Cleaning Out the Inbox, or Nepenthe

22 August 2008 at 6:44 pm (Avarice, Epiphanies) (, , )

There is something to be said for the art of forgetting.

Time does not heal all wounds so much as it accustoms us to their aching.  Time sands down the edges that pricked us, shifting them just out of focus: we are nearsighted creatures.  The past never needs to move as far as we think it does to elude us.  It takes so little to make us forget.  Maybe we are looking for distractions.

Going through old correspondence reminds us of what we have lost.  Well, it reminded me, anyway.  Part of me wants to do the mature thing, appreciate what we had while we had it, and accept that nothing lasts forever.  But part of me is mourning afresh.  The wounds have not healed; they were just heaped with debris.

Now that I have rediscovered this warmth, I would not forget it for anything — not for surcease of sorrow, not for new loves. I would not give up these memories for anything — but I cannot help wanting what was.

Good friends are so rare. And as I get older it becomes harder and harder to love.

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Injunction

10 January 2008 at 6:24 pm (Epiphanies) (, , )

Stop.  Stop playing and just LISTEN.  Listen like you used to, before endless entertainment beckoned at your fingertips, before there was temptation or distraction.  Just stop and listen.

Listen to the hollowness, to the emptiness, to the harsh screaming quiet that you can quell now with alcohol, that used to be deafening and ineluctable in the years before you could drink, in the years when you were allowed nothing but to listen.

You don’t have to be so good at listening now.  Adults rarely do.  It is a rare skill.  I do now know how much of it is talent, or how rare that is; it is not a talent people look for so you can’t test for it.  Kids have to be good at listening, unless they’re good at talking, or rich, or pretty.  They seem to have the easiest transition into being adults with other adults, because the adults who run things are the ones who talk, the ones in charge are the ones who can talk over the most other adults.  Comfort may be sought and forgotten.  No one remembers when you listen.  People remember what you say.  That is what they look for – vocalization, vocation.  Speech.  They think anyone can listen, that it takes someone special to talk.  But everybody talks.  Talk is cheapened by its very proliferation.  Now it is silence that is rare and precious and strange.

But has it ever been otherwise?  The voice crying out in the wilderness seeks another, and another and another until the humans have gathered once again, clinging to each other in a stinking, yammering, cloying mass.  And no one can hear for the talking, and no one knows how to listen anymore, they are all so busy trying to be heard.

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Grow Old with Me

4 January 2008 at 11:10 pm (Epiphanies, Perspectives, Vanity) (, , )

Thought many thoughts tonight on the way to dinner and had at least two epiphanies fit for paper but only recall one, that plastic surgery is an extension of anorexia, that economists should cite these two practices and their burgeoning as evidence of the inevitability of affluence. Because just as thinness will only be attractive to those who can afford not to eat, for whom eating is such an inevitability that it must be actively avoided, so too youth becomes a luxury commodity when old age is inevitable. No  longer prized for its rarity and wisdom, old age has become something to flee, to avoid, to recoil from in terror. It is no longer a golden time to look forward to and look back from but a terminus, an end to the pleasures and dreams of youth, which have become the only pleasures worth having. What of that character early in Plato’s Republic who says old age has done him good because the passions of the flesh have yielded to the passions of the mind? Who among us would embrace that ethos now? Each phase of life once served a purpose. No more. Now we serve only ourselves, our desires, our narcissism and our schizophrenia. On the one hand, the lifting of the phases frees us to pursue anything, at any time. On the other, we have nothing new to pursue. We have slipped simply from being creatures of duty to creatures of desire: once we were told to do, and we did; now we are told to want, and we want.

Even our mythologies have shifted from being to desire. Once there was the story of Eos and her grasshopper; she asked for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. And so in the nature of humans he grew old, he shriveled. Old age as prelude to death. Old age as preparation. Life as preparation for old age.

But it is not all so futile as that. There is so much to do, so much to be, and so much to contemplate too afterwards. If there is a divine being, a wisdom, then it was right to make us as we are, for old age is one inevitability that compensates for our other shortcomings. It forces us to confront our mortality and our fallibility. It enables us to give meaning to our experiences, our choices, to understand consequences. To what end, you ask? Why must there be an end? Why must we be served in any tangible way but to gain wisdom? What is more important or more sublime than truth?

