Take a Bow, meta style

When not meant in an ironic sense, the call to “take a bow” usually implies that one has just completed a performance worthy of merit and acknowledgment by an adoring crowd. Ironically, it means a situation involving gongs and tomatoes or eggs being hurled through the air.

Apparently, my life is more inclined towards dramatic irony than anything else.

Before anyone pulls Alanis Morrissette out of a hat and throws her Canadian definitions at me, may I offer Webster’s? I refer to definition 3, but mainly 3(b): “incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play.”

Can we ever see our own situations objectively? Even with great distance, we still encounter the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat, but more so, since we are the cat, the scientist, the box, the atom, and the acid at the same time.

We live life as though boundaries are real. The epidermis exists, but we sweat and things penetrate our skin. Breathing violates the sanctity of our separateness – we imbibe and embody our atmosphere. Speaking violates the auditory spaces of others. We are indistinct; where I end and “the world” begins is an imaginary line, like those drawn on maps. I stood on the 49th parallel yesterday, half of me in Canada and half in the United States. I was in two places at once. Also a paradox, I hear.

So if life is a performance of the absurdist kind and we are all waiting for Godot, at what point does a bow become appropriate? Maybe we all instead deserve bows like those on packages at Christmas – marketing the myth and the mystery.