Induce
..the seductive solemnity of a life momentarily weakened, and I somehow found within myself enough spirit to move back out of fetal posturing. Here I live, one day at a time, darting back and forth between gravel roads and dust barren rooms, a quiet omnipotent job and far away horizons..
"And surely you realize that things will carry on starting and stopping, expanding and contracting, and that all you can hope to do is adapt until you can't adapt anymore?"
"Maybe. But if things sometimes feel particularly meaningless, it must imply that there's occasionally at least a semblance of meaning darting across the days. I only want to catch it."
..wielding tiny epiphanies and wholehearted tremblings as I go. And how about you? I ask, looking away and continuing the monologue before you've a chance to draw breath. From my tiny corner in the world I tried and failed for so many lifetimes, I dreamed up fantasy futures and endless worst case scenarios. What if, I would ask the cat lazing in a sun-mote -- what if everything was the same as before? The unrelenting lows and the kamikaze highs..
Now and then during the day, I want too much for my own good. Now and then during the day, I have to brace myself from bursting open and forgetting what I have to be careful about.
An elderly man hanging onto a lamp post, in real difficulties, while a young boy dashes across the street to ask for help;
we walk past with no thought but for our own sufferings, and the need to avoid further troubles. If this is a sin, if I bear real guilt for my failings, then how dearly our bodies can cost us! And aren't those who suffer cursed from the off?
..or how about the progressive falling-in-and-out-of-love with the idea of making it from one week to the next? The body can only take so much. The soul even less. But here's the reality: none of it bears any relation to last time. The extremes are headier, the contrasts more disorientating. Life at the sharp edge. It's so difficult, and it's the only thing I want. I read about Italian saints and the transfiguration of Being into a struggle between flesh and spirit, a clearly marked warzone, and I catch myself nodding and making marginal notes..
Now, with the sharpest side of heartache in retreat, I find not only the pleasure of being, but the pleasure of being myself. I am more -- much more, than my sufferings, more than the mannered affectations, more than the doubt. I am a delight. An angular, quiet-hearted delight.
..and even now, I'm unsure as to what kind of future there could possibly be, but I have work to be getting on with, and so many blank pages yet to fill. I should like to capture the point at which distant lines meet for a moment before diverging forever, that sense of inexplicable juxtaposition, the way you can feel context dropping away beneath you: stranger songs, the eternal Nowhere..
..who forgets so much and recalls only the insignificant and frivolous. How many phone calls niggle at my conscience? How many appointments have passed and been rescheduled and passed again? How many sunrises and sunsets have I missed? My behavior is atrocious, yet dreamily so. Forgive me, I murmur, for being so tall that I can straddle continents. Forgive me, for I make mistakes, and life is all so horrifying and wonderful.
..and then, lost in clouded nostalgia, I struggle with the sadness that perhaps I didn't realize how sweet life was at the time. Yes, in all actuality some of those times were very hard, but I have managed in my reveries to rewrite my own history so that they somehow missed the endearing folds and slightly worn edges.. like an old photograph with its reality blurred. Fingerprints and watermarks and torn corners. Raindrops have bruised the pages I turned, and I took shelter, leaning against the side of a church as I rediscovered words used once and never again braved, lines written late in the evening when the world seemed wide open and willing, hopeless though I was..
And I've been quiet these days - the only thing I can do - filling my lungs with air as silent and dull as the blood sleepwalking through my veins. This is what you've lost, ..: the tiny instabilities and doubts, the eternal blanks, the deadest of times.
..and I find myself powerless to do anything but make my way back to my little sanctuaries as storms build, amazed and always a little stunned by the realization that it was not always so..
I did my best, I seem to whisper.
..however much the dualist blah blah had me by the throat, even then. For now, it's enough that I make it home each night, that I have recordings of crooners rhapsodizing sadness in an unknown language, that my family is close, that I can find sleep amidst the everyday noise of living. For now..
Self-pity is a loaded term. It implies indulgence (which is accurate), but it also implies that the internal logic of the indulgence is flawed. Of course, a lack of perspective is implicit, but the notion that there is any kind of real choice at play seems like nonsense. Who among us is capable of leaving a puzzle unfinished? Or leaving an equation wide open, the two sides loaded and unbalanced?
