Spectacle

Sylvia Shawcross

There are two types of people in this world: the introspectors and the exospectors. Well… there are actually three if you count the people who have no spect at all.

They don’t usually count because they make no difference to anything or anyone at all.

Now, the introspectors live lives like anybody else, puttering about their days, making their plans, laughing, lunching, working, sleeping and buying ice cream and going on vacations and clipping their toenails. For the most part, their lives are predictable.

The funny thing is the exact same thing is true of exospectors. In living there is no difference really. It’s when the bad things happen. That’s when the lightening bolt splits the atom and you know exactly who you’re dealing with. One is positively charged and the other is negatively charged and there ain’t no meeting in the middle.

One sunny day, like any other day, something terrible happens. Oh I don’t know. It could be anything. Let’s say they lose their job and there are no other jobs to be found and the mortgage payment is burning red in their bank account and the car payment is late and… well, the usual hells of living here in this time and in this place. Maybe it is something as simple as an election result they did not agree with. It could happen. Really.

The introspector will crawl into bed and pull the covers over their head and proceed to think and torture themselves and praise themselves and then stop thinking and weep and wail and then cycle this for a long long time before they emerge to ask somebody what they did wrong. They will ask more people. They will examine every fact they can lay their hands on. They will bravely put their toes where they’ve never put their toes. They will listen to people they never even really knew existed before. They will think and think and think.

They will probably repeat this whole cycle for awhile. And in their final emergence, they will have learned. They know what they did wrong. They know what others might have done wrong. They mostly realize what they themselves will not do again.

They were hurt and they know the how’s and the why’s of it all. And the life of the introspector will go on, changed indeed. They will perhaps have taken on some sorrow, for knowledge often is sorrow but their direction is clear. As the oracle of Delphi exhorted, they know themselves. They did a thing called introspection.

Introspection used to be a thing. Once. In the olden days.

The exospector has no spect to inspect and I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I just told you that there was a third type who didn’t have a spect. I lied. Well, not really. That third type literally has no spect. The exospector has one but refuses to look at it.

When bad things happen to the exospector there is only one response: it is somebody else’s fault. No need to think about anything here. It is “so and so’s” fault and that is the way it is and that is because they are [insert derogatory names here such as deplorable, uneducated, misogynistic, traitors… etc… the usual litany]. They might crawl into bed but not for long because that is boring and nobody is looking at them. Mostly they have emotional diatribes.

This is actually a normal response for most people in bad times. It’s the degree and outcome of it. Exospectors will scream, cry, threaten, howl, sob, shave their heads, and mostly blame every single person they can think of to blame. They have been hurt. How dare such a thing happen to them since they are always right. Wasn’t it obvious—they had the moral high ground. How dare the world treat them this way.

But that’s the thing about the world. It doesn’t care. It is just the world doing its worldly stuff. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. It has been that way since recorded time. There is nothing new under the sun… well… maybe the Hadron Collider thingie and factories that make insects to eat…. So I stand corrected.

The strangest thing about the exospector is their need to go on tik-tok. In the olden days nobody would want the whole damn world to see you at your worst with your hair flying and your mascara running and your chin wobbling and your mad red eyes and wailing open mouth screeching things you may or may not regret.

Now of course, the worst of all possible moments in a person’s life is theatre for all the world to see. It is all theatre. It accomplishes nothing. But it makes for great tik-toks in a weird perverse world.

Of the two, the introspector is the one who figured it out. The division was all that mattered. And that was nobody’s spect to inspect.

We are all just spectators to a mad world. Be gracious. In the win and in the defeat. It was never your game. You didn’t make the rules.