Before I get into this, yet another self-indulgent post, and drive most
of my readers elsewhere, I wanted to tell you that, as poor as I am at responding to comments and e-mails, I read every single one,
promptly and perhaps a bit obsessively. I should probably write fewer
articles and correspond more, but I am who I am, so I probably won't.
But though I may not communicate it well, I am listening to you, dear readers. Don't give up on me.
On a similar note, several readers have suggested that those that stumbleupon this blog currently get told (in the blog's subtitle) what it's about, but not why
I write it, and that it's a bit confusing and disorienting to those
who come here to read a business article, say, then find a rant about economics, then a
poem, and then an essay on environmentally responsible living. So I've
added a second sentence to the blog's subtitle, which I hope will make
this blog's purpose (and apparent incoherence) a bit more understandable.
And
a caveat: This post is heavy, even grim. It's autobiographical, and a
partial explanation for my pessimism. If that rubs you the wrong way,
then please don't bother reading it. And if you do, keep the psychobabble and complaints to yourself. You've been warned. |
I've
received a few e-mails lately that say I seem to be struggling on this
blog to get past some obstacle, that I seem to be churning over a lot
of the same ground, pushing myself to decide something, do something,
take something in a new direction. As I've acknowledged, I have been
under a lot of stress lately, but I don't think the angst in recent
posts can be attributed to that. Perhaps my recent habit of running 100
laps around the track in my back yard to end up substantially where I
started is an allegory for my whole life. I'm a slow learner, making
the same mistakes over and over until finally something makes it so
obvious even I can't fail to 'get it'.
More
than anything else I am impatient with myself, even more than I am
impatient with the world. That's futile, but that's me. As you'll know
if you've hung around here much, I'm not a great believer in our
capacity for self-improvement. Capacity for learning,
yes, but not transcendence. I'm a cynic, but I think believing we can
change ourselves is just self-delusion. We do what we must, and
learning helps us discover what we must do. We can
change what we do. We can even learn to expand our capacities, alter
our perceptions and our conceptions. But that doesn't change who we are. Each of us is, after all, a chemical stew, a bag of organisms self-organized for these organisms' self-perpetuation, and which evolved their brain for that purpose as a commons, a collective communication and memory device. It is they, not 'we', who are in charge of who 'we' are.
I was going to write this post in the first person plural, about who we are and what our society (i.e. we, plural) has done to us. But I concluded that such a projection would be presumptuous. Who am I, a bag of organisms self-organized for their self-perpetuation, to presume to know who someone else 'is', or what our society has done to that person -- to their bag of organisms? What I perceive as other people are, after all, merely figments of reality, pale, inadequate representations conjured up by my organisms' brain to 'make sense' of their
external world. We are all, in fact, utterly, terrifyingly alone. To
presume to know anything about someone else is a preposterous arrogance.
So
I am writing the rest of this instead in the first person singular, a
smaller conceit. I have this intuitive suspicion that the rest of
humanity is, mostly, as damaged as I am, but my evidence is purely
circumstantial, subjective, unprovable.
In addition to being
incessantly impatient, I am also sorry. Sorry for all the people I have
hurt and disappointed. I have hurt people because I am, as I say in my
blog bio, insensitive, and I have disappointed people mostly because I
learn so slowly, I miss the point. I wasn't paying attention. I didn't
catch your meaning. "I am a child. I last a while", as Neil Young put
it. No stamina. Living in a dream world.
When I was young, I
felt my emotional sensitivity slipping inexorably away, and I knew I
would be, to all intents, emotionally dead before I reached the age of
25. I saw that death of emotion and sensitivity everywhere. 'Old'
people made me shudder, pathetic, empty creatures hollowed out,
zombies. Even in children I saw it being crushed, as they learned to
play civilization's brutalizing survival game. I watched children learn
fear, learn to lie, learn to impose suffering on others, from insects
to the weaker kids in the schoolyard. I watched as they became
everybody else. I watched them become damaged, broken, and then die.
And, not being strong, I died with them. I killed myself before they
could get to me.
I watched the adults, oblivious to all this,
apparently already dead but still going through the motions, still
pretending to feel, like those who have lost limbs still claim to feel
something in the empty space where the limb once was. Not a takeover by
emotionless aliens, just a slow decline, a gradual loss, a compensation. I never wanted to fall that far. I wanted to die physically long before I reached that sad state.
My
friends at the time, of course, thought this was seriously deranged,
and outrageously judgemental. One of them went so far as to say I was
simply projecting my own growing emotional debility and insensitivity
on others, and that it was I, not them, who needed help. He said that I
had isolated myself from my feelings as a defence mechanism, and had
masked and excused that isolation with the pretension of intellectual
superiority.
At that time I was in love, far more deeply in
love than I had ever been or probably have since. It was a desperate
and consuming love. I attempted to cache all my remaining emotion in
her, and, to some extent she did the same. We wound a cocoon around
ourselves to try to keep all the hurt inflicted by the rest of the
world away.
It was a brilliant fiction. I had invented, in her,
the personification of all the ideals left in my heart. We would escape
together. We would transcend this brutal and beaten world. We would
save each other.
What a horrible burden to impose on another
person! She did her best, as the object of my fierce and impossible
affection, to live up to this expectation. I am not sure what she
wanted or expected of me in return. I was too deluded by my invention
of her to pay much attention to the real her, or her needs and desires.
I
am sorry for what I did to her, for how I let her down. I am sorry for
what I did to all the others I have hurt and let down out of reckless
insensitivity and uncompromising idealism. I should be made to wear a
hazard warning around my neck.
I still haven't learned. I still
expect too much of myself. Always over-promising and under-delivering.
Not very becoming. What I do now, if I were honest with myself, is just
filling the emptiness, passing the time. Having gone through the
emotions, now I am just numbly going through the motions. I am the Dead
Shaman, still reciting the words whose meaning I have long ago
forgotten.
I keep having this dream where I meet a young
woman, pretty, athletic, eyes wet with tears of pain and love and
longing, who persuades me that the best possible life consists of
making love all the time, stretching it out so it fills every waking
moment, until time and space lose their meaning. In the dream we never
get bored of this; indeed, it feeds on itself so we want more and more.
This is, of course, my subconscious re-enactment of the cocoon. The Box. Everything else has died, but the dream, the ideal, lives on, relentless. Pure madness.
I'm
convinced we were not meant to live the way we live in this pathetic,
civilized society. Somehow I know this, instinctively, but I just keep
playing along, dreaming of a way out, and doing what I must. Going
around and around, repeating the same mistakes, playing a role in the
movie that is my life, though I am now no more really alive than the
images on the movie screen. Such brilliant self-delusion. I have become a figment of my own reality.
I
watch myself perform, as if I were still, really, here. But if you stop
making believe with me, buying the illusion, just for a moment, and
look closely, you can see -- look! -- all that is there is an empty
shell.
Graphic is from the website of Synergy Communications, a UK company. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
