The End (Closure, Perspective and the Collapse of Multiplicity in Meaning)

Begin with the end.

If something has been pleasurable, we are averse to it ending and seek environments in which it will endure. And yet the laws of entropy and emotion tell us that all things, all good things, those that are of the most pleasurable kind in life, they shall end. Despite the promise of further ups and downs, the next will be diminished and the most pleasurable of these, when the addictive dopamine rush kicks in at the anticipation of securing, the certainty of experiencing the successful event, lapse like lemmings off of a neuronal cliff at the attainment of the event itself, the mockery of success). Even the most pleasurable life will some day end. And by signaling the end – our bodies tell us things, our partners reveal things, literature and film have material constraints as well as plot indicators letting us know that things will soon collapse back into nothingness. By preparing the viewer, reader, loved ones – we are allowing them a better transition and means to move on.

Not all endings provide closure, however, but even without closure there are always still the signals there for us to notice – to indicate, warn, alert us to the impending end. Most of us have probably experienced it on a personal level – the story of a relationship. Not so suddenly, the spark seems to be missing, one partner is showing impatience or begins to note and tear the other down. Perhaps one of the parties is moving in a different direction, perhaps they’ve met someone new, perhaps their behavior is elicit a response that would justify their new adventure and break from the old and what has become boring (i.e. stable) – all of a sudden they’re nervous around you, are evasive, even combative – they are already looking to leave and abandon the ship, as the rats scurrying for the docks – and you sense it, you notice it, you repress it, but your intuition knows, your gut knows, and maybe you try harder thinking that you can see – brazenly in the open – who it is they are moving towards…will you betray yourself and imitate another, or maybe it isn’t even a person they are moving toward, maybe it’s a lifestyle influenced by alcohol, the Neverland of Peter Pan, where noone ever grows up or matures, or maybe it’s drugs and they are Pinocchioing their way to becoming a jack-ass on their own pleasure island. In any case, it’s something other than you – you are not enough, you feel less – unnecessarily, but nevertheless…less. And then finally, one day, there’s the cut.

They call it ghosting and it seems to be directly derived from either cowardice or a narrative ploy that frustrates the reader. I think that it’s main motivation is to illicit a confusion and desire in the ghosted person so that they will still be thinking about you. The confusion allows thoughts of reconciliation to linger on. Or is it that as an author, you have no ending, as a director, you have no idea of a conclusion, or as a person, you have no will to end the relationship, only to see the sorrow it may reap. Perhaps it is that you don’t want to have to face the consequences of your actions – the emotional strain of having let someone else down, or the fear of perhaps not being able to be decisive about its finality. In any case, in a story, the authors signal the end, they let the reader know that the book is coming to a close. They certainly don’t have to in  a purely technical sense – but more often than not, they do, because it would otherwise frustrate their readership and genre expectations – unless your reader loves melodrama and it’s masochistic, fanatic suppression of desire. But then why?

To provide closure. To entertain. To let the viewer and reader know that this is the end and now you can set the book aside and continue on with their life. We see exposition, plot resolution (identity resolution), or frames that reach for a conclusion, but leave the gate open – refusing to close, but preparing us in a way that we understand it as unresolved – perhaps awaiting a sequel and our dopamine receptors kick-in as we wonder about the next time.

At the end, we also re-evaluate the book or film in their entirety. As part of reconfiguration, we have now come to a point, where we can reconstruct, where if we were to tell the story to someone else, we would only pick out the essential features that stuck out most for us. Each person may pick out something different, as the plot lines can even vary, and multiple readings reward, and experience in life tends to diminish our favorite books of youth. They are all these things – like the quantum theory that places electrons both as a field that can extend across the universe, but upon first observation, collapses to a specific point in time. These books – a simplified reality – could have been and were imagined many different ways by their authors, but when pen goes to the paper, only one story emerges – and among the multiplicity of readings, each reader brings out different variations collapsing the potential into the story they take with them. Imagine then, the complexity of a human personality – a human being, who experiences something, goes through it, then reconfigures that experience in a particular way. The multiplicity of the human personality – questioning whether the intentions of someone were benign or malignant – they were and always will be both, only that when observed, only one of those remain – like the visual trick of the duck/rabbit – young/old woman – the brain localizes, spatializes and collapses the duality to meet their expectations that only one can exist at a single time. The truth is that both and many more exist within the same person and only through reconfiguration to shine a light upon one or the other. 

The end is like any other experience we have, we go back and we pick out the points that are most relevant to us at the time, perhaps also most satiated by what we are feeling at the time, whether it be melancholy and loss or joyful freedom. What’s interesting is that even given a decade between readings of the same book, you would understand or essentialize it in a completely different way – unless you refused to learn, refused to grow and refused to take on new perspectives – and even then it would be hard to form a different opinion, for better or for worse. Remember what time does…it heals. Not exactly…it provides new readings, new configurations, deeper understanding, when we care to confront the past as narrative. Finally, I must admit that the books that impressed me most back in High School, seem incredibly simple in their style, plot and vocabulary – to read those favorites again diminishes them while also leaves me waxing for simpler days – a romantic notion for certain – but not altogether harmless either – because it begs me to regress to that period of enjoyment and opens up the mind to the subtle manipulations of willed infantilism – something that is rather ugly to behold. The person as puppet. The man or woman as child in the adult body. The middle school mentality of infidelity and excess. A never-ending cycle that refuses to progress. And yet what awaits us all, even those who have grown ugly in action from their refusal to sacrifice.

The end.