Oh dear.
It's not that I can't handle silence. It's not that I'm afraid of what's in my head. It's not feeling overwhelmed by loneliness. It's not anxiety for what's to come.It's dread. It's a hopeless void that somehow infinitely recurs. It's hearing and seeing all the same things under the sun, and facing the impossibility of escape.
There's an unbridgeable void between the world of logic and the world of what we feel. When I say unbridgeable, I mean that any time one is built, it collapses moments after. You can read every contrary book, live well into your elderly years, and listen to thousands of embattled pleas to be understood, and you will die smiling and assured in your personal truth.
I got 14 minutes into this mini news documentary on Indiana passing a near-total abortion ban. I watched an old white dumb cunt representative skip on by a question about the benefits there are for the 10-year old girl who was raped. I can't help but think of the potential for escalation with regard to this country's fascism almost every day, what the ongoing wars will bring, or what ecological or economical cliff the "elite" will have us barrel towards next.
We want to die.
I don't know how to arrive at any clearer a sentiment. Of all the patterns I profess to notice, this one just keeps popping up in new and tired forms. We simply want to die.
We want to die through our work. We will do so functionally 24 hours a day. We build our entire lives around the dictates of work. We've, barely, scraped back almost laughable dignities when compared to others or our ideals. We think about work when we're not working. We anticipate the work we must do when we get off work. We dream about new and marginally better, if not at least different, work when we're not at it. We don't wish to exist. We wish to work so long and hard that we cease to exist.
We want to die through our entertainment. We want to die so bad, we don't even recognize it as entertainment. We're squawking through the whole performance. We don't see the stories they are telling because we aren't heroes or even background characters. We're watchers. It's meant to be on, streaming, endlessly, racking up views and playing ads. You're not supposed to take up your own sword like some hero of your own existence. You're not supposed to see yourself as the funny one, poised for a romantic tryst, or scheming to enact your hidden agenda. You're a 1 or a 0, selecting from interchangeable squares calculating in real time which ones to show you next.
We want to die through our politics. This almost doesn't feel worth elaborating. The cultural psychosis that is Trump worship is tantamount to a religious inquisition. We celebrate, not just ignorance, but determined and proud denial of facts, science, or the language and possibility of a shared existence. Conviction and repetition sweep us under like an ocean current. I predict hundreds of thousands will die before you get half a generation attempting to undue the damage of the last 50 years.
We want to die through our relationships. We let our abusive and dismissive family members tear through our self-conception. We let our partners control us. We let our kids run amok. We let our relatives take advantage and get demanding and we pray away the self-respect and responsibility it would take to cut them off or tell them the truth. We enable self-pitying and compulsive excuses to stay lazy, silent, and distant. We seek people who "compliment" our pathological self-destructive narratives and coddle our unhealthy coping mechanisms.
We want to die through our memes. Who needs an "original" thought? Why sit with yourself long enough to conceive of a means of describing your life or circumstances after asking and wrestling with questions that arose in you? Do questions even arise in you? The answers are in limitless supply, so why question? Some errant "thought leader" said it first, and certainly meant it exactly as you feel they must have. Just as well. Who has the time to write, or read, or embody a series of difficult contradictions when the right voices, color patterns, and approved activities can be added to the conveyor for all to notice and not be threatened by?
We want to die through our language. It's just empty. It means nothing. It's the fakest most painful series of interactions I have every day. So much nothing, about nothing, for no one. You wanna hang out sometime? Maybe if I hound you for a month. You're upset about the state of the world? Bet we didn't read the same series of articles. You wish "things" were "different" or "better" than you have now? Whether you practice the naked ironic inability to appreciate all you currently have, or you dutifully abstain from pushing yourself to budget and coalition build, every path leads to pre-verbal sensations of cyclical inured guilt.
We want to die in our celebrations. Halloween is so many people's favorite holiday, right before they slump into a 3-5 month depression remembering everyone who isn't coming to Thanksgiving or how many Christmases have been nothing but stress. We carry dreadful narratives about what one must do with and for "family" no matter the cost. We pretend not to resent all the effort we might put into the facade, and the obliviousness and disregard from the other players leaves us not quite unaware of how suicides tick up this time of year.
We want to die in our addictions. It's not so straight-forward as to suggest we wish to go down in some hazy bliss of an overdose or poisoning. We want to die by being beholden to our comfort, our pattern, our overseer. Be it a persistent avoidance of the feelings and traumas and ignorance of how we're wired, or kneeling in prayer for getting "stable" on a "harm-reduction" medication, we wish to be absolved of ourselves through the rituals and the rulers. "As long as I have my x, I'll be okay." As long as I never determine what it means to be "I," any x'll do in making and following a rule.
We want to die as watchers. The more we watch how others are or aren't, we can implicitly compare and reassure ourselves that, wherever we are, at least we're not over there. When you watch, you get to trick yourself into thinking you only exist right behind your eyes. You're not your body, your words, your works, nor anything more abstract like your potential, your intention, or your awareness. Ephemeral bursts of agency or desperate claps-back serve to embarrass and train to self-correct. Don't change, fix, or challenge. Watch the story unfold, hit your mark, and play along.
We want to die as consumers. We'll bleed the planet dry for doodads. We'll burn ourselves alive to keep things "convenient" and "cheap." We'll bemoan soaring coasts and defer to inflation before we face our own greed that would obligate us to hold others to account for theirs. There will never be enough to buy, therefore never enough produced or commodified. When the robots learn how to do it for everything physical, you'll find even more ways to divide up and price out your soul.
We'd rather die than forgive. We'd rather die than admit. We'd rather die than acknowledge words like "humility" and "wisdom" even exist. We scream and cry when concerted efforts are successful in their explicitly stated aim to kill us, and we don't try to defend ourselves let alone kill back. We die in our silence and complicity and late-to-the-party complaints as though we weren't happy to celebrate our deaths as long as they were politely dressed and laughably convoluted and incoherent. They would never! Say the incredulous bloviators. Yet, they always do.
Unfortunately for you, you're not dead yet. Your merely meager and often feeble existence is still killing us all considerably more than it's keeping us alive. You know how I know? You're silent. You're alone. You're depressed. You're anxious. You're confused. You're exhausted. You're poor, but not poor poor. You're stuck. You're afraid. You're working incredibly hard to not feel how deeply all of these things you are, and you're scared of touching how close you exist to death, and how often you seek it.
Or, maybe, you occupy an entirely different world than I do. Maybe you're in some pocket of middle-class bliss and reverie that one such as me has never known. Maybe Jesus is keeping you so safe and snug that you can't wait to ride the next catastrophe into His Light. Maybe everyone else's mythical beings you don't believe in are really the ones looking out for you, but they aren't taking it personally. You're already in the club, right? Just gotta dance, drink, and hit on people. It's simple. Just gotta believe. Gotta have faith. There's always hope to be had in something.
Death will be a gift, but only if you've figured out how to live before it gets you. All this practicing and dress rehearsal is a mockery. Wake up. You're asleep. You are drifting between narratives that have nothing to do with you or what you need. Your voice works. Your work matters. You need to find the things to fight and push through instead of treading water. There is no prize at the end. All you have is right now.
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