Insufficient Funds
There is a space between anticipation and whatever it is you’re anticipating and it’s a weird one. It’s sort of thick and heavy. There’s weight to that space. But at the same time there’s airiness to it. Like everything is sort of open and in tiny, tiny pieces that are floating around over our heads. A bit like Mike Teevee after he’s gone into the WonkaVision machine and hasn’t yet appeared on the screen. “It’s flying over our heads in a million pieces!” My favorite part in that scene is when Mike Teevee mansplains Willy Wonka about how television works, and Willy Wonka bends down and says, “You should open your mouth a little wider when you speak.”
I have all these pieces floating around over my head and no chocolate bar on the screen yet. I’ve been thinking about creativity and connection and relationships and sex and death and responsibility and home and what actions are sacred and the nature of god and man and if our lives are predestined or if we have free will and if we create meaning out of suffering or if there is actual redemption in suffering and whether there is an intrinsic benefit to being a decent person or if we all sleep the same regardless of whether we’re assholes or not. And I can feel a change happening because I just came out of this heavy, heavy stretch where I could not for the life of me figure anything out. It was just this murky span of time where I couldn’t find any relief from my own shit, no matter what I tried. In the past, whenever I’ve struggled with something or had some sort of intractable sadness; I’ve just done whatever anyone suggested. “You know what I did that helped me?” is one of my favorite things to hear because there is such gigantic hope in that statement. But this time, none of it worked and hope just started to feel like the continuance of suffering. I started to resent the shit out of hope. A friend of mine said, “We’re all just looking for small glimmers of hope,” and I replied, “Not fucking me. Don’t give me any hope because all that shit is, is the anticipation of a specific outcome and anticipation just leads to crushing disappointment. Nothing ever turns out the way you want it to, because of god’s will or some shit like that.” The “god’s will” part was spoken with air quotes and in that mocking teenagery tone because I was so tired of not having any power in the situation. And then people would look at me with a mixture of concern and fear, which would just serve to make me want to hermit in my house and stop talking altogether. You should’ve seen me answer the question, “Did you find everything okay?” in the checkout line of the grocery store. Sometimes, I would have a day or two of relief and then this uncompromising sorrow would come back and squeeze my lungs with its big, pink, hammy fists until I could hardly take a breath. Eventually, the only thing that anyone could do was shrug and say, “Just give it time.” But that just pissed me off. Fuck time. Shit never moves fast enough.
It made me do some things I hadn’t done before and maybe that is some of the redemptiveness of suffering — it dictates the acquisition of new actions and perceptions; demands critical thinking and exacts new forms of pain management while taking its pound of flesh. Commands us to expand our consciousness and look towards things outside of our own limited perceptions for relief. Before I had this period of sorrow, I was accustomed to performing my own form of penance in the self-righteous hope that it would keep anything bad from happening and to insure that I was pointedly aware that things can never be too good. Not for me. This is counter to what anyone should ever do because there is no need — suffering will happen whether you do it to yourself or not. Might as well conserve your resources for the unexpected times of hardship. Also punishing yourself is just unmitigated bullshit. No one likes a fucking martyr because ultimately, it’s all just self-centered horseshit and no fun. Now I know how Joan of Arc felt. And I bet she didn’t have a wide circle of friends.
My conceptual framework for faith got super shaky when things got bad. Wait. I take that back. It all but disappeared. I hear people say all the time, “That’s when I really rely on my Higher Power” or “I lean on God in those times” at which I stare at them with a mixture of jealousy, awe, and horror. I have no fucking clue what that means. All I can figure is that it’s a fancy way to say that they force themselves into believing that things will eventually okay. But “reliance?” What the fuck? You can spend the better part of a year on your knees begging for god to intervene on your behalf and it won’t happen. Trust me. I tried it. Nothing happens.
Our dark nature is a rich and interesting place, but only with distance. Those noche oscura in which the only recourse is to hang on to your ass, are places where the edifying meaning that we so desperately crave remains agonizingly obscure. It feels like torture. Like, “What the fuck am I supposed to learn from this shit, already?” As if it was only learning the lesson that would force the suffering to cease. “OH! I get it now. Thanks.” That’s some punitive god shit, right there — and it can’t be right. I’m still not convinced that all suffering leads to some sort of redemptive lesson. It can’t. Not for everybody and not every time. Sometimes suffering is just cruel and meaningless suffering. And when it’s not, we still have the work of teasing out the significance ourselves — seemingly, because we need some sort of reward for having survived this bullshit, lest we be plunged back into the meaninglessness of existence. The non-dualistic nature of life being both precious, invaluable, and not to be squandered as well as cheap as dirt, purposeless, and pointless seems to be both critical and so fucking profoundly disappointing. Non-dualism itself is profoundly disappointing. It’s so much easier when things fall neatly on either side. Certainty is comfort. Black and white is easy to see.
