Falling can be murky terrain, and the rabbit hole a dark, dreary, unforgiving place. You open your eyes for direction, and see only darkness, and beckoning paths, and all awareness drops down below your feet ahead of you. Its then you know you’ve lost, the unfulfillment is stifling, and you hold your breath, afraid to breathe. Afraid to lose what you’ve begun, afraid to question what you’ve already questioned, afraid to look yourself in the mirror to get lost in the cracks. What you’ve found is irresolute, unbearable, and unachievable, but there it stands all the same, looming and horrifying, a monster in your wake. What you’ve discovered is something breakable, but unbreakable, the indefinable characteristics of yourself, of those around you, of this so called life. The things that echo deep in the corners of your soul, and outline the contours of your being, the unmasked, unveiled, the vast, irresolute, unattainable flashing before your eyes, but as you reach, so close to grasping that flickering treasure, you find your endeavor impossible. You’ve reached an end to a pursuit, but the end marks the beginning, and you realize you’re running in circles. There is no end that is not the beginning, there is no marker for where you left off, the rabbit hole continues on, and you’re too caught in so-called being to escape. The falling lasts forever, that is, until you hit the ground and snap.
So I ran. All these thoughts cascading through my head. It took me a while to realize I was completely breathless, and outraged, overwhelmed by this horrid contemplation, about everything and nothing all at once. What I want to say has no resolution, only more questions, and I feel so uneasy, so lost in the pursuit of the indefinable realm of the abstract. The dissatisfaction, the urgency, the want for the irrational to become rational, but ultimately, the recognition that this desire is impossible, so there can be no actuality, no promised truth, no reason. I sit here, typing, and the words become vague, and blurred, and I feel my mind racing a billion miles a second. All the concrete notions I held fast have dissolved and I feel so unfulfilled, so lost for words, so inconsequential, so ultimately forgotten, and left behind. I spent hours contemplating, searching, begging for some kind of answer, but the truth is, there are no answers, there are only questions. There is only the abstract, for our actual beliefs have no grounding, except in the abstract. It doesn’t matter what it is, scientific or romantic, it is all maintained within the confines of our mind, and the matter that surrounds us. So where are we left, but back where we started, in the attempt to define that which we live in, that which surrounds us, that which can never be truly defined.
Still running. Thoughts menacing. My sanity pulsating, pushing me to the edge, beckoning to jump when I’m already falling. How do you define something in a world of limited language, of limited emotion, limited continuity? How can you be sure? How can you be resolute without any resolution? I had so much to say, but now it seems futile, and diminished. It seems empty and vapid, and vain. I feel the urgency, the need to write, because otherwise, I will go insane, and lose my mind to this endless array of abstract ideals. Philosophy itself constitutes no grounding for life, for it is merely a compilation of abstractions, of ideas, of irrational means for satisfaction. I cannot philosophize, because there is no ending, no ultimatum, no goal. I am left with the dull, aching feeling, an emptiness that resounds and leaves no meaning for life itself. How do you live a life that has no meaning? How do trust yourself enough to become someone worthy of meaning? Where does that meaning actually lie? Within the pursuit of goodness? Happiness? Love? Success? What is it? I sit here, in my aching hostility, with my unwarranted revulsion, and it is pointed at no other person except myself. My throbbing frustration is bent towards my own putrid disgust at my inability to quell my own hypothetical dilemmas. I cannot fulfill life in this shrill, cramped writing style, this is not life, these are words, tools used to define something I’ve already claimed is indefinable. So why do it? Why do I sit here in wonder, as time flows, and I become elapsed, and unquestioned, unanswered, and unfulfilled. I become broken by my own inabilities, my own insecurities, for isn’t that all this really is? An insecurity? A misery?
No, I will not submit to being miserable. It is not a misery. It’s an awareness.
A little while ago, I was accused by someone I hold very close that I have nothing more to write about then my own suffering, this classified misery. I can’t say that I firmly hold this be true, though it does profess a small quantity of viable fact. Yes, my writing, especially this genre of writing, is in terms of how I feel, how I view and thus receive the world around me. If I’m miserable in lieu of the world around me, obviously it will be portrayed in my writing, and if I maintain any remote writing ability, hopefully, I will be able to reveal these hollowed drifts that resound through my soul. Perhaps I’m miserable, but I don’t think so. It’s not depression; it’s just a desire for truth. I want to know, trust, and teach something feasible in terms of universal human nature. No philosophy, or esthetics, no abstractions or ultimatums, no judgmental bigotry, or biased belief, just truth, real, unadulterated, pure truth. That’s all I want. Of course, that’s everything, and probably unattainable. And perhaps all those things I don’t hold as truth, are in fact truth.
So I keep looking.
