theme - yield, title - warning: spoiler alert for being alive in misc. flash fiction

Matt said he can’t get into superhero movies as he knows most of the time, when someone dies, they’re coming back, so there’s no narrative weight. If anyone can return via time-travel, wizard or time-travelling wizard, there are no stakes. And from a storytelling perspective, I understand. Insofar as theory goes, he’s absolutely right.

But as ritual-act, it’s needed catharsis for culture in crisis, either teetering on the edge of collapse or going through quickening pains of a birth into something better, depending on your optimism. We’re in times without pantheon, without gods plural or by plurality, without even God singular. If we can’t have magic, we at least need metaphors and that’s the point of these films culturally:

We sit with strangers by campfires and together pretend death surmountable, vanquished by parlor trick or words of wit, for a little while. We can’t get family or friends back from death but gods-be-damned, at least Spider-Man is resurrected, as cast on cavern walls in flickering lights.

Old question I’ve been chewing on, a koan lacking an answer, point being the futility of asking: what happens when immovable object meets unstoppable force? It’s absurd, of course, neither’s possible. Everything’s stops, everything’s moves, just a matter of how hard it is to accomplish. Maybe love’s unstoppable, maybe death’s immovable, I don’t know. They sure feel so.

Such questions, like one clapping-hand, are supposed to force embrace of logic’s inadequacy in a life never uncomplicatedly logical, cut through the gordian knot of the momentary, possibly push toward enlightenment. Koans don’t function that way for me, I’m not built for it, I don’t reset in absurdity’s glower, I double-down instead.

I pick at edges and find loopholes, novel ways out, third paths, you know… cheat. Cheat instead of accepting loss. Riddles have me clapping one hand’s fingers against palm, smirking like I beat City Hall. Too clever by half in the worst sense, instead of seeing past the logical, I instead hack the code for a win-by-forfeit.

What happens when immovable object collides with impossible force? I’d weasel out with jokes and say the two just make love. I want to elude or to elide, prove how gosh-damned smart I am without improving myself by accepting defeat, even though it doesn’t work like that in real life.

Worst part is, I know an answer that works perfectly but doesn’t do me any good. You know what happens when unstoppable force meets immovable object? They yield. They both just yield. Their shared impossibilities annihilate each other out and yield.

But I don’t know how to yield, I’ll keep trying to talk my way out until my voice gives. My love doesn’t know, either. Death sure as hell doesn’t. So, I’m left at the local movie-house, watching pictures so swift they seem to move, beating death in metaphor as it’s better than no win at all.

It doesn’t make for the cleanest story, sure, but it helps me to not yield today. At least not today.