Cut passage from Faithful Unbeliever

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The beginning could also be the end. The idea of a lost masterpiece was of course alluring. But was there one? Did it actually exist? Perhaps the rumour was the work. Setting up the rumour was the masterpiece in and of itself. I didn’t know. No one knew. This is not that story. That story was only a tale I was following from afar. Yet everything is connected.

This rumour was mainly pursued by experts in the field. Some of these experts recounted inexplicable occurrences. Such as discovering a scan in a particular archive, feeling it to be a major discovery, but upon returning to the archive later the same day no longer being able to find it. From memory they parsed what they could from their short time spent examining it. A story about a soldier who, when ordered to fire at the enemy, instead turns around and shoots his commanding officer dead. A clear act of treason followed by the other soldiers spontaneously bursting into applause.

Did that archival scan actually disappear? Was it a fiction? A hallucination? A boast? A poem? A good story you might tell at a cocktail party?





The feeling that something has been lost. That people used to know something we no longer seem to know. A parallel or mirror feeling to the anxiety there might not be much of a future. A past that existed yet feels unknown and a future that might not exist and therefore feels equally unknown. To imagine that someone broke into the archive and stole the scan. To hide something. To cover their tracks. To create a mystery. To whittle down the available evidence. Or for no reason at all.

Anyone can say that something was there but now it’s gone. Anyone can say they found a clue which later left them clueless. There are probably only twenty or thirty people in the entire world who are intensely interested in this topic. I am not one of them. More of a casual observer. Occasionally observing from afar. Years go by when I don’t think about it at all and then something happens. As if someone had taken my life, turned it upside down, given it a good shake, and what fell out is a reminder of this questionably lost masterpiece.





My ancestors were oppressors. This does not make me unique. I don’t particularly want to tell you about them. Maybe I will later. (Maybe not.) This isn’t a story about them, isn’t a story about anyone. It is a story about certain specific events. Events that happen all the time. How I tell you about these events will determine how you understand them. This is my basic understanding of narration. I will try to change your mind at the same time as you’re trying to change mine. If you strongly disagree, if you throw this book across the room in protest, to my mind that is also a valid reading. Even indifference is valid. I used to read every single book I picked up from beginning to end. That was a different time. Now I often abandon books halfway through. I no longer want to know what happens. What happens is often less interesting than what I imagine. And what happens in my life is often less interesting than what I desire.





During the final game of the world cup, the star player decides to score on his own team’s goal as an act of treason. The crowd is stunned, dead quiet. In less than a split second he is no longer a star. Another thing about this time, I was thinking a great deal about conversion experiences. I wanted something along those lines for myself and I wanted to trigger something similar in others. Often what you want to do, or what you think you’re doing, is not what you’re actually doing. You’re doing something else. That something else might be what you actually want to do, rather than what you think you want to do. But these two possibilities need not be in opposition. One of my goals, in short, was to bring them closer together. Was this the goal of my team or did it belong to the opposing one? I can never stop thinking about that hypothetical soldier who turned around and shot his own commanding officer. An example as compelling as it is rare. You only have a split second to succeed. If you miss you’re already dead.





A fragment, even the rumour of a fragment, makes you wonder: what were the other things that once surrounded it.





There are conversion experiences that concern religion. I suspect these are the ones we hear about most often. But what I want to think about is not that, since we’ve heard about such things way too often and, more importantly, I believe there are also conversion experiences that concern art, politics, other things as well. Thinking one’s political or artistic convictions are one way, and then you have an encounter or experience that, quite suddenly, shifts them toward something completely different. I now find myself thinking of such conversion experiences as some kind of mini-utopia. Utopia reflecting a desire for the world to change and these personal experiences being evidence that an individual’s sense of purpose and action can shift – more, and more quickly, than one might at first suspect. Such conversion experiences can of course also set off domino effects, where each person changes the next. But can this phenomenon ever really be said to lead to human flourishing? It has potential, yet also seems to fall short. I worry that writing about it so positively neglects the aspects that most resemble joining a cult.



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(In my current in-progress trilogy - Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Desire Without Expectation, Faithful Unbeliever - all three books are based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.)



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