The Hungry Artist

My cat – in playing-dead position, marble eyes rolled back – murmurs like a dreamer. Does she dream herself the prey in some exciting chase? Or is the fluttering of her eyes and the quivering of her lips merely a physical reflex?

The 22-year old man-child sits on the floor, dressed up in a sweater and tie. The camera stays on him for a painfully long time. He was born deaf and blind. No one ever tried to awaken him, or even teach him how to walk. He doesn’t dress himself. Is he capable of abstract thinking? When he spits and drools and slaps his cheek, is this a form of language, or merely a physical reflex?

With one leap, the philosopher throws himself from his window. Perhaps death’s delay is too much to take, and after years of deliberation in everything else, he is driven to literally take the leap.

If he prayed, he would pray: Shall I like most, die when death takes a hold of me, suddenly, or preconceived? We owe one death each. Should we not have some say about the time to pay?

Do not be sad when death arrives. Welcome and accept it, rather than revolting like a spoiled child.

The man-child can’t help spitting and dribbling.

There are worse things than death – you’ve seen. Like watching someone offer up more than the one death he owes, an unwelcome generosity.

Hand him a banana and he’ll consume it instantly, without mashing it between his fingers. He can never think up a tree, but he can feel one with his hands and climb up one with his feet without knowing it’s a tree.

If the 22-year old man-child could pray: What is this constant buzzing sound in the back of my head? Please make it stop, and if you do, I’ll stop slapping and scratching and crawling on all four of these things you call feet.

Trapped in a one-lunged body, the philosopher suddenly leaps out the window. They say it was a reflex, after several years of struggling with painful breathing and living. The physical body can only take so much.

He had no time to think.

I wonder what my cat now awake, and the man-child now asleep dream about in the blank hours.