Your life is written on, into, all over, your body. To be marked is to have lived. To live is to be marked. To seek to erase those marks is to deny that you have lived, to affirm that you wasted your life and think getting your wrinkles ironed out will buy you another one or to simply deny your experiences. But you cannot. No amount of collagen or toxins or surgery will change what you have done and who you have become. We make ourselves. The wrinkles are still there underneath the injections and the tightenings and the lifts. Only the superficial is alterable.

If I live that long I want to be engraved by my stories, for better or for worse. Maybe I will regret these words later. Maybe I will live to regret them. Indeed, what irony. I do not seek to tempt fate, but the simple wrinkles of living – old age, scarred hands, laugh lines, these do not frighten me. They are a promise of a full life. But to carry your whole life with you, to be able to look at each line and embrace what it signifies, be it folly or wisdom, sorrow or joy, to be able to embrace what I did and who I became – that to me would be the dream and the gift of old age, should I attain it. That anyone would seek to flee from such wisdom and peace baffles me.

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Commitments

12 November 2007 at 7:52 pm (Epiphanies)

There. I have decided. I decided on the walk home that I should write a little every day, ten minutes a day. Now that I have a working laptop there’s no excuse. I must keep a journal, I must remember who and what and where I was so that when I look back I can understand who I have become and what I came from.

I seem to accomplish so little these days. The wheels are turning in my head, sometimes feverishly, but it seems less and less often. I am growing content to inhabit the stupor of the barely living, those L says are “just waiting to die,” driven by cupidity and envy and the desire of the moment. Driven by fantasies instead of ideals. Following what I want to be real instead of what ought to be made real. Ought. The categorical imperative. Kant was so boring; but maybe I just disliked him because he was right. There is a categorical imperative to do the right thing where the ability exists. To distinguish the right thing and act. Is it acceptable to be thoroughly irritated at the little moralizing voice in my head? Sometimes I don’t want to do the right thing, even when I want to, if that makes sense. In other words, I know I should, and I want to do what I should, but it’s too much trouble. It’s inconvenient, or exhausting, or I just want to be selfish and vegetate and not be so invested in the happiness of other people.

Which is exactly what I have become, and I don’t like it. It’s not right. I’m better when I’m helping people. I’m a better person, and I like myself more. Is it still altruism if you do things just so you can live with yourself? Does anyone do anything for any other reason? Drinking, charity, whatever – as Lewis Black says, you do it to drown out the dogs barking in your head.

Everything I do I do because I have no self-control. From masturbation to nurturing, everything can be traced back to the root of no self-control. I have been manufactured by the generation of instant gratification. Entertainment, altruism, sex – all available at the push of a button and a quick blink of the mind. There is no god but happiness and wanting is its prophet. No, not wanting. Desire? No. Infantilism. Maybe. Close enough, it will have to do for now. I don’t want to be happy. Not just for the sake of being happy. No, that’s not enough. I have to be right. Whence can be traced the root of all my problems, all my anger and unease, all my baggage, all the things I fuck up in interpersonal relationships. I can’t just be happy. I have to be right.

And not just philosophically right. That is, not just right in any given argument. Not just declared the one with the proper and correct position. Not just the one with all the answers, although I like to be that kind of right too. No, morally right. And yes, read those italics with all the distaste they are intended to convey. The inflection is right. Seeking moral rectitude seems about as sensible and appetizing as peeling a suspiciously moist and sticky bit of garbage off your shoe when you come in from the city sidewalks. Or worse, from the el station.

I am a hedonist. I am prone to fits of self-indulgence, guilty of writhing in gratification, both mental and physical. I tell myself that I am right, that I am doing is acceptable and okay. I provide my very own vocal and insistent cheering section, usually under the pretense that nobody else will, but occasionally with the acknowledgement that it is simply because I seek the crass gratification of self-affirmation, of congratulations that I do not deserve because I have not, at least lately, done anything worthy of adulation.

