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[personal profile] aruan
I thought I left the guys kind of abruptly and quite rudely. I mean, it had partially been due to the very legitimate reasons that I felt tired and the progressive souring of things between James and I and having the object of my crush in the same room and knowing that he harbors no such reciprocating emotions for me - it was all enough to make a girl take a gun to the next person who so much as looked at her the wrong way. In any event, all that aside, I do normally enjoy their company regardless of surroundings and extenuating circumstances - those three can be quite the entertaining bunch. However, something about the day at large had been building within, and I found myself saying the words and leaving the scene in just such a manner.

And I realized my actions only as I was driving home. I felt guilty - they hadn't done anything to deserve neither my sudden exit nor my curt words on the matter of their current fascination. They had been messing around on this new fractal program for the past week, creating images out of mathematical equations with a myriad color, texture, shape, warp, and manipulating ability, which they were now eagerly showing RJay and I, who were slightly less than amused. But as RJay started playing with it, he also became sucked into it - yet the only thing I was feeling as I watched them, listening to their excited talk and watching the world zoom in and out and swirl by a simple application of a formula and a click of the mouse, was utter boredom. I mean, some of the designs were indeed gorgeous and amazing to look at - but nothing about either the creation process or the end result particularly grabbed me. So after about two hours of it, I had to step out lest be bored to tears. As I got in the car and cranked up Fatboy Slim louder than anyone's eardrums in a closed cabin should have to endure (the loudness obliterates thought), I drove home feeling not only that I had obviously missed out on a common bond, but also that I've somehow injured the ones already forged. With these gloomy thoughts I kept going, mostly on autopilot, lost in the ocean of music pulsing in my brain and the heavy feeling in my heart until I rounded the corner to get me onto Stirling Road from Palm Avenue, whereupon I suddenly found myself driving into the relatively unobstructed view of the sunset horizon stretched all along the road ahead of me. And as I sat in total awe, once again humbled by nature's talent with a paintbrush, I remember something James had said when he first booted up the fractal program that resonated within me: he was playing with the zoom feature and telling us how he could keep on zooming in almost infinitely and how it made him feel a little like God, watching the tiny universes within universes emerge and change under his control. And for a moment, the clouds, the sky, the setting sun, the trees lining the median and the asphalt road ahead of me all became the same sort of mathematical creation, a series of variables and operations making the world possible, like Neo's vision at the end of "The Matrix." I blinked in surprise and the math was gone; however, the feeling of awe and surreality lingered long after I'd pulled into my driveway. And for the next half hour, I remained deeply immersed in that moment, recalling it, the fractals, the excitement of the guys and why I had reacted so harshly to it all.

It dawned on me, in that all of a sudden, where there had been muddled confusion and pieces of a scattered whole was now being obliterated by the glaring light of high noon; and everything made sense. The fractals, while they had been nice to look at, intriguing in their forms and processes, possessed unto themselves no inner light that the spark of life creates, no inherent beauty; only the cold, (ha! How ironic: science girl finds math cold and, for lack of a better word, calculating) detached firmness of its rules and principles, its order of operations and inverse ratios. Its pretention annoyed and outraged me; it's coldness burned my skin and wounded the divine ground within. How dare it imitate the real, assume to know its workings and method, pretending to be alive and dynamic yet so limited in its range and scope? How dare it assume the properties of life, that deeply mysterious and wholly magical force animating every living thing? How dare it masquerade as beauty? Like we were saying today in English, art is supposed to elicit emotion - looking at those fractals, I felt almost disgusted by their mockery of the beauty that true art embodies. And the fact that they were taking such joy in it - I was disconcerted before I even recognized it as such. And all I could think of were the great works of art, of true beauty I had encountered in my life - Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club," the launch of a space shuttle, Olympic figure skating - and here they were, wasting their time in adoration of what is essentially tantamount to a false idol, and love them as I might I simply could not stay in the same room with them a moment longer. I thought about writing, of the sheer ecstasy of finally discovering the perfect word or elusive synonym seeming almost negligibly different in the spectrum of meaning, yet somehow an infinitely better fit. I know the workings of grammar and, I'd like to think, possess a well-honed command of a sizeable vocabulary... then again, looking at it that way, one can easily draw the parallels between their computer program and my glorified calligraphy. The difference? The well-written word can wring from me a thousand tears or arouse the most satisfying happiness, whereas these fractals bred nothing but contempt for the travesty they were - lifeless, soulless numerals in sequence, no heart or mind, just aligning themselves to form even bigger mountains of blasphemy.
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Eva

April 2014

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