Sehnsucht

I felt so bizarre today with a feeling that I thought was saudade, which I have talked about before in a linguistic sense, but I don’t think it’s that. Nostalgia is a yearning for the past, but that’s not what I do at all. It’s like I feel a nostalgia for the future, for things that haven’t happened yet. Events and situations that I cannot draw a clear line from to my present self. A hazy, dreamlike state, simultaneously mordant in its utter realism, where every word and step has a profound effect, warping the very air. Is this just a mad amplification of everyone’s desire to matter? I don’t know.

There are a couple songs that I like to listen to when I get this feeling that may be able to shed some light on it. One of them is Motion Picture Soundtrack by Radiohead. It features a momentous organ and a mournful tone – the organ is the most important feature of the song for me. As the closing track of its album, Kid A, that song has added punch from its sense of finality, of having come to the end of a journey. So maybe I feel like I am heading somewhere.

Then there are a couple songs by Counting Crows. Round Here opens with the lyrics “step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white”, which makes me think of a house in the woods, isolated but not lonely. And apparently, round there, “something radiates”. I sort of hate the song for not saying exactly what the hell is going on. The other song is Another Horsedreamer’s Blues. Maybe it’s because the opening riff sounds like something you would hear in an elevator in a good dream, and maybe it’s because the song is about a girl with a similar name to my girlfriend and both of them like horses.

Horses in particular evoke this feeling and it’s been years since I’ve ridden one. Sunsets, organs… I guess these are all romantic (in both senses of the word) images. I guess I want the destination I am heading toward to have some sort of fiery intangible resonance beyond simply what it is. If I ever wrote get around to writing a novel or making music or something, at some point I would simply be compelled to attempt to capture this feeling. But apparently, it’s impossible.

C.S. Lewis had a lot to say about it, including that most people don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s called sehnsucht and the following paragraph is not such a bad approximation of how it feels.

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

I don’t know. I can’t think about it too much. Maybe I will have more to say later.

Mantra for the Other Man

when i get to typing in all lowercase you know my mind is undergoing drawage and quarteration from important thoughts and i am uncomfortable with just coming right out and catapulting them at you. however what i am currently mulling over is the most critical thing i was taught today and i feel that they must be immortalized lest they be forgotten and i remain forever dishonest and unresolved.

so here are the things that i am repeating in my head, like a rotodiller digging up some peace, joining the likes of “just give up”, “you can’t make a difference” and “everything will be all right”

talk about what happened

separate the history from living in it

it means nothing

you can figure out what people like

appreciate the past for its pleasure

(which sounds so overwhelmingly positive and fluffy i’m pretty sure i just fucked a guy without knowing!)

abandon the mindset of sleaze

no one is competing with you

being weird helps no one

I just realized I’m being a hypocrite with that last one by being all insecure and vague. The virtue I am lauding today is openness. If you’re going to make a big commitment to something, be it an amazing project or goal or a person’s heart, and this something matters to you, you have to confront it openly and honestly. (I can sense myself channeling Pema Chodron again here.) Learn everything you can about it, the good and the bad, the true and the real. Then appreciate it, and let it go. You can’t genuinely enjoy something that matters to you if you don’t know its true nature, or the true nature of your reaction to it. It is what it is, you feel how you feel. And that’s okay.

It’s okay. It doesn’t matter if your feelings are too irrational, too wrong, as long as you can acknowledge and forgive yourself for it. It doesn’t matter if ideas similar to yours have failed before, because they might have led up to this moment where yours can flourish. It doesn’t matter if your dad used to be an asshole if he no longer wants to be. And when I say doesn’t matter I mean doesn’t have to matter. It’s a choice. It’s okay to feel unreasonably jealous, reluctant, and fearful. It really is. There are people who get by with worse flaws than yours. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t hate yourself for things you don’t hate other people for.

A Perfect Circle – Gravity is a moving song about this topic. It’s about being flawed to the point of imbalance and accepting it in the sense of letting its importance waste away to nothing. Just let it go. You don’t have to play basketball against anyone who isn’t on the court.

In the interest of practicing what I preach, I’m going to, uh, practice this as soon as I can. The people you love and the dreams you have deserve your authenticity. They deserve your walls knocked down. This harkens back to my post about never wanting to be on TV. This unresolved tension, this crushing drama sustained to keep viewers interested. In real life, you can’t hide from what you need.

Bubble

I just started The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron and it is amazing. I will probably soon be consumed by a desire to talk about it. Between that and tonight’s work on Fear.less I have a lot of new words to deal with. Thus I want to get at least one post up inspired by my weekend in Duquoin before my mind is taken. Without further ado, here we go.