But maybe unhappiness is not so integral to rightness or goodness. Maybe you don’t have to be miserable doing the right thing. This is the residue of Catholicism: lingering unease at any form of happiness that does not involve diminishment or self-degradation. If you’re happy you’re doing it wrong. If you’re enjoying yourself you must be sinning. And when I sin – it is with such gusto, almost spite. Like sinning is a way of shaking my fist at the heavens, at the departed and deeply hypocritical popes, at an unreasonable god making impossible demands of poorly made goods, of saying “How d’ya like that, huh? How ‘bout that? I cut off my nose, but it also spites your face!” Way to rock, kid. I’m sure, even if there as a god and it is as unreasonable as that, that that accomplishes something.

We are creatures driven by accomplishment – programmed to seek it. And not just any accomplishment. There is no simple satisfaction with breaking even, with accomplishing the setting of modest but admirable goals and achieving them. We are programmed to be The Next Big Thing, to seek our names in lights, to be the next idea craze, the next hotly sought celebrity, to be the latest and best god America has ever seen. That is what I want: in true American fashion, I am not content to contemplate returning to school and settling into the modest, if remarkable, life that P and E have achieved. No, I must be the next Camille Paglia, the next Mark Lilla, the one who brings brilliant and un-heard of thoughts to the table, who is known if not respected, who forces thinkers everywhere to re-align their paradigms and refine their perspectives. That is what I want to be. And if I continue dreaming that way, I may be sadly disappointed, as I have been in so many other unreasonable dreams. But there remains a sliver of me, the classic American sliver, the deeply programmed sliver, that says I have what it takes if I just apply myself. That the materials are there and I just need to grasp how I will think of the world and how I will go about sharing that thinking and enlightening the other thinkers of the world. Maybe “enlightening” is too theatrical and conceited a word. Not to imply that all other thinkers are in darkness, just to shed a different light on the concepts in play. I just want to be that voice of reason, the one who synthesizes information in heretofore unheard of and exciting ways, to provide those “oooohhh, I get it” and “aha!” and “it was so obvious” moments. I want to see the thing that was so far beneath our noses that until my moment everyone missed it. I want to see what binds things together, the hidden strings, the invisible network of lines that enlaces. I want to understand how point C and point Q are linked, why when one is grasped the other vibrates, why two apparently unrelated concepts move in tandem. I want to see that they move in tandem and be the one to point it out and explain it.

That is what I want. That, and to be right. Every kind of right.

Is that so much to ask?

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All-Gifted; Hindsight

16 October 2007 at 11:38 pm (Epiphanies) ()

He was in my dream last night.  My Pandora, the one who opened the world to me, gave me access to everything but hope.  The Prometheus who made me Phaeton.  He was in my dream, as callous and detached as he was in our time together, but in that dream he had a blog, a diary where he listed all the ways and reasons and metaphors he still pined for me.  Something about mowing, and about me smelling like eggs — probably the quiche I had last night asserting its gastronomical supremacy.  But all of it came down to his longing, to his real and final regret, to his realization that he casually discarded A Good Thing.

And this dream bothers me, because I fear it is wish-fulfillment of the crassest sort, the sort of simple-minded dream that projects our desires for people onto them, that turns them into the automatons we crave.  I don’t want to be the sort of person who seeks affirmation in such coarsely gratifying fantasies.

This dream makes me uneasy, also, because of its implications for my own feelings.  Because this dream by its nature and texture and feeling implies that I am not over him, that I will never be over him, that I will always carry this damned torch.  That this torch will never go out, that it is Promethean fire after all, salvation and damnation flickering on the branch:  Fire is what saved man; it is also what doomed him.  The gods could never forgive that transgression into their territory, could never forget our encroachment onto the domain of their unique power.  In appropriating fire we robbed them of their primacy as the Saviors, as the Givers and Renewers of Life.  We became as gods, knowing what is good and what is evil, or at least what leads to living and how to avoid what leads to death.  In the drama that divides all parents and children, we took their agency and their secret knowledge and their power.  Once humans aspire to godhood we are doomed by our own hubris.  And yet enhanced by it, saved.  It is the only way to grow.

It is the story of the tribe who received fire; it is the story of Adam and Eve.  But what am I to do with this flame?  I cannot quench it but I cannot keep it.  It illuminates but it also consumes.  What happens when there is nothing left to burn?  What happens when it consumes the fuel intended for other altars?

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