I once held a meeting for people who could not die and did not want to live.
They had given up a long time ago. They couldn’t take life anymore, yet any attempt to end their own life had failed, too. They were too cowardly to live, too cowardly to die — at least that’s what they told themselves.
One man confessed he had a fantasy of a secret world beyond a secret mountain, where the stairs to the peak brought you into clouds that were solid and held a living city of angels and other beings of light. He spent most of his waking hours there, in a land of daydreams.
“This everyday is so boring, so bland,” he said. “I need brightness.”
I agreed, I understood, I got him. When I was young, somewhat past the wild genius of five and before the rifling ordeals of puberty, I could sit enraptured in front of a wall of my bedroom. The patches of texture became faces that talked and told stories. The shades of color held secret meetings and plotted against one another.
The problem is that you forget what it’s like to be born. You get used to phenomena; they have no more effect on you, so to feel anything you must have an effect on phenomena, exercising your agency like a tyrant and getting a kick from holding court in the world. Instead of simply receiving the brushstrokes of creation, you must paint upon everything outside you as though it were a canvas for your pleasure and your relief. And yet it’s tiring, so tiring, to justify this acting upon the world, to try and make a so-called difference, when the difference you really seek is simply between the stale moment and the fresh one.
…
At those ages when the gift of life fades and the attitudes of the tyrant begin to emerge, there is a wonderful tension in receiving and effecting which we call awkwardness.
In fact a certain species of awkwardness could be said to be the moment of uncertainty when you’re at a loss as to which to do – receive or effect, greet or be greeted, to open or to penetrate, to hold or be held?
The very energy that two people need to unite causes them to carom away. The buildup of voltage overwhelms their senses and their entanglement becomes a parting of ways. Their intimacy was a moment of unpleasant collision and deflection. And the sparks are an acute sense of shame like a bit of gravel laid over the freshness of your senses to the moment. The story of life becomes built over the ordeal of life, freshness replaced with tension and threat.
Leave a Reply