It's been a kind of peculiar set of days lately. You know how you can have days where every sensation comes to you brimming over with hope and possibility and beauty. And then there are days where things are, well, not. The sort of days where everything is just what it is. No pointing outward to something meaningful. Nothing insanely weird or captivating.
A series of these, and it threatens to induce a bovine-like mentality, that if left unchecked could conceivably lead a person to afternoons in front of the TV during the times of day when the commercials are targeted to the unemployed or terminally ill. And a person watches the trainwrecks unfold on "Jerry Springer" or whatever the hell idiotic programming is on, I imagine, because those people on the screen at least have a spark, they are animated. Even though it's about something nuts, like, a guy's cousin who swore she loved him but then ran off with his best friend.
I digress somewhat. More to the point, that sensation of life being a series of going-through-the-motions: that's the kind everyday darkness I confront as personally embattling. As a good existentialist, I acknowledge that there isn't any ultimate meaning and magic to it all, but I also can, and do, affirm that we can create our own sense of it through how we consciously choose to engage. But sometimes, it's simply difficult. The world seems to be deliberately resistant to being perceived as hopeful or promising, and trying to find a way to perceive it so through a tidal wave of mundanity is simply tiring. It would be so easy to succumb to it and become just another thing, acting and reacting to what's going on around, without reflection or passion or hope or love.
I think there's something about these feelings that are key. Because the conscious choice part is only part. Choosing something, and feeling something are two different things. My moment viewing the aftereffects of the tragic accident yesterday took me to chose to see life in all its everydayness as precious and fragile. But I didn't feel it; the day still felt mundane and uninspired. Maybe it's partly due to being in the middle of a couple of projects, where the onus of effort is on doing a bunch of bookish and electronic leg-work, and that can get to feeling like being in a limbo-like state.
But what joy. Even in the midst of typing this note an event happened, the drama of which I'll spare any reader save that nothing life-threatening is involved, that has thrown the preciousness of everyday mundane experience into sharp relief.
On, however, a more exuberant note, I have a clip from a column by one of my most favoritest writers that I'll share here below. Thanks, Mark Morford! I needed to hear that from a voice outside my own head. You rock:
[...]
Or maybe not. I prefer to think of these fine denizens of dumb as the darker, skankier parts of our individual consciousness, the red flags of the soul. Should we not be grateful they exist? That they are here to remind us to be ever vigilant and wary? Hell yes we should.
After all, the Fred Phelps, the Glenn Becks, the Terry Jones of the world are but our basest natures made manifest, the bleakest, most paranoid, lazily ignorant parts of each and every one of us. Deny it at your peril. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion." He should know.
These wretched little demons, they are eternal. They have always been here. And they exist to deliver but one message: If you're not conscious, if you don't pay attention, if you don't fill your cup to brimming every single day with laughter and paradox, love and possibility, if you don't deeply appreciate the madhouse irony of this completely gorgeous, impossibly ruthless human experiment, well, they will but fester like a sore on your big toe, and you'll no longer be able to dance.
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Let us dance, then!
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