GONDOLA yearns.

Can he yearn? Supposedly he's a placid observer, who wanders contently with an “utter and complete acceptance of the world as it is,” who follows natural movements without imposing private wishes upon them. GONDOLA embodies WU-WEI, and after all what is WU-WEI if not 顺物自然而无容私焉?

But WU-WEI is not just 无为. It is also 为无为 -- an imperative to act as if one does not act, which in the end is still a form of action. GONDOLA acts. He's a weird little bear thing who wanders around with immense curiosity. He fiddles with his surroundings and touches the hearts of all who encounter him.

To act as if one does not act implies its opposite. It suggests that GONDOLA's actions derive from some sort of internal compulsion separate from what merely exists. GONDOLA wills, and if he wills then perhaps he yearns as well.

How do we reconcile nature and will? Perhaps GONDOLA is himself a force of nature, in which case his will is plainly identical with the movement of nature. In retrospect, this might have been possible at some point in the past. A GONDOLA that is more or less spatial, who lives in the rosy landscape of Schiller's twisting trees, seems able to simply be. But our GONDOLA, who has been thrust into an interactive narrative, becomes something temporal. He moves against himself. He takes on history.

All historical outcomes were decided by willful action in the moment, yet appear in retrospect to be fate. The painful choices made by revolutionaries have afforded us the confident position of saying that, according to the iron laws of economics, they never really stood a chance in the first place. As a result, it may seem that all actions are a little 无谓. Our GONDOLA yearns to act, but he cannot escape the anxiety that in the end it always had to turn out the same way. His Panglossian fortune has become a grating burden. He yearns to return to a more innocent time.

All of us who draw GONDOLA yearn to return with him. Childlike times appear to be superior, inasmuch as its limits promise the comfort of closed shapes and forms. Its communities provide at least a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern society leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied with itself, is gemein.

But the past is not settled. It is a little irresponsible to jump into a kitschy painting and abdicate present society, which is in any case also impossible, and more than likely one finds oneself in an even more confused position, or at best staring off into nothing. The stars, if they ever existed at all, have fallen down to Earth.