I talked about decadence a while ago, in a post that I believe was tittled, fittingly, Decadence. Well now I have discovered something about decadent people – they know a lot about things the rest of us don’t, but all they know is that.

Sometimes a lifestyle can be too exciting and the setting is to blame. On the extreme end there’s living in a gunfire-raked hellhole, constantly fighting for survival in wars you didn’t clamor for and genocides you don’t understand. At the other end you have a pretty typical town where, for whatever reason, what a lot of people do for fun a lot of the time is illegal and affects the brain in neat ways. It’s a sludgy, trippy backdrop for stealing street signs and reveling in childish irreponsibility.

It’s also all you ever think about.

When your life is too exciting it takes over you. This is understandable when you’re escaping the secret police for obvious reasons, but if you’re a regular low-life kid you’re probably just full of yourself because you don’t have access to rewards other than those that come from breaking rules. Either way, your preoccupations stunt your existential growth. You’re in a bubble. You can’t analyze anything other than in the context of your own experiences. You reminisce a lot because you are colored only by concrete events in the past, and appreciate them only for their concord, not contrast, with the present you. Your appreciation for beauty is superficial and it never occurs to you to comment on the funny design on the restaurant napkins. You don’t aspire (and why should you). You don’t dream.

I sympathize with the refugee representatives of this state because they have a lot on their plate. The fortunate, peace-blessed side is just shallow and annoying and they cover it up with pompous lyrics from the song that was playing in their basement while they huffed paint instead of going to work. They may take road trips (which means they have a vague idea of the appeal of getting out of Dodge), but only to stain their facetious tapestry with the same numbing experiences as always. Do you know how long it takes to become familiar with a city? One day. In one day you can acquire so much knowledge about how the streets are laid out, where to eat, where to dance, where to sleep. If familiarity to you means more than this, if you are so bored that you notice the particular way bank tellers address you here as opposed to there, then you are not in the bubble.

I think that if you don’t have vices to resign to, you carve out meaning in places where there seemed to be none. Sometimes when you have nothing to do, you look outside at the trees and sky and come to understand not just how it makes you feel, but why, and what that means. You look somewhere else and realize why you would rather be there than here. You don’t live in the moment, the moment lives in you, because you ate and are digesting it. It’s easiest to start thinking outside the box when the inside of the box is uninteresting.

Pema Chodron actually seems to agree with my color wheel idea: “people discover the same truths through many avenues”. A lot of low-life philosophy boils down to “people suck”, the one truth that everyone ever in the entire world has figured out. Why undergo so much harm to mind, body and spirit in order to understand things a bunch of boring people can tell you is plainly evident?

As I mentioned in The Color Wheel I have no problems with being a rambunctious jackass in and of itself, but I know people only do it because culture glorifies it and shoehorns people into it and I am so very against that. Perhaps the guy sitting outside on his boring suburban porch would learn to appreciate not napkins or sunlight or art but weed, bondage, vandalism, throwing Monopoly money at hobos, anything. But he would appreciate those things instead of feeling like he could go nowhere else. He knows what he wants.

For several months recently I decided that I hated thinking, believing that a propensity for it had stuck me in a mire of depression and uncertainty, and then I was all about feeling. But now I know where too much feeling gets you. Overthink and you become sheltered, overfeel and you become a screwup. And thus I have no choice but to come to a conclusion that I had probably secretly always known. It was confirmed when I noticed that love is beautiful precisely because it is a choice and also because it’s not.

Passion and reason in perfect balance.

Bare Necessities

My eating and sleeping schedules have been ruined. I sacrificed these basic needs, these building blocks of life, to devote time to various other activities this weekend while down in Duquoin.

Do you have anything in your life that you could get passionate enough about to neglect the bare necessities for your own survival? Surely, there are situations where you will miss a feast or stay up late to accomplish some task or another and that’s fine. Usually it’s not a big deal and the essay or whatever gets done. But what if you got so wrapped up in something that this persisted for days?

I don’t think this is a good idea in and of itself but I think there are a number of situations, all of them directly related to meaningful human interaction, that justify involuntary fasting and stayupitude. But my intention is not to comment on whether compromising your health like this is worthwhile. I just want to put the concept out there as a barometer for enthusiasm. If you have something (good or bad) that you care about to this extent, what does that show you about yourself? What do you want to go without less than life? (What a clunky abortion of a sentence that looks like at first.)

Tomorrow (today) I will resume work on Fear.less and you may hear about it. Also I will hopefully have much to expound upon about my downstate travels – because if I didn’t there wouldn’t be much point in traveling. I am big on drawing more from your experiences than the experience itself – the inability to do so being a major theme in my observations of southern Illinois, as you will see.

