by LJ Frank 

Life is not a film. Perhaps not, but then again, entertainment has value – the meditative reflection on a chiaroscuro canvas in want of expressive color – to make it through a day is heroic for increasing numbers of people.

The surreal quality of to exist: moments beyond the omnipresent public cameras that record our movement there exists a demand for more precise equipment to improve our voyeurism addiction.  There is a film in which I am a participant with beep like sounds and a dim light by a voyeuristic culture – will people learn that consensual titillation is the most rewarding?

After cashing in on my reward points for drinking and eating at a particular coffee shop I walked outside to cast my gaze at a face formed by a billowy cloud and framed by a deep cobalt blue sky.  A human like countenance with long hair in anthropomorphic splendor glided across the heavens and as the moisture moved about from the breeze, I could have sworn, with tongue in cheek, that she winked.

The wish to project and relate I suspect is a holistic attempt to define all with humans at the center. Much like the sun revolving around the Earth as opposed to the reality.

I occasionally ascribe attributes where the only place they exist is in my mind. I suppose it’s an attempt to make personal that which is impersonal and indifferent, and otherwise unrelatable to the want of my brain seeking the simplest of answers.

Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, or natural phenomena such as faces in the clouds can be a rewarding past time and quite inexpensive as I once spent an afternoon with a friend in which we described inanimate objects as signs or symbols with hidden meanings.

There are eerie sounds emanating throughout the cosmos. Yet I hope among the distant planets and two trillion galaxies there are recognizable human like voices and musical notes that uplift the spirit of life itself, awakening it from its primitive pastures of the struggle of birth, growth, and the aloneness of death to be energy recycled in vaguely familiar and enchantingly unfamiliar forms.

I cannot accept the supposition that infinite space is wasted on non-living things. If there is but one contrary example, such as the Earth, then that notion is false. Truly, there are living creating beings on some distant planet that surmise their seemingly existential nature and have composed music to inspire and give them pause at the wonder in the starry sky above them. 

If they have survived their own peculiar genius to create and destroy, they serve as a companion no matter how distant in the journey across the infinite heavens.

Perhaps the Methuselah star in the Libra constellation is among the oldest if not the oldest star in the observable universe….if it was able to store a film worthy journal about the universe and human like life, what would it be able to tell us about our journey?