(no subject)
I don't understand why I feel very unhappy--sour mood complete with physical pain in the chest--right now.
EDIT (2:35 am):
I took a shower and articulated my position to myself like this: While I'm familiar with the endless mechanical rotations of my cognition and can intuit how they operate and what they'll do next, there has been a terrible depth and breadth of emotion for which I have no explanatory theory, no predictive account, just phenomena, qualia even, with only the slightest uniformity to tie them together. This hell of suffering comes out of nowhere--undocumented.
I hadn't felt as bad as all that since a month and a while ago, before I was dating Katie. It was the same thing, but now with no established cause I can understand. (It is no tangible clockwork like the ambitious cognitive stress, ) it is a series of crashing waves, slamming me against reefs--I am blinded by the salt spray and alone. "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by"--but instead I'm just naked and adrift, and I hate it and this helplessness and I don't understand where this empty pit of need inside me came from because--because why? Has it been dug anew by my long-incarcerated id as an escape tunnel from its cage? Or has it been there all along, just covered like a tiger trap set by God* to snare and torture my prowling gloomy beast-hunter-become-savage-beast soul?
This was more or less my thinking in the shower--part of it is recalled from then, part of it is new; but there is another moment of this which I feel is telling and which I find encouraging despite this stupid rage that makes me punch my desk and heave my chest and which turns to attack itself in its fury at it's own inexplicable and to the extent explicable despicable sources in jealousy and insecurity and myopic inability to see two steps outside its own solipsistic, autistic phenomenology, until it again flips and turns outward onto any and every feature of that beastly world...
But there was another moment: I came back from the shower and saw "THANK YOU" on my door and I thought I understood, and the waves immediately calmed and I thought that maybe I can reach beyond this savage world to another's and the stormy waves subsided and felt not as alone though still drifting and bleeding enough to punch out this testimony to my I-don't-know-what-I'm-not-going-to-try-to-explain but good lord this now is only a purgatory at sea and I can only now try to dead man's float through my anticipated insomnia and hope, hope, hope that quite soon I will pass out from lack of blood and rest and wake again on shore.
* journal posting + booze = theological lapses. I will exercise restraint.
EDIT (4:31 pm):
No, it turns out I completely misunderstood the "THANK YOU"--it wasn't even from who I expected. Which leaves things a little hollower again. I mulled a lot of this over while hearing the Messiah, in addition to talking it over with Katie this morning. I'm building a theory of my discontent--trying to employ my only skill, I suppose. To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a hammer, all you really can do is swing away and hope things are nails.
Anyway, the theory isn't particularly optimistic, in that it just points out to me again my jealousy and need and shows that the solution lies in intentions that can't be asked for.
EDIT (6:53 pm):
And what if the pit is bottomless? Then eventually, she'll just get fed up.
EDIT (2:35 am):
I took a shower and articulated my position to myself like this: While I'm familiar with the endless mechanical rotations of my cognition and can intuit how they operate and what they'll do next, there has been a terrible depth and breadth of emotion for which I have no explanatory theory, no predictive account, just phenomena, qualia even, with only the slightest uniformity to tie them together. This hell of suffering comes out of nowhere--undocumented.
I hadn't felt as bad as all that since a month and a while ago, before I was dating Katie. It was the same thing, but now with no established cause I can understand. (It is no tangible clockwork like the ambitious cognitive stress, ) it is a series of crashing waves, slamming me against reefs--I am blinded by the salt spray and alone. "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by"--but instead I'm just naked and adrift, and I hate it and this helplessness and I don't understand where this empty pit of need inside me came from because--because why? Has it been dug anew by my long-incarcerated id as an escape tunnel from its cage? Or has it been there all along, just covered like a tiger trap set by God* to snare and torture my prowling gloomy beast-hunter-become-savage-beast soul?
This was more or less my thinking in the shower--part of it is recalled from then, part of it is new; but there is another moment of this which I feel is telling and which I find encouraging despite this stupid rage that makes me punch my desk and heave my chest and which turns to attack itself in its fury at it's own inexplicable and to the extent explicable despicable sources in jealousy and insecurity and myopic inability to see two steps outside its own solipsistic, autistic phenomenology, until it again flips and turns outward onto any and every feature of that beastly world...
But there was another moment: I came back from the shower and saw "THANK YOU" on my door and I thought I understood, and the waves immediately calmed and I thought that maybe I can reach beyond this savage world to another's and the stormy waves subsided and felt not as alone though still drifting and bleeding enough to punch out this testimony to my I-don't-know-what-I'm-not-going-to-try-to-explain but good lord this now is only a purgatory at sea and I can only now try to dead man's float through my anticipated insomnia and hope, hope, hope that quite soon I will pass out from lack of blood and rest and wake again on shore.
* journal posting + booze = theological lapses. I will exercise restraint.
EDIT (4:31 pm):
No, it turns out I completely misunderstood the "THANK YOU"--it wasn't even from who I expected. Which leaves things a little hollower again. I mulled a lot of this over while hearing the Messiah, in addition to talking it over with Katie this morning. I'm building a theory of my discontent--trying to employ my only skill, I suppose. To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a hammer, all you really can do is swing away and hope things are nails.
Anyway, the theory isn't particularly optimistic, in that it just points out to me again my jealousy and need and shows that the solution lies in intentions that can't be asked for.
EDIT (6:53 pm):
And what if the pit is bottomless? Then eventually, she'll just get fed up.