/lit/ - Literature

I don't think postmodernity goes away, stops, or finishes. I think it's just a cloud of chaos that opens itself up infinitely, like a Sargasso sea. My honest feeling is that ultimately it is a kind of phenomenon too fragile and mimetic to last, but it doesn't mean that it can't block out the sun in the meantime.

Like you were trying to leave Plato's cave but there was an army of clattering monkeys with cymbals standing there in the way making such a racket that you get completely lost and forget which way you are going and force you infinitely backwards into retreat. And eventually maybe it can get so bad that you come to wonder if that is simply all there is or if there ever really was an exit from the cave at all. Maybe - you can still remember the unsettling moment this thought first occurred to you - maybe Plato was just a meme and this is how life really is: monkeys with cymbals. Maybe there was no exit from the cave; maybe headquarters just received some bad information. Maybe it was just a slight miscommunication. You know how these things can go. Even the others in the cave can become convinced that this is the case. You can become convinced that an inescapable monkey labyrinth stands between you and the exit; but the instructions must exist somewhere. And surely they can be found. You just need a little more time, a little more data.

In the meantime therapy is an option. Maybe you become a monkey wrangler or cymbal repairman or an archivist. Maybe every once in a while you hear that somebody, some madman, escaped from the cave. That would be nice, you think, if it were true. But even if it were true - and what is truth, anyways? - it's too late for that now, because what, it is asked, would be up there but more monkeys anyways?

So you wait. You convince yourself that there were only ever monkeys, there only ever will be monkeys. You acquire a reputation for detecting nuances and charms, pointless trivialities, in the monkey labyrinth.

Later on, though this is much later, people not all that different from you, happening on the cave, will gather all of the monkeys and cymbals out of the cave and find your remains in it. They will clear the dust of that which you once were away from the vast and infinite collection of accumulated monkeys, an Ali Baba's treasury of worthlessness and wonder, and marvel in mingled astonishment and despair at the peculiar and nature of people who became stuck in the caves when escape was only three steps around the corner. The lesson, for anyone who hears it, has that ring of unmistakable truth associated with the Tao; it becomes a fable for children, who - happily - soon forget it.