Life on Mars (plus two other songs)

I sometimes wonder if there is life on Mars. And when I do, I hope there isn’t. I’d like to have a place and call it my own, all the rules and facts UNDER me. But maybe this wouldn’t be worthwhile and the forces that keep me going would disappear. Maybe I’m not enough for myself.

I have once wondered who I am. The girl with the mousy hair or the script writer? Am I a character inside some broader, incomprehensible movie, or am I the director with god-like powers to create my own small, ersatz story?

Perhaps, as George Harrison once sang (and many before him, but shamefully he’s the only one I care about), it is within me - it is myself - and goes on without me - bigger than me. But alas, these are two different things. I have totally shrunk Harrison’s meaning into my own self. It’s not about life, what I wonder. In the end, it’s just about individuality.

You can’t have one without the other, of course, they go together like the horse and carriage, because life as a broader movie is made of character-individuals, yet we won’t exist if there isn’t a life for us to live. But they are not the same, they are a couple, and none is bigger or more important than the other. They are two sides to a same coin, so then I wouldn’t survive on an empty Mars. There is no escaping, and that’s fine (when it’s not sad, but that’s just sometimes).

And if the individual’s inherent dependency is fundamentally necessary to its existence (through life), can’t we at least shyly wonder what it would be like to live as individuals who aren’t so essentially unique and distinct? Which part is designated to others inside the movie, and how do they write their own script? How do they do it, how do they perceive it, how do they feel?

I sometimes think that I’d like to see what others see, but I quickly shun these thoughts because they make me run away from myself. They lead way too smoothly into thoughts of living somebody else’s life, of abandoning my individuality and assuming that of someone else who exists inside the same movie as me. And that can’t be, I would never allow myself, being the iron fist ruler that we all have to be.

But I shyly wonder, still, and life would be a lot more chaotic, a lot less fluid and careless if we could jump from individuality to individuality. Some would fight for the right of being a certain other, and then they would be abandoned, and the movie would stop happening. If the movie ever stopped happening, individuals wouldn’t survive, to live and to be lived by others. Without the limits of self, characters can’t survive, and therefore they wouldn’t have a script to follow or a paper to write on.

If I could, just for a moment, ever know how is it that others live, then everything would go wrong. Even my problems, my wrongness, everything. So I just remain amazed, watching the multitude of others that exist around me, each one of them a life like mine, a character as me; each writing their own movie, living the same one. And no matter how much I can sometimes wish for a still Mars, all these strangers are what allow me to be myself. To be alone there, I’d have to be together with them.