Would I go without food or sleep for days to finish Fear.less? That is a moot point because I do not have to and I hope we don’t find out.

Commercial for Cake

To me it means something a little different than luxurious chocolate cake. I have a friend that actually used to think “decadent” was synonymous with “luxurious”. That’s how often that word is used to describe chocolate cake. That’s how often the appeal of sin is used as a marketing tool. Try as they might though, no restaurant will ever make me feel guilty about eating chocolate cake.

I have an odd relationship with decadence. I feel a warped sort of envy for those who partake in traditionally deviant behavior, even things I wouldn’t partake in myself, like humongous tattoos. Maybe it’s because decadence is a scar, literally or not. It’s a badge commemorating your experience, your descent into the hole.

If this isn’t a cultural thing, it’s a me thing, but I think a lot of people think this way in some form or another. These people seem more venomous. They seem like they have discarded meaningless constructs like common sense in order to appease their fascination. They seem jaded. With their veins as a subway tunnel they have commuted to infernal places far more interesting than Earth.

The effect is amplified the younger the person is. And I don’t mean the occasional outburst or two that should be expected of any teenager. I mean it becoming a lifestyle. Surely the line of innocence must be crossed at some point, but maybe that line should be a gradient? I don’t know how young people doing drugs and committing crimes and going wild makes me feel. I just don’t know. I stare at the wall. It disturbs me whether they’re male or female, rich or poor, whether they live in urban squalor or the middle of nowhere. I have difficulty reconciling this with my attempts to be open-minded. I can’t help but think it’s too much and that kids in this situation are having something taken from them. I kind of wish I had done it myself just so I could know the truth. How would I feel about life if I had experienced more drunken police escapes, street sign thefts and one night stands? Who knows if I would even remember it anyway.

I want to be friends with a porn star just to see what kind of person it turns you into.

A lot of them either realize how contrived it is, or die. Maybe if we all had some chocolate cake.

I’d like to close with one of my favorite songs, which discusses this topic in rather explicit terms if you still have no idea what I’m talking about. It is Placebo – Commercial for Levi.

Puzzling Behavior

Envy is the biggest problem with living relative to others. But sometimes, you’re not comparing yourself to someone else, they just swoop on in and usurp you. This is fine in professional sports and whatnot but competition is a little different from this.

Last summer I started a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle late one night. I rummaged through the pile of cardboard, snapped together the border, and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, assorted family members had finished half the puzzle. They had decided to adopt it into a collaborative effort, except without me collaborating.

This is so stupidly senseless I shouldn’t even have to make a post about it. You don’t sneak into people’s studies and studios and finish their novels and paintings for them. You don’t raise other people’s children. Fuck people who steal other people’s opportunities for fulfillment and joy, robbing it of all relevance and educational value.

It feels perverted to write about this because it’s as obvious to me as “don’t eat the banana without peeling it”. Be a libertarian for once in your inconsiderate validation-starved life and leave people to do their thing. Let them have their experience. Let me do my goddamn jigsaw puzzle!

In other news the new method of editing Fear.less stories is going well, except I have a smaller workload than I thought.

You Never Want to Be on TV

The Office is my favorite comedy on TV right now. Fuck We’re Always Assholes in Philadelphia (actually that’s a good show) or How I Met Your SUCK or any of that trash. But The Office is more than just funny, it taught me an important rule of thumb for life.

Don’t be a TV character.

I believe that a lot of what we expect from the world comes from what we see on TV, and then we get all surprised when we learn that crime scene investigation is boring. We get surprised when our friend doesn’t give his cheating significant other another chance.

Or, wait, we’re not surprised, because he does take her back, because he thinks it’ll be cake because he saw it on TV! Just looking at characters on The Office, particularly Jim before going out with Pam and Michael throughout the show, reveals many traits common to Real People:

• you hate your job and see it as a means to an end
• you are not respected by the people around you
• you are in a situation where your talents are being misapplied
• you are in love with someone who is not in love with you
• your relationship(s) is/are unstable

Real People who feel this way are also miserable. That’s because any interesting story is filled, filled, with conflict. If you are a TV character, the fact that you are interesting comes at your personal expense, because your day-to-day suffering, whether you are a cubicle slave or Jack Bauer, is fascinating as hell.

I specifically say TV and not movies because movie characters sometimes win at the end. American TV wants to go on as long as possible, so Jim is stuck forever working his shit job and Jack Bauer is always getting shot at.