My god concept suffered such severe collapse that it had an aural quality akin to being underwater in the bathtub, where all you hear is the blood in your ears. Contraction like being buried and panicked beneath concrete. My lungs hurt all the time. I walked constantly but always head down, eyes burning, and as many steep hills as I could find just so I could get as much air sucked into my lungs as I possibly could. Fucking gasping all the time like a hooked fish. I would imagine these grappling hooks planted in my heart — which always felt like it was beating wrong — and I would picture pulling them out, meat hanging off the barbed ends, and plucking the heartmeat off the hook, then plugging the holes back up with the bloody meat, fingers sticky and red. A girl jumped from the roof of a building downtown and the kids from my son’s high school all heard her land on the asphalt, and aside from feeling miserable for her family, the only thing I thought was, “poor, brave, little thing.” And as a watched my son skateboard across the street one day as I dropped him off for school, all I could think was how I’d had fucked myself by having a kid. The option to die was off the table, and I would never be saved from the sin of being a mother. The day after my birthday, I caught a glimpse of what it is like to make a snap decision in the throes of despair that would end the inexhaustible revolving malicious thinking, but would only begin a misery for everyone who loves me, and it scared the shit out of me.
I started giving darkness more consideration, because now it seemed nefarious and deadly. If non-dualism is a thing, then certainly, darkness cannot only be abject pain and misery. Right? C’mon. Please. Give me something. The only evidence I could find of god was in the cyclical nature of life, because god sure as hell wasn’t showing up when I was begging for help. Despite global warming, we still have seasons that follow each other in succession — spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter — on and on from the beginning of the planet. Sprouts pop out from the ground and grow into something and then wither back and drop a seed which lies buried under the earth in a period of dormancy. Trees bud and bloom, leaf out completely and shade us, turn yellow and lose their leaves covering the ground with detritus that builds on the forest floor, then stay naked all winter. You can deny a creator all you want, but you cannot deny creation. It happens all the fucking time. We are born, we grow into lovely flawless dumb things, get a little wisdom and middle-age it up with some hot blonde and a Corvette, and then go get saggy and crepey and mega sage and then die. And then maybe death isn’t the end and just it starts all over again — all the evidence clearly points to that obvious conclusion. Maybe death isn’t the end. Maybe it’s the dormant period where all the action is before the spring. I have this lovely image of the afterlife being this peaceful molecular state out in the iridescent blackness of space where we all are connected in this lovely infinite cosmic soup before we are yanked back into individual form again. Maybe we would live a little more fearlessly if we knew this is only one of many. The generative properties that exist within us might amaze us and give us reassurance that yes, it’s just part of the compass if we only had some consciousness of death and darkness wasn’t so difficult to navigate. Joseph Brodsky wrote, “For darkness restores what the light cannot repair.” Many human interactions take place within this realm — even connection — especially on the intuitive level. I’ve been trying to understand what intuition is all fucking year and it remains frustratingly opaque, which is just adding to my annoying trust issue.
There is this sweet, gentle period in the morning in which I am neither awake nor asleep and sometimes it is so generous with thoughts and ideas. My room is outlined in darkness and my eyes can’t be open yet, but it feels as if they are because I can see. This is the fleeting and slippery time when I seem to have filtered and untangled and gathered together whatever bits I have partially absorbed and occasionally, I am even inspired with something which had previously evaded me. Sometimes my dreams have something to do with it. Sometimes it feels like there is something else to it. Something outside of myself. This happens in darkness too.
Fixed eye dilation is the point at which nurses know to stop administering CPR because it is the indicator that the brain will never perceive light again. I saw it happen when my cat died — her pupils seemed to become even blacker and expanded out into the furthest of the green, and I instinctively knew that was it. Huge, black pupils mean it’s over for now. Or maybe it’s our limited perception of life that makes death seem like an ending rather than the next step in the cyclical progression of another life of brutal wretchedness and potential enlightenment. Maybe darkness is really the death of some conceptual meaning that will be replaced by a new, expanded understanding of something. Maybe all those motherfuckers are right and this black-ass period is just a necessary suspension before some kind of exponential growth. Ain’t nothing new under the sun. Glad you could finally make it.
This insurmountable challenge of living. Louise Bourgeois said, “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space between is trust and love.” Trust and love, that’s a bold statement. You can’t contain the people you love. You can’t contain your own love, either. That frightening concept is when the thought of the cosmic soup most appeals to me. That great space in which form doesn’t exist and there is no separation between what is some scattered version of us and the great nebulous godhead. Feels like respite. Feels like relief because the vessels that contain our energy and love are gone and we are just Mike TeeVee-ing it in the infinite.
Language is the vessel in which our reductive ideologies are expressed. I recently read this article by Cormac McCarthy in which he was talking about the process between concept and expression. That ideas are not spinning around in our heads in a cohesive language — there is a process. Right now, I am writing poorly in this insufficient language about this yearlong experience I had, because I want to make sense of it and connect it to other people. Because despite writing being a solitary experience, the purpose of it is to communicate with someone else. I have no idea if it translates or not, because I am restricted by language. But also, language is the way in which I express myself and form a narrative. I can get trapped in the narrative I create and believe it, because it’s right there in black and white. I wrote it down. It must be true. I’m sure this will continue to evolve and change. I just have to be wary of getting too comfortable in thinking I’ve got this shit nailed down. I have a feeling I’m going to be strapping on my singlet and wrestling with this crap again. It ain’t over. Even though it was the seeming endings in my life that were the catalyst for this whole thing.
Sing it like Morrissey, “over, over, over, over…” He’s always wrong about so much.