Later, smoking threadbare thoughts, peering at the epitaphs written in the stars, I wonder.. does it matter, the sometimes lack of gravity? I can't believe it does. Life continues: we live, die, love, hate, cry, laugh and make do as best we can.
"And surely you realize that things will carry on starting and stopping, expanding and contracting, and that all you can hope to do is adapt until you can't adapt anymore?"
"Maybe. But if things sometimes feel particularly meaningless, it must imply that there's occasionally at least a semblance of meaning darting across the days. I only want to catch it."
..wielding tiny epiphanies and wholehearted tremblings as I go. And how about you? I ask, looking away and continuing the monologue before you've a chance to draw breath. From my tiny corner in the world I tried and failed for so many lifetimes, I dreamed up fantasy futures and endless worst case scenarios. What if, I would ask the cat lazing in a sun-mote -- what if everything was the same as before? The unrelenting lows and the kamikaze highs..
Now and then during the day, I want too much for my own good. Now and then during the day, I have to brace myself from bursting open and forgetting what I have to be careful about.
An elderly man hanging onto a lamp post, in real difficulties, while a young boy dashes across the street to ask for help;
we walk past with no thought but for our own sufferings, and the need to avoid further troubles. If this is a sin, if I bear real guilt for my failings, then how dearly our bodies can cost us! And aren't those who suffer cursed from the off?
..or how about the progressive falling-in-and-out-of-love with the idea of making it from one week to the next? The body can only take so much. The soul even less. But here's the reality: none of it bears any relation to last time. The extremes are headier, the contrasts more disorientating. Life at the sharp edge. It's so difficult, and it's the only thing I want. I read about Italian saints and the transfiguration of Being into a struggle between flesh and spirit, a clearly marked warzone, and I catch myself nodding and making marginal notes..
Now, with the sharpest side of heartache in retreat, I find not only the pleasure of being, but the pleasure of being myself. I am more -- much more, than my sufferings, more than the mannered affectations, more than the doubt. I am a delight. An angular, quiet-hearted delight.
..and even now, I'm unsure as to what kind of future there could possibly be, but I have work to be getting on with, and so many blank pages yet to fill. I should like to capture the point at which distant lines meet for a moment before diverging forever, that sense of inexplicable juxtaposition, the way you can feel context dropping away beneath you: stranger songs, the eternal Nowhere..
..who forgets so much and recalls only the insignificant and frivolous. How many phone calls niggle at my conscience? How many appointments have passed and been rescheduled and passed again? How many sunrises and sunsets have I missed? My behavior is atrocious, yet dreamily so. Forgive me, I murmur, for being so tall that I can straddle continents. Forgive me, for I make mistakes, and life is all so horrifying and wonderful.
..and then, lost in clouded nostalgia, I struggle with the sadness that perhaps I didn't realize how sweet life was at the time. Yes, in all actuality some of those times were very hard, but I have managed in my reveries to rewrite my own history so that they somehow missed the endearing folds and slightly worn edges.. like an old photograph with its reality blurred. Fingerprints and watermarks and torn corners. Raindrops have bruised the pages I turned, and I took shelter, leaning against the side of a church as I rediscovered words used once and never again braved, lines written late in the evening when the world seemed wide open and willing, hopeless though I was..
And I've been quiet these days - the only thing I can do - filling my lungs with air as silent and dull as the blood sleepwalking through my veins. This is what you've lost, ..: the tiny instabilities and doubts, the eternal blanks, the deadest of times.
..and I find myself powerless to do anything but make my way back to my little sanctuaries as storms build, amazed and always a little stunned by the realization that it was not always so..
I did my best, I seem to whisper.
..however much the dualist blah blah had me by the throat, even then. For now, it's enough that I make it home each night, that I have recordings of crooners rhapsodizing sadness in an unknown language, that my family is close, that I can find sleep amidst the everyday noise of living. For now..
Self-pity is a loaded term. It implies indulgence (which is accurate), but it also implies that the internal logic of the indulgence is flawed. Of course, a lack of perspective is implicit, but the notion that there is any kind of real choice at play seems like nonsense. Who among us is capable of leaving a puzzle unfinished? Or leaving an equation wide open, the two sides loaded and unbalanced?
Later, smoking threadbare thoughts, peering at the epitaphs written in the stars, I wonder.. does it matter, the sometimes lack of gravity? I can't believe it does. Life continues: we live, die, love, hate, cry, laugh and make do as best we can.
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