Step back and take a look at an issue in your life. You know, that wretched thing you’re always thinking about, going over and over in your mind like a gnarled chunk of wood spinning on a lathe. If you were watching someone on TV doing what you’re doing, would you keep watching? Would you keep watching to see if that character eventually killed themselves? Would you even laugh at the person’s expense?

I try not to get in those situations. On-again/off-again relationships should stay on Friends where they belong, I don’t want people watching me and judging me like I’m a spinning roulette wheel. And being in a dead-end knuckle-dragging job is not cool either. I want to be on a very boring TV show that isn’t worth watching because the handsome hero (me) wins all the time and it isn’t even close. No suspense at all. “Is he going to get the girl? Is he going to get the job? Will he ever find peace?” Of course, bitch. Yawn. Watch sports instead.

How do you get off TV? Standing up to people is usually what it comes down to. Don’t let your life have blights like recurring villains. Your mother, boss, lover and bully all need to be put in their places. TV is okay to enjoy because even though it potentially could happen it is ultimately not true. Keep it that way. Write your own script.

Also watch The Office.

The Color Wheel

Take almost any RPG and play it until something dies. Your character or party will earn experience points and become more powerful. Stronger characters help you win the game. Experience translates directly to worth, to the ability to win. This correlation seems intuitive in real life, too. It’s wrong.

Psalm 23 contains a line about the “path of righteousness”. Well, it’s “path” in English. In the original Hebrew they use a phrase roughly meaning “roundabout paths that lead to the same point”. What that means is that our God-driven journeys aren’t always hunky-dory or obvious, but will still lead you to green pastures and still waters.

I know many people who, in their hearts, want to be good. I can assume their paths lead toward righteousness, but they’re not the same paths. I get ecological vibes here. People have their niches. I’d like to pluralistically venture that there is no property of numerical worth you can attribute to these roles and routes. The validity of the route is path-independent.

If you reject this, life can marginalize you. In particular, if your route is generally accepted as lesser, you may come to hate yourself for it. There is a notion that it is possible to live more than someone else, that your experiences define your efficacy as a person. The problem here is that these standards are a social arbitration (and you will learn that I hate those). Brad the Alpha Sigma Sigma bro who flounces about in bars, rolls E and carves a new notch in his bedpost every week is likely to seem more worldly than Melvin the neckbeard who spends his weekends LARPing and playing Left 4 Dead. I don’t think either of those sets of experiences has more real value than the other.

I think that if Brad and Melvin sat down, stopped judging each other and had a candid chat, they would discover they had a lot in common. Their hearts may be hollow from their vacuous love lives. They may be majoring in the same field, one they both feel passionate about. They’re two souls in human form, but Braf thinks Melvin is a sheltered loser and Melvin thinks Brody is a vapid husk.

Pop culture sides with Brody. Melvin’s dong hasn’t had enough exercise, nor has he put very much trippy shit in his veins. But the roundabout path thing unites the goody-two-shoes with the baddie-barefoot because it’s not about what they’ve done. It’s about how what they’ve done makes them feel.

It’s analogous to a trip along the color wheel. Let’s say you’re a yellow person. Good for you! Because for the past three years you’ve been living green. And now you meet and befriend someone new. Because people getting to know each other are always talking about their pasts so they can flesh themselves out more without being vulnerable, this person ends up seeming quite orange to you. It’s fascinating, foreign and alienating, but he might not feel the same. He may envy, resent or dismiss your ways.

But wait. The more of a real, deep relationship you foster with him, the more you realize that he is yellow. You guys will actually be great friends, especially if you bring to the table all you learned while green, and the same for him and orange. The spatial aspects of the color wheel are imperfect for this but the point is that LAN parties don’t define a level 3 life and raves don’t define a level 80 life.

I know what you’re thinking. “You chach, this is an excuse for your boring, uncarbonated nerd life!” But I wouldn’t have ever thought this way if I hadn’t lived it when my own blue to purple self met a quite glorious someone who turned out to be red to purple. I have observed this phenomenon in myself and others. That and my life is no longer boring! I only aim to venture that two life-journeys can lead to the same emotional and spiritual position, and it’s a coincidence that some life-journeys in particular get a lot of scorn. (That said, there’s a difference between cool stuff that you can happen to do indoors and outright reclusion. This is an easy trap for introverts to fall into because the line between the two can blur. Some people really do need to get out more.)

I won’t lie, nerds and rascals uniting in mutual misery is my favorite example of this theory but it doesn’t have to be that negative. The color wheel brings together boss and employee, student and teacher, parent and child. And there is the reassuring corollary that the guy at your church who builds schools in Thailand and organizes food drives is not a better person than you because of those things. For all you know he did it out of self-loathing. Even if he didn’t, then treasure his experiences as education for yourself. If he doesn’t help you use it in this way then he is not that great a person anyway.

