The Representation of Unreality

(content warning: implied suicidal ideation)

Once, there was a girl who was preternaturally good at creating representations. She could not tell how she came to possess this power. Perhaps she had been born with it, or perhaps one day she had gotten carried away reading Erich Auerbach and it had simply sprung into existence.

She could do impressive things with this power, and for a time she put it to good use. She could make movies and carve ice-sculptures and impress small scribbles on a piece of paper, and all around her, the people would stop to marvel at these likenesses. How lifelike they were! How keen and how beautiful, as though steeped in some iridescent effluvia that boiled in the deep recesses of geothermal vents, which itself had spilled from the lacrimal glands of the gods!

But when she spent a long time staring at these representations—the hallways full of cassowary sculptures, the embroidered boll weevils—something would always make her flinch away. There was something missing, she thought. They were a little too empty, too insubstantial, like an echo on the walls of reality. She tried asking the representations, but because they were merely that and nothing else, they could only stare at her. (Of course, she did not stop to consider that the real animals would—most likely—not have answered, either.)

At last, the girl believed she had found the answer. There was some fundamental pearl of reality that eluded her, some grain of truth that would spark life into her creations. 

So she spent a great deal of time trying to find it. In fact, the effort took her all the way around the world. She rappelled down massive cataracts with the water thundering past her ears, walked upside-down on the roofs of bottomless caverns, and stared down snowfields aglitter like black glass under the midnight sun—all to find those secret places where dragons slept. And where she found them, she plucked the pearls from their claws. 

Then, in the light of these orbs, she continued her work. She worked all the way through the night, for thirty days and thirty nights, until their glow was spent and new calluses grew on top of her old ones.

But it was no use. Like a limit approaching infinity, her representations could only become more lifelike without ever touching perfection. 

And so, one day, the girl—who was now a woman—set aside her cameras and her chisels and her sketchpads. She decided to become an accountant. In an office building with a cubicle, surrounded by other people, she thought she might find freedom. But everywhere she looked, there were reminders of her failure. For what were numbers, but the purest representations of reality? 

The days rolled on. They gave birth to weeks, months, years; each generation greyer than the last. 

And because the woman was so skillful at creating representations, she made a representation of herself to see herself through them. It lived in her skin and breathed the same air and ate the same food that she did. The only difference was that it was content with unreality. 

Don’t think of this as your life, it would say. Think of this as the representation of the life of your typical nine-to-five office worker. Isn’t that better? For your life to be art?

She thought these things were meant to sound comforting, but all they did was make her feel worse. So the woman slept inside of herself while the representation walked around in her body. Until one day, she awoke and blinked in the sun, and decided that she was tired of sleeping.

She made her way to the top of the office building and walked up to the edge. 

The sky blazed blue into her eyes. She turned them downwards. From this height, all the people in the city looked like ants, and the cars were beetles with bright shells. I could make a decent diorama out of this, she thought, but what would be the use? 

She took a breath.  

At that moment the representation of herself stepped out of her body and said, wait. It looked exactly like her, only a little more translucent, and its edges shimmered like oil on water. It was hovering a few inches above the rooftop. 

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, and I think… you’ve got it all wrong. It’s not about replicating reality. It’s about making something similar, but different. In a way that makes it interesting. 

Take me, for instance. The representation gestured at itself. Did you know I can fly?

The woman shook her head. 

Me neither. I only found out now, when I thought we might need it. 

The woman looked back at the edge, and then at the representation of herself. I’m sorry, she said, closing her eyes. For making you go through all that work. And she tried to articulate the suffocating feeling of confronting the routine that had become her life, and the endless array of numbers that reduced reality down to its components better than she ever could, but the words clotted and stuck to the inside of her throat.

I know. The representation smiled sadly. Then again, what could be more interesting than a metaphysical entity doing financial reports?

It opened its arms. For a few seconds, the woman only stared at it, wide-eyed. Then, she stepped away from the edge, turned around, and let herself fall back into its soap-bubble sheen. 

They stretched out their arms in unison, and a pair of prismatic wings unfolded above them, huge and opalescent.

They flew from the top of the building, circled the city twice, and finally came back to the woman’s old workshop. It had fallen into disrepair, and the dragon pearls were covered with a fine layer of dust. The woman picked them up and dusted them off. I suppose I won’t be needing these anymore. Shall we return them?

So they flew around to all the places that she had ventured to, which the representation could remember but had never seen with its own eyes. It marveled at the waterfalls and the caverns, and the vast stretches of snow. For the first time she had visited, the woman had unwittingly made these places unreal, too. And now that she knew this, she found that the water could cascade in any direction, and the ceilings of the caverns were lined with a thousand colors of quartz, and the snowfields reflected the lights that danced through the darkened sky. 

In their slumber the dragons had long turned into stone, but when the woman placed their pearls back into their claws, a touch of unreality came back to them, and they reanimated.

Then they had to run, of course—but the dragons were still drowsy, so it was easy to get away.

When the woman got back, she made it her aim and her craft to never try to mimic reality again. All her old friends and admirers tittered and looked askance at her new projects, but she didn’t mind.

It wasn’t all easy. In fact, it could be quite a difficult balance to strike. One couldn’t dispense with reality entirely, because everything that existed had to be based on it. And yet, in her representations, she could at least hope to capture something that was more than the subject itself.

One day, she made for her representation a body of its own. It was made of little more than glitter and chicken wire, and she might have made something much more splendid, but in the end, this was what the representation liked best. 

It had grown separate from her, into a person all its own, and when it asked if she regretted that, the woman would only smile and shake her head. If it wasn’t for that, we could never have flown. 

So they lived on, in a little house on the outskirts of the city, where the concrete ran out into the fields along the freeways. 

And for every person who worked long grey hours in a cubicle, and every child stuck in the stranglehold of school, and every runaway representation—for them, there would be a glimmer of hope. To catch a glimpse of weightless water and jewel-bright skies, and dragons that roared up from the other side of reality.