march 8, 2025

a confession is a fact wet with shame

well, fuck. well, fuck, i am losing track of time. well, fuck, none of this is fixing anything. well, fuck, i am changing my entire being. i keep being surprised that i am so disoriented, when i am in the process of reorienting my entire being, my entire way of living, my entire constitution. the sick pull of the world is still as strong as it was before – just less frequent. i am still sucked back into the vacuum of existing in relation with others and all that brings to surface. i am still losing my fucking mind at the experience i am anointed in this life. i am still losing my mind when i begin to live inside it and entertain, even for a moment, the absurdity of all this. of knowing i may not be able to depend on anyone in this life. of dwelling on the depth of disappointment i feel in my relations with others. it is probably tainted and mixed with ingratitude, this disappointment, but it is also swimming as its own pool, defined in its own right, standing tall as a tower, and crushing me every day. or every other day, maybe now, because i have learnt not to expect, learnt how to avoid, learnt how to ensure, the reality does not hit me as it does. of course i am looking for myself in others, but i am couching it in basic dignity. i don’t know how to survive in a world where i like no one and everyone likes me. where i do not enjoy the company of anyone but they seem to seek the company of me. i suppose not anyone, i like people who touch the weight of the human condition with their bare hands, who have swam or sunk to the bottomness of it all, and survived. i like their company, because they possess a certain truth that leaks from their phrases and mannerisms – that they know what this life stuff contains, and they do not run. the last part is crucial, you know. everyone knows what this life stuff is – they are just terrified, not confronting, of it. they spend their whole lives running and avoiding and ignoring that giant feeling that is at the core of all of life. maybe they are privileged, too, or disadvantaged, depending on how you look at it, in possessing a steel armour – a certain coldness and hardness that makes them inevitably very laissez faire in front of the circumstances of human suffering. in the face of, inside the belly of, in the very depths of, what suffering is, and how powerfully it arrests the soul. how entirely it can consume and possess and dispossess and disarm you entirely, leave you utterly and completely drunk with your own despairing, drowning in your own condition, dying in the uniqueness of your situation, and the necessary solitude it forces upon you. i can’t decide if the word i am looking for is solitude or isolation or loneliness, so i am teetering on the edge of each letter, wondering if to cross. what i am trying to say, if i stop looking for a container for it, is that sometimes the suffering is so complex and convoluted and particular and circumstantial and unique that it is almost by definition that no one can or will or can understand or describe it at all. it is so uniquely made for you, like a custom suit for your flesh to burn inside, that it is you and only you that must walk your way to some sort of salvation, or survival, or solution. there is no solution, and that is another kicker, there is just survival, and what shape that leaves you in. whether you survive your own tragedy in a manner that leaves you hard and cold and bitter and hating of all that has happened to you, all that happened around you, all that did not happen to save you – or whether you somehow, by will or happenstance, soften. there is no grand reward to either path, either. you can harden or soften and the world will not really clap for either. it will respond here and there, but the predicament, even at the conclusion or cessation of suffering, is not decided by the world at all. there is no grand prize for choosing to love inside a world that seemed to tell you you were hated by it. in fact, there may even be more immediate suffering, as the world flocks to you with open arms, sensing of all the light you have discovered, and chooses to ignore how it was all created. there is no prize for it all, and there is no justice in the earthly plane. there is vision, and there is clarity, and there is a way in which you can see through illusions, maybe. i have not reached a point where that feels quite enough.

i have not reached the part of the fable where the moral of the story is very apparent to the reader, or the characters, or the trees. if truth needs a witness, it has not found one in me. i am still at the part of the story where there is a void, and i am inside it, and i am poked, or blind, or stuck, or still, or moving, or searching. searching. in all the nonsense of the world, i am still searching. that is all that i really am these days, even as i don’t consider it real, or occurring, or enough. i am still searching, and i have always been searching, and i might always be searching. god, i hope i stop searching. i hope i arrive one day, a little less questioning of this life, a little less wading knees-deep inside the circumstances of every circumstance and trying to answer a question i’m not sure when i started asking. maybe one day i’ll live a regular-schmegular life again, possessed by the tasks of a job or the survival instincts of a society that has not survived anything at all. i mean it has, but barely. and not for the better. survival is a stupid word, a bit like resilience – it simply states a fact. it does not say anything of content or meaning or consequence. to survive something is to barely avert death, or destruction, or utter collapse, often not by choice. in a societal context, it probably does elicit some death and destruction – we just don’t see the bodies. the machinery must inevitably be a murderous one – the victims just cannot tell the tale. there must be a parallel in the self too, then – parts of us dying quietly through the fire of suffering and pain that was too large, too potent, too intense, too haunting, to ever let breathe. the two must be linked, too – the parts that died inside a body were not divorced from the people crushed by a system that was not designed to let them live. in some ways i am heartened that pain persists despite the systems that attempt to diminish it. that across societies, no matter how prude or suppressive or open or unopen, there are instances of human life more complex and honest than the lies broadcast by the world around them. you can pretend all is well, and you can create a hierarchy where all can be well-er, but you cannot suppress inside a human what it has been designed to seek. (love, and safety, and joy?) well, you can in many people, depending on the level of horror and sensitivity they are ordained, but you cannot annihilate it entirely. inside the purest of societies, maybe especially inside the purest of societies, there are stories of truth. stories of messy, dirty, awful, incredible humanity. there is addiction there is infidelity there is suicide there is sexuality there is theft there is dishonesty there is crime there is pain there is pain there is pain. it is dangerous to close the trunk on all that makes us human – it is dangerous to sweep it all under the carpet – it is dangerous to pretend anything pure is real (that anything that calls itself pure is pure; that anything pure needs a word). it is dangerous to confuse the illusion of purity for an image or a fact – anything that is built on hierarchy and attainment will inevitably collapse. the legs will not hold the weight of the lie, the structure will inevitably collapse, or buckle at the knees, or be evident in its own fallibility, in a matter of time. you cannot create an image of stability by drawing over the ink that is human blood. this society will self destruct in a matter of time, it will just not be divinely orchestrated, or immediately obvious. it will not go with a bang, it will simply tear at the seams, it will slowly disintegrate, it will slowly war with itself, it will inevitably be chased, and caught, by its own cause. the trees know the truth, and the moon is still watching, a people that are being organised by the law of hate. hate is not an organising principle at all, hate is the destroyer of all truth, and the dismantler of all attempts to wipe clean the human dirt. it is not dirt at all, of course – suffering is as banal as joy in the absence of ideology – it is soil. it is where life grows, it is where we accept and know and face what is true without judgment, it is where – as rumi says – the light enters, the plant grows. but we are sweeping dirt, and we are not stopping, and it is only multiplying in some cellar. we are labelling it Dirt and we are creating emotions from emotions that need not exist. a feeling is a feeling, it does not need shame, a feeling is a feeling, it does not need rage, a feeling is a feeling, it does not need to grow larger than it is. but it does, and it is probably some mechanical result of attempts to shrink it. such is the irony, such is the lie, such are the times. i am heartened, for now, that the pain persists. i am heartened, for now, that we are still humans, somehow. i am heartened, even though, it is still too subtle.