I am trying hard to avoid conveying that life experiences are useless. I definitely don’t believe that. You should travel and volunteer and fornicate and experiment and do whatever. What is useless is any sense of peace or superiority you harbor just for having those verbs on your existential résumé. You must apply those experiences and change colors. Realize that no two colors look bad together and that it is deeply rewarding to help move someone else around the spectrum.

You are not better because you’ve done drugs or because you haven’t done drugs (or anything else at all). I think if you step back and look at everything on your palette as a way to paint someone else’s picture instead of way to doll up your own, you will feel free. You will realize the value your experiences have as tools for bringing happiness to others. You won’t compare your worth to other people because life is a collaborative art.

We are all at particular destinations at any given moment, but every point on a journey is technically a destination, and we continue to recolor our perspectives as we go to classes, listen to music, kiss pretty people, and look out for nenbarns (more on these later). The capability of reaching the same ends through different means creates the necessity for a cool skill called empathy that allows you to live more than your own life.

Fiercely Ebbing Away Resolve

Dictionary.com on fear: “A feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence or imminence of danger.”

Urban Dictionary on fear: “A waste of your time caused by lack of familiarity with the experience.”

Fearful people on fear: “AHHHHHHHHHH!”

Computer Gaming World on F.E.A.R.: “One of the year’s top single-player shooters”

I agree with all of the above.

I had a big post written up after this nifty intro but I deleted it all. It felt like pompous half-baked (on marijuana) drivel. I think it would be premature of me to philosophize about fear right now, especially before the release of a fantastic project I am editing called Fear.less that may enlighten me and millions of others.

Instead I will share with you some of my experiences with fear. The decision to do this embodies one of my favorite methods for combating fear: fatalism!

Getting Published: Fail to figure out how, feel incompetent. Give up before reaching the mailbox/clicking send, feel cowardly. Get rejected, feel useless. Get rejected over and over, hang myself with a shoelace. Predict adverse reaction to unmet expectations or lukewarm reception, feel petty.This is the typical artist fear of a world full of critics ready to crawl up your ass, and this is an attempt to get over it.

You know who has never been published? This guy. I haven’t even had anything rejected. 0/0 technically means you’ve never failed, and the perverted hollowness of that makes me want to punch walls.

Getting Employed: What if I am as lazy at performing a job as I am at finding one? What if my boss hates me? What if it is about as fun as a swarm of wasps? What if they don’t let me go on vacation and it eats up all my time?

This is even dumber because I have been employed before and it was the best diversion in my life at the time. Fear is illogical like that. Now that I’ve sent off some applications today I feel the same way I did before, only now I have a chance of someone hiring me. For all I know I will hone the same skills in my future employment that I used to weasel out of applying to jobs forever and ever.

Getting Lucky: I lend this one substantial weight because I believe our lives should be means to a loving end. Also, it forces you into a position of vulnerability. That vulnerability can be beautiful, but not if your S.O. cheats on you with Frat Boy Chad after chugging one too many Natty Lites. Have you ever been cheated on? I’ve heard it feels like getting knifed in the stomach, though I heard this from somebody who has never been knifed in the stomach. Still though. Infidelity is vile because it’s easy betrayal and betrayal is such an atrocious sin.

That’s pretty dramatic though. Even healthy relationships are precarious and scary. One person could get bored of the other… just because. Long distances and durations of separation may prove that absence makes the heart stop caring. If both people are vestal and intellectual, it may drown in meta-analysis. Sometimes things just don’t work out, and then you have no one to hold, no one to make your sanctuary, no one to understand how triumphant it feels to eat spaghetti in a white shirt and not stain it. Do you want that? I don’t. But there’s no magical way to keep it at bay.

Getting Over It?

Notice how all of these are me getting adjectives. States being induced in me externally. Stuff being done to me. What if I was the agent? That would feel powerful. I should take control. I should say “I am a guy who gets published, who gets a job, and has a great relationship.”

I recently discovered an approach to life called Be-Do-Have that seems to resonate with my whole apotheosis idea. If I am a demigod just because I can be one, that gives the universe the finger and me control. Delusions of grandeur stop being delusions if you act on the temporary psychosis and make it happen. It makes mathematical sense: fear fiercely ebbs away resolve, but if you have infinite resolve, nothing meaningful can be taken from you. I will personally vouch that it certainly helps for acquiring special someones.

It’s hard, though. If I find a way to consistently bring about constructive megalomania, I’ll let you know.