Spring Weekend
This is Spring Weekend: the weekend when everybody is supposed to stop everything and party, non-stop, for at least three days. This is my last Spring Weekend: it should be the biggest party I ever attend at college. Which means it is probably the biggest party event of my entire life.
When alone at concerts or parties, I fall so regularly into a particular pattern of thought and emotion that I end up feeling like earlier versions of myself. There is a sinking feeling in the gut, and a sense of distance from everyone else present that is exacerbated by the reification of 'everyone else' as a single entity. I wander from corner to corner expressionlessly, occasionally making contact with somebody I know. We chat or hang out for a while, but ultimately I feel restless--I don't want to impose on them, or I'm feeling imposed on, or I imagine that something else out there might fill the emptiness of the moment--and I move on. The Roots concert last night was like this.
There are some exceptions. In a gathering which is dominated by a group of close friends, I feel embedded. Fresh in my mind: the party at Twining's house I went to last night, or the cook out this afternoon. But these cases tend to be characterized by a different dynamic: the host/guest relationship. Hospitality matters both because the guest can always in principle rely on the host for providing a reason to be present, but, perhaps more importantly, hosts tend to bring people together who are connected in some way, or should be. I've been blessed with an amazing frequency of this sort of thing this year. I am concerned that some of the darker parts of this post, then, may just be the result of a mood swing.
Another thing entirely: today, at the Flaming Lips concert, I was there with Katie, and it was heavenly. All the normal anxieties melted away, and every moment was either about her, or about the performance, or about witnessing the performance with her. The tables were turned--nobody else mattered, nobody else existed. And it's more than that: the feeling of being so desolate, so unworthy of being a part of such an event because I am contaminating that world of friends and lovers with my lonely reflections, has wounded me, made me crippled, in a way. I've lived my life just pushing on in spite of it. But in those moments with her a salve is put on that wound, as if I were suddenly relieved of some chronic pain. I am free. I can dance with her like I've never danced with anyone before her. My heart is weightless; it tells me, "Never go anywhere without a lover."
But now the concert is long over, and she turned in early for the night. I was restless though, because I knew that there was so much going on tonight. And because I keep getting drawn back into that kind of revelry, because they are such a puzzle for me: in them, my entire system of activity and thought and values, my whole lifeworld, gets turned upside down. Almost everything I work for matters absolutely zilch in that other world, and I am reminded that the things I have sacrificed on the altar of my highest values were indeed valuable. Some instinct drives me to try to reclaim them. And some purer instinct drives me back to this experience so that I don't forget what it is that I am missing, what it is that everyone else seems to be living for. All of these needs are more vivid to me now more than ever because I graduate in a month. Maybe this is the end of this era of my life, with its periodic inflammation of adolescent angst. Are these my last confrontations with it? If so, then if I simply escape it then it will go unredeemed, something that I could not bear repeated:
"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"
And so I set out alone again tonight, to take a tour of the events. And it was exactly the same as every other time I've set out alone at night to try to weave into something useful these failed pieces of myself. And again, I find myself merely an awkward ethnographer, drawn to the exoticism of the events but unable to partake. Ashamed to be a mere observer, and terrified that some compassionate but occupied friend will take pity on me.
But the campus was alive tonight! Some local funk band was playing on one side of campus, and surrounding it were several frats throwing their respective parties. Far away, the Latino dance group was throwing a dance party, turning a miscellaneous Big Room into their best imitation of a club.
It was tucked away in one of the quads that I saw the purest expression of the spirit of this weekend. Just outside of some modern art installation in which large organically shaped mounds had been built out of the ground out of woven together branches, there was a small group of hand drummers and percussions beating out a rapid rhythm. Surrounding them were about twenty dancers, most of whom were completely naked except for body paint and the night air. Somehow, amidst all the weekend's events, this one perfect jewel was ignored and uncontaminated by leery passersby.
Of course, I didn't enter the fray. I couldn't. I wasn't painted, I'm squeamish, I can't dance, I knew no one there, I am paralyzed by my own internal calculations.
I am a modern man. I am compulsively mobile. In moments of comfort I find myself bursting outwards, forcefully dislocating myself, trying desperately to expose myself to the social elements so that I can learn to adapt to them.
