My impressions divide. I wonder after my fellow man, I see myself in a dazed terror, yanked from my day, too fast to panic, falling in the street under a mellow sun. I wonder if I should move, and where to go, and if I should leave the house this second, and whether to take the stairs. I wonder where my loved ones are. I look out and think it strange that the buildings are unmoved, and the ants have so happily returned to theirs trails. I wonder how many lives have changed, and how, and whether the phone call reached right people, and who they are, and if someone has already died alone. I also feel a quiet thrill.

Abstract danger is incredibly exciting. Oh, the romance of speeding across the country in rusted Harley, the fun of risking health and security, knowing you can lose it all. Nobody I know has ever lost health, security, or “their all.” They have had strokes, lived on benches, watched their children die. Abstract danger is a high stake, importance, contrast, aliveness, it is what gives a choice its meaning. Concrete danger is merely tragic.

There are times when the symbolic importance of an event seems almost at odds with its details, when abstraction seems very far from fact. From afar, I can almost see the strange beauty of it all, I’m left with only the impression of humanity. I look at the dots on the streets, and briefly, I know each of them intimately – late for school, leaving an interview, phoning a friend, planning an evening, mourning mother, drinking, celebrating, disintegrating, paying off a debt, being a better father today, buying that laced bustier, tiring, trying, striving – they pay me no matter at all.

“Today, a dreadful thing sounded through my door, fear and wounds in terrible injustice, and the world kept spinning, never pausing to weep.”

“Today humanity pounded on my door.”

I don’t know which is true.

#chronicle

Yesterday I hitched a ride to the outskirts of my homeland; I needed to retreat away from sorrow and death and familiarity – naturally, I wound up driving out with a terminally ill family member. We were confined to each other for the duration of the trip, and despite our best efforts to stave off meaningful conversation, we eventually spoke of his illness – metastasized cancer. He is carefully hopeful – I, on the other hand, rushed to call his condition terminal . But what destroyed me was the way he spoke about his death – like it was his, an experience that belonged to him. It was like watching a puppy get kicked by his trusted guardian and get up to greet him. In him I saw the ghost of Christmas soon to come. The rest of the journey was silent. We reached our destination late in the evening and had a long overdue dinner in a corner bistro; he had a decadent, shellfish and fried fruit gourmet dish, and I had a phobic, grilled vegetable and whole pasta bowl. He ordered dessert, and I stared out the window. We slept in the decaying beachside apartment I now write from, and he left in the morning to receive his first round of treatment.

When I rose this morning I rose to go in search of booze – I left my life to leave myself as much as the world, and casual, seasonal alcoholism seemed a great hobby to that end. I walked into the first tourist-supermarket I saw and made for the booze isle. Too Anglo-Saxon for vodka, too young for good wine, too old for cider, too gay for scotch, too straight for tequila, and with too cheap a liver for fruitier options, I left the choice to chance. I turned a corner and grabbed the first bottle that presented itself – “Carl Jung – De-Alchoholized Rosé.” I put it back on the shelf and grabbed a Malibu. I returned to the store a few minutes later and bought the damn thing. When the man who coined “synchronicity” – meaningful coincidence, the a-causal but meaningful linking of events – comes to you in the form of a WASP-y liquor label and tells you not to do drugs, kid, you listen.

I am not a natural optimist – that Malibu is sitting in my fridge – I do not wake up with an urge to smell the flowers and hug my neighbor. I expect the worst and prepare for it well; I admire the great spectacle of life from the corner chair by the emergency exit. Thoreau agreed with the luminaries of today that it is by truth alone that we are made immortal – but his truth was not the one we pray to, it belonged to him and no other. The entirely unfalsifiable notion that divinity and meaning are baked into existence, that the world is composed of symbols and synchronicities, and the truth belongs to the spirit isn’t one I’m naturally inclined to believe. But here I am, feeling only the buzz of a night poorly slept.

#chronicle #jung #synchronicity

It is not uncommon for me to startle awake and find myself sharing the room with residual images from a dream for the following minute or so. For most of my life, my dreams have been lucid – if I wished to exit a nightmare as peril grew near, I’d squeeze my eyes shut until I physically felt my eyelids contract, and open them to look out into the faded black of my room. The boundary between my imagination and waking life never felt particularly marked, but there was no consequence to this, my dreams felt terribly polite – an olive branch extended from my conscious awareness to the shallow end of my subconscious. My sense of personhood was the unwavering centre of my experience, and the boundary between myself and the environment was sacred. I felt no distress when my dreams intruded on a morning, or my perception dissolved into pure exhaustion, no experience was destabilizing to my identity. That was, of course, until Wednesday.

Wednesday night I awoke with a distant sound ringing out in my ears, and through a sleepy a haze, felt the push-and-pull of my breath, the headache forming beneath my skull, and complained, in the privacy of my mind, that I needed a few more hours of sleep. These sensations and thoughts, which would have ordinarily coalesced into a sense of self, swarmed me with no aim. I was not myself, I detected no soul, I was perception itself, trapped in hollow body. I felt a panic creep up my chest and blood leave my fingertips. I hurried to the bathroom mirror stared at my reflection; it trained its eyes on me, a curious stranger; I saw myself as I see the elderly man selling lottery tickets by the town square.

I’m used to the banal “dissolution of self” offered by practices such as mindfulness and have never found them particularly enlightening or disturbing. “The self is an illusion,” says the one, “we do not author our thoughts, they simply appear to us.” Our thoughts are born of us, consciously or otherwise, it is the make of our mind that gives them structure, our sensibility that gives them taste, our heart that gives them form; they appear as a finished product, but we recognize that they belong to us. We can’t pre-decide our thoughts in the same way we can’t pre-board an airplane – paraphrasing George Carlin, “what does that even mean, to get on before you get on?” This puts no dent in authorship. “Why, don’t you know, if we pay attention like so, we can notice there is no self.” And if we “pay attention” in a different manner, as if by magic, we “notice” something else entirely – as though the manipulation of perception could produce a variety of experiences. How curious. This I face is another beast entirely. I cannot look at the looker, I cannot find the witness. I can’t focus on my breath and sit in a benumbed trance, as the two-bit secular buddhist prescribes – my focus itself is disjointed, my perception is fragmented, each experience torn into emotional tone, cognitive understanding, pain, pleasure, sight, smell, never coming together, never forming an event.

Loss of self is as primordial a fear as the fear of the unknown. Consciousness is not all there is, but it is all that cares, and the self how it cares. The self is the glue that binds existence, we fear the destruction of self when we fear anything at all – or love, seek, laugh, despair, live. To be without a sense of self is to be in perpetual disbelief – the “other” is dissolved, the world is dissolved, the cohesion of life gives way to isolated moments joined only by memory and fact. The outline of a life, that is what we are left with without a self.

The twilight hours bless us with a lack of sense – poison of the brain – and the mind treats the stuff of the world like the pliant matter of dreams. But I have never benefitted from the quaintness of the late night quite as much as I ought to, it never seemed a remarkable hour to me, my dreams never felt strange, and reality seemed weighty enough to withstand the occasional nocturnal assault, should that ever change. Perhaps this is why my self crumbled so easily, I never did admit the flexibility of the imagination, I did not dream a dream so much as think it. Reality does not feel weighty anymore, it does not feel the monument it once was, I only see scaffolding.

I am not keen on this death. I known now that I must build something new.

#ramble #chronicle