down in prosaic prosy prose, spelling them out letter by letter and line by line.

Most tragic of all are those who become numb, whose scenes bleed out on the altar of convenience and entertainment, whose numb patrons shuffle artlessly through existence, swatting meanly at the glimmer, the stirring of the scene within, numbing the nerve with events and obligations and drudgery and the mindless flickering light that settles on the spirit in the evening and portrays even that which it kills. Have pity on these scenes; for when a scene dies within the soul, its uniqueness tied to that of its mausoleum, it is a tragedy beyond reckoning.