“Being miserable is part of your identity” he said. Ha. I found this amusing. But no, I don’t consider being miserable as a part of my identity. This might profess a kind of Keatsian dilemma, and the irrefutable transitory nature of human emotion, but there will always be an inextricable link between melancholy and joy. However, this does not entail that one is primarily miserable, at least the way he was accusing me of being. I am frustrated, and I think he was just attempting to accuse me of something he himself feels. Misery and frustration are very different things, for misery seems to be in terms of renouncing life, while frustration depicts a feeling of fulfilling it. Truth and misery are not one in the same and being overwhelmed and lonely does not entail that you are depressed. It does entail frustration, but misery suggests some kind of inherent loss. Misery in terms of depression, I think, requires some kind of futile fear. It requires unawareness, a desire to be unaware, and to sulk and rot, and be inhibited by ones fear of getting better, or becoming. No, I am not remotely the product of such a selfish, disgusting waste of life. I am the product of my own need to be to aware. My misery (frustration) is the product of my desire for truth, not my desire to succumb to nothingness. Its overwhelming nature might in fact make me miserable, but this does not result in a desire to give up, but a desire to push on. Ultimately, this misery allows me to never lose sight of who I am because I am almost incapable of giving up. The desire to know pushes me on, forces me to continue my search, my quest for an answer. Actual misery in depression can be linked only to that kind of feigned indifference, the pretense of “not caring”. If anything, I care too much, and thus I am frustrated at the difficult nature of my cause, but I am not lost, for I still maintain a purpose, and thus I am not miserable. I care about myself and those around me, so my misery is not a function of depression, or giving up, but a function of wanting to better my life and the life of those I love. Thus it is not misery at all, as none of that has any concrete basis in misery. It is instead a quest for truth. A battered attempt to be fulfilled, to know, to decide, and to live. We will all, at some point, be miserable, but it seems that misery in the pursuit of truth and misery in the pursuit of succumbing to an end, an end that entails giving up on life and those around you, are entirely different forms of emotion. And this inherently depicts the problem with language; it limits ones ability to profess truth.
All of this, seems very strange to me, as I felt so sure this morning. I had intended to write something different, but instead, here I am, frustrated, lost for words, angry at my lucid inabilities. I wrote an entry this morning, one that cast a completely unrelated kind of tone, but it just doesn’t seem sound enough now…
I think everyone’s afraid. And it’s that fear that really inhibits us from becoming anything, in terms of other people or ourselves. We’re all afraid to never be enough, to not be, in all actuality, good enough. So what defines good enough? Of course, this brings up the idea of Quality, and faith in the abstract, but its more then that. This is not just philosophical theories, or existentialism, its actual life. It goes beyond books and follows through into actual living. We move past ourselves and into other people, and fall into the ebb and flow of emotion, into the deep swell of life. But are we all fated to drown, or do we learn how to swim?
I guess this is personal choice. There will always be followers and leaders, always be people who know what to make of themselves, and those that don’t. In terms of my own life, well, I don’t know who I am going to be in forty years, but there are certain constants I recognize. This pursuit, this idea, well, it will always remain. I can’t really entail how exactly I know that, but it’s a feeling. It goes beyond actual words, so yes, tell me its not real, tell me I’m stupid or irrational, but that won’t change anything. The feeling itself will still remain, and I’ll just sit back and laugh at you fall over yourself in your attempt to define your stifled little life, so living actually makes sense. But isn’t this exactly what I’m trying to do? I’ve turned myself into a hypocrite.
ACCEPT IT! Life does not make a bit of sense. I don’t care who you are, what you are, where you are, you will never know why exactly you’re here, you can only know the direction you want to go in, and on a certain level, doubtless of how depressed or lost you feel, we all know that, because it has everything to do with Quality itself. In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (yes, we’re back there), Pirsig dives into this concept, and in order to convey the existence of Quality, portrays a world that is deprived of Quality. In simple terms, it would be like 1984 twenty-six years later… Sorry, I couldn’t’ help myself. No, but really, there would just be nothing. No coffee or tea, because we wouldn’t know the difference, no art, music, culinary expertise, clothing, clothing designers, homes, suburbia, cities, and yes, this can go on forever. Honestly, it seems in a lot of ways, the things that make us primarily human would disappear, so we wouldn’t really be human anymore. We’d cease to feel. We wouldn’t even be animals, because even animals can sense the difference between rotten and viable food, kindness, and abuse, and so on. Quality is, in a way, what allows us to grow into ourselves, so no one can tell me they don’t know what they want, because its just a simple matter of, well… Would you rather eat rotten veggies, or delicious veggies? This is a direction. It’s a sense of self, doubtless of how inconsequential it seems. We could all be put in that position one day, and its following through with those simple questions that leads you anywhere. If you want to attain Quality, you have to try. And we all want to attain Quality, in whatever aspect we deem fit. Its human nature.
Its just not enough. I don’t know why. I’ve become like two different people, and I can’t yet explain it. But its not enough. I can just feel it.
I need a break. I’ll be back later.
