(no subject)
Probably as far back as I can remember I’ve always been felt oddly disconnected from the way that in our normal lives people skate around the surfaces of our lives talking about mundanity and bloating ourselves with television and celebrity gossip, but even to a level where people are actively discouraged from having any sort of meaningful discourse about anything personal. Especially since all of that clap-trappery is universal and the frantic hum of “nownownow distraction, won’t think about that!” in regards to death and meaninglessness and the tragedy that is our interior lives is universal. The red-string kabala nonsense wouldn’t even exist if this weren’t the case, there would be no Dr. Phil, no horoscopes, no shifting of metaphysics to science from more traditional religions married to the rise of fundamentalism in all the Big Three Monotheisms.
When I was younger, I thought that religion, if analyzed from the right perspective, would provide *some* kind of meaning. I suppose that was, actually, in some ways the case. Being involved in religion taught me about group-think and mass hysteria. I didn’t know those names then, but I actually think I’m a lot more lucky than most people who look at religion as completely pointless and wrong-headed because at least I get the appeal based on personal transport. It’s total madness, like adrenaline-seekers or substance abusers or compulsive athletes-if you’ve never smoked opium in all its specific forms then you’re never really going to see the appeal. Or maybe that’s wrong and people who have never been swept away be a tent rival or prayed at the Western Wall or gone on hajj always feel a certain longing *to* get it? I do see that soul-longing in a lot of people who have no name for what that is, withdrawl symptoms with never the pleasure of the drug? Could be.
At any rate, the constant not-saying what one really wants or the simple acknowledgement that you don’t even *know* really strikes me as more than just quiet lives of desperation, because *these* lives, the kind we live now in the richer nations of the world are *not* quiet. They are loud, booming lives full of screaming and braying and doing anything anything to never voice the “what if?” questions. There are disposable families and disposable jobs and on the other side the people who paint themselves into corners and make themselves very busy with all the unrelenting daily drama of the dry cleaners and the babysitter, but it’s all really the same dance. These kinds of people pass each other in life and say “that could have been me” and long for the other kind of fake life they don’t have-one spent in hedonistic fervor skiing and vacationing and shopping and the other digging their own graves with forks while feeling very comfortable and smothered at the same time. In some ways, the decline of traditional, calm religious alternatives makes both of these sorts of people’s lives harder. People, frankly, don’t even see religious vocation and a life of meaning dedicated to something more than paying off their debt as an option. While, personally, not a believer, I find that tragic for all the people who want something more but have no one to point them at that. In religion, all the shorthand is there-soul and transcendence and higher purpose, which is at its most basic level a way of expressing the terror of singularity and loneliness. People pine for more and they get Dr. Phil telling them to work out their relationship issues where in the past they could have had something that made their “soul” tremble.
I wasn’t really intending to talk about religion, though, more about connection. Through shared religious experience people find a way to express feelings about self that they do not in the mundane world, a sort of expression that now tends to be mocked or completely absent. A genuine sort of acknowledgement of each single human life as having a unique meaning along side the acknowledgement that is it is alright to be terrified and disconnected because that’s a universal experience, as universal as death. I’ve pretty much longed for a way for people to connect on that level without the mediation of religion since I was a teenager. Not so much for myself but for all of us together. What’s the point of talking about universality of human experience when you just want something for yourself anyway? The point is to offer your hand and say “me too, yes, it’s all futile and we do it anyway” and be comforted by the togetherness of it all. Religion makes that easy.
I’ve always been sort of shocked at how unwilling people are to actually say “me too” or “this is what wakes me up at night in terror” readily when most art is predicated on those sorts of issues. What makes art moving is the appeal of the universal experience-love, sex, mourning, loss, death. Those themes make literature and music and visual art something more than mindless entertainment; the ability to clearly express in a real, human way either collective or unique incidents of those basic experiences is what comprise transcendent art. People can stand in a concert hall in the dark and listen to someone sing from the bottom of themselves for hours on end, be transported and moved, and then go with their companions to a coffee shop and talk about the waitress’s eye make to fill the void. People are so scared to just say “me too” they let all their moments pass them by.
At one point in my life, this affected me so deeply I would cry over other people’s disconnection and spent many nights sleepless worrying over this sort of deadening of the soul in regards to people I love. This brought me, eventually, into bitterness of people’s stunted inability to just say “sometimes I X” in a *meaningful* way and not in regards to life anecdotes and litanies of petty childhood remembrances. Now, I think I might be just sort of tired, because instead of bitter or emotional, I find it hard to not just say what I think when someone says to me “all I want from life is X product” or “if X would just change then my life would be perfect!” because “nothing will fill the void if you keep trying with plasma screen tvs and new shoes” just sort of tumbles out of my mouth without me even meaning for it to. The effect is way more assholish than bodhisattva, trust me.
It’s hard to watch people asking over and over again the wrong questions-“why am I not good enough?” or “why did X person treat me like this?” or even dumber ones like “should I toss my money down the toilet buying this luxury car or *this* luxury car?” when the effects are all the same in that they just mask the real issue. The one real issue-what does it all mean? The problem is that this question has no answer and wells without bottoms are much scarier than what to have on your pizza or whether Angelina Jolie is pregnant again.