But instead, I find myself each time having been blown back into an eddy behind some rock and the winds rush past. On the Saturday night of the biggest party weekend of my life, I am here: sitting alone, writing in a windowless room.
When alone at concerts or parties, I fall so regularly into a particular pattern of thought and emotion that I end up feeling like earlier versions of myself. There is a sinking feeling in the gut, and a sense of distance from everyone else present that is exacerbated by the reification of 'everyone else' as a single entity. I wander from corner to corner expressionlessly, occasionally making contact with somebody I know. We chat or hang out for a while, but ultimately I feel restless--I don't want to impose on them, or I'm feeling imposed on, or I imagine that something else out there might fill the emptiness of the moment--and I move on. The Roots concert last night was like this.
There are some exceptions. In a gathering which is dominated by a group of close friends, I feel embedded. Fresh in my mind: the party at Twining's house I went to last night, or the cook out this afternoon. But these cases tend to be characterized by a different dynamic: the host/guest relationship. Hospitality matters both because the guest can always in principle rely on the host for providing a reason to be present, but, perhaps more importantly, hosts tend to bring people together who are connected in some way, or should be. I've been blessed with an amazing frequency of this sort of thing this year. I am concerned that some of the darker parts of this post, then, may just be the result of a mood swing.
Another thing entirely: today, at the Flaming Lips concert, I was there with Katie, and it was heavenly. All the normal anxieties melted away, and every moment was either about her, or about the performance, or about witnessing the performance with her. The tables were turned--nobody else mattered, nobody else existed. And it's more than that: the feeling of being so desolate, so unworthy of being a part of such an event because I am contaminating that world of friends and lovers with my lonely reflections, has wounded me, made me crippled, in a way. I've lived my life just pushing on in spite of it. But in those moments with her a salve is put on that wound, as if I were suddenly relieved of some chronic pain. I am free. I can dance with her like I've never danced with anyone before her. My heart is weightless; it tells me, "Never go anywhere without a lover."
But now the concert is long over, and she turned in early for the night. I was restless though, because I knew that there was so much going on tonight. And because I keep getting drawn back into that kind of revelry, because they are such a puzzle for me: in them, my entire system of activity and thought and values, my whole lifeworld, gets turned upside down. Almost everything I work for matters absolutely zilch in that other world, and I am reminded that the things I have sacrificed on the altar of my highest values were indeed valuable. Some instinct drives me to try to reclaim them. And some purer instinct drives me back to this experience so that I don't forget what it is that I am missing, what it is that everyone else seems to be living for. All of these needs are more vivid to me now more than ever because I graduate in a month. Maybe this is the end of this era of my life, with its periodic inflammation of adolescent angst. Are these my last confrontations with it? If so, then if I simply escape it then it will go unredeemed, something that I could not bear repeated:
"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"
And so I set out alone again tonight, to take a tour of the events. And it was exactly the same as every other time I've set out alone at night to try to weave into something useful these failed pieces of myself. And again, I find myself merely an awkward ethnographer, drawn to the exoticism of the events but unable to partake. Ashamed to be a mere observer, and terrified that some compassionate but occupied friend will take pity on me.
But the campus was alive tonight! Some local funk band was playing on one side of campus, and surrounding it were several frats throwing their respective parties. Far away, the Latino dance group was throwing a dance party, turning a miscellaneous Big Room into their best imitation of a club.
It was tucked away in one of the quads that I saw the purest expression of the spirit of this weekend. Just outside of some modern art installation in which large organically shaped mounds had been built out of the ground out of woven together branches, there was a small group of hand drummers and percussions beating out a rapid rhythm. Surrounding them were about twenty dancers, most of whom were completely naked except for body paint and the night air. Somehow, amidst all the weekend's events, this one perfect jewel was ignored and uncontaminated by leery passersby.
Of course, I didn't enter the fray. I couldn't. I wasn't painted, I'm squeamish, I can't dance, I knew no one there, I am paralyzed by my own internal calculations.
I am a modern man. I am compulsively mobile. In moments of comfort I find myself bursting outwards, forcefully dislocating myself, trying desperately to expose myself to the social elements so that I can learn to adapt to them.
But instead, I find myself each time having been blown back into an eddy behind some rock and the winds rush past. On the Saturday night of the biggest party weekend of my life, I am here: sitting alone, writing in a windowless room.