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The Positive Outlook

Oz Hardwick

The light is heavy here, leaning on language until it breaks. We’ve countless words for yes but none of them works in this kind of illumination and scientists – proper scientists with thick glasses and all desires sublimated to the good of all humanity – work through weekends and cancel their vacations but are still no nearer to an adequate affirmative. A hundred years ago, children as young as five or six would chip away at light like this so that the rich could bask in the swinish luxury of their beautiful, useless houses, while the poor scraped up dust and fragments to wrap in old newspapers for when the night grew too stubborn to leave. It’s why we had wars, unions, Dada, and long-playing records. Now, this light’s taken for granted and we trust celebrities rather than scientists, while 95% of children aged five or six would rather be celebrities than scientists and the other five per cent can’t tell the difference. The light is so heavy here that it forces our heads deep into the sand; it crushes metaphor and metonym until their juice dries to dust; it flattens science into a 60s comic strip, and until someone discovers that hidden element of yes that physicists and mystics agree must be here somewhere, we’ll keep chalking it up to madness and swallowing the tiny white pills.

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