The Point of Pointlessness

A Poem by Oveane

Sometimes, the best answer doesn't need an answer at all. You create your own answer, and trust in yourself to hold trust in you. This piece explores several questions asked in the midst of silence.

I lie on the bed, tapping and rapping on the wall,
waiting for something, someone to pick me up and
throw me out, allow me to survive for myself.

Alarm clock screams at me to get me up,
and then I remember: I don't have one.

Huge sigh and lazy shoulders thrusting me over the bed
I don't want this to end just yet, this eternal rest.
I fall back and look to the ceiling for answers, though
I know that anything man has made is technical.

My head screams at me the question.
What is the point of it all?
So many times have I thought I would think something
and never come back, I would fly off into the void.
Undefined questions begin to invade my mind.

What is the point of a poem if it is destined to be lost
to the sands of time? Why write, if experiences will
never be the same? How may I prove I am thinking
these thoughts if everyone else seems to think otherwise?

No. I'm not alone. I can't be the only one alone, tackling
the difficult nature of these dreaded, undefined questions.

And then I think: writing, moving, exercising, running,
fighting, speaking, seeing, sharing, analyzing: these are
no different than us just simply breathing.

So, I think: what is the point of breathing?
What is the point of a point?

If it is the pointlessness of moving that makes me question,
search, yearn for an answer, the very thought of the word
that makes me even wonder why I would bother to think:
well then, I've solved it all. I look not at the ceiling, but
to my hands, myself, viewing me as the closest thing to life.

I look at the ceiling, and I don't stop thinking. I have both
hands behind my head as I question everything, and I don't
stop. If there is not yet a final answer, then there is no point
in stopping: and that's when I'd solved it. In all of my time of
thinking throughout my short life, I'd reached 'Eureka!'.

No longer can I stand the despair that pointlessness brings upon me.

It is pointless to have a point, and it is pointless to not have a point,
and that very pointlessness in not having a point would be no different
than having a point. In other words: there is no point in living, and there
is no point in dying. There is no point in existing, and there is no point
in not existing. There is a point, however, even in believing that there is no
point.

The point in having a point is very well pointless in itself.
Therefore, the point of a point is to be pointless.

I look at the ceiling, and its purpose. I stare with indifference
as the spider skitters across humankind's structure, blood, bone,
and marrow that has shaped this home to supply shelter to others.

And I wonder:

My life is no different from that spider. But there is only one thing
that separates me from it; separates humans from mundane creatures.

If René Descartes said: "I think, therefore I am",
then I would add to that, and believe this instead:

I move, therefore I am. Or, in other words,

We live, therefore we think, thus we are.
Creatures live, therefore they move, thus they are.

That is the only difference between us and them.
We think and they move, the only contrast being
that we can both think and move, as well as order
ourselves accordingly to keep us under control.

In more accurate terms, reasoning versus instinct.

My thoughts take me back to the point of the human race, human
competition. We are all in this single battle, saying we fight for
the top of the hill, kicking each other off and preventing their ascent;
meanwhile, those who are already at the top don't know what to make
of everyone they've let fallen, only to sit there and realize that there
is not much more to do than to gather more of it all, make the hill
higher, for if they had already surpassed this level of pain and torture,
then it would only make sense to create a Mount Everest of a hill.

And I think back to this: What is the point of it all?

Well, the point of it all is to not have a point at all.
Because we, the humans, have been bestowed the right
to give a point to the pointlessness of it all.

We know, deep inside, that creatures and objects may not have
a point, but they may have a purpose, though that purpose they
are defined upon is not a definition of their own.

But we can, and we do indeed give a point to the pointlessness of it all.
We forge our own purpose because our reasoning is the point of our own, inner creature.

I get up off of the bed, to get up and go.