18/11/12
The other day I almost burst into tears on the sidewalk, just lamenting in my head the state of humankind. I walked a block and a half past where I was going, just trying to keep the sorrow internalized, before I even noticed where I was and what I was robotically doing. There seems to be a lot of this going around within my peer group. Maybe the world. I can't profess to know. Why do we keep this shitshow going? These continual cycles of horrid violence, of moral decrepitude, of malignant, poorly-judgmental iniquity; and consensus reality defines them as necessary, or even inherent to existence. Fuck that bullshit noise. Never let anyone tell you it had to be this way. We, as humans, have superseded nature. Point blank, case closed, and if you want to quibble about the semantics of that (because I'm aware they exist) you can either kiss my fucking ass or bomb it into oblivion with an artillery shell. Our unique, evolutionarily adaptive trait, as a species, is technology, and we have the technology to fix every single fucking problem on the planet, though the clock is ticking. Bomb another inch of Palestine, while polar bears scramble to find a surface upon which to even exist.
I was thinking about cruelty and kindness. I once told myself that the day I stopped walking up escalators would be the day I moved out of the city. But now I think up escalators, and it's not the time to move yet. When that time comes, I might have to find a horse. Both kindness and cruelty are so easy, so requisite of no effort, it just seems baffling, unreal, abhorrent to me that we systemically choose to be cruel. I mean, I'm far below the "poverty line" in terms of taxable income, which is still HUGE in terms of western privilege, but it still systemically forces me to buy my underwear at some big box store. And I don't even live in a small town anymore, where, even if I had the disposable income, I wouldn't have access to some kinda artisanal birch bark/ethically-raised chicken-feather Snuggie.
So on this systemic level we are forced to be cruel. To people we'll never see or meet. It's crazy. Like, that's not anyone's definition of sanity, right?
I was walking up the steps, coming up out of Metro Acadie, where you're pretty far underground, behind a struggling elderly woman. Since my grandmother's last years, I've continually had the impulse to offer my elbow, my arm to elderly people walking up stairs. I never do. Because that's weird, right? It's some unspoken social restriction, and if I were to offer my help I might well be met with consternation. Or--and even worse--it might seem as though I am somehow emphasizing their fallibility. But we all get old, and we all eventually die. I see no reason to pretend otherwise. I likewise see no reason to embrace abject morbidity as an aesthetic choice the way so many people I consider to be friends and peers have. There are no politics here, no stance to be taken: life is life and death is death. The line cut is sharp and inextricable. So be it.
I am not a religious person, not by a long shot, though as I get older I understand more and more the value and perhaps necessity of ritual and rites. Nearing the end of my grandmother's life, I chose to begin accompanying her to church on the rare occasions I was able to visit. It all seemed like such random, pagan bullshit, except that I was there, with her. Grammy was a person of words (and the reason I know how to punctuate, for example--no thanks, school system), but never a wordy person. So it happened, in unspoken but understood terms, that I became a churchgoer with my grandmother, for a time before her death. My mom, who raised me areligiously and holds a similar Catholic-damaged agnosticism to my own--she and I would stand together during that whole part where people line up to eat the body of Christ or whatever, and save a seat for Grammy. It brought us all closer together, so church has that going for it, at least.
I know I've written about this before, but in my mind and heart it bears repeating. I wasn't there when my grandmother died, but almost exactly one year prior, her system failed, and she may as well have died then. We signed the "do not resuscitate" thing. It feels callous writing that, but I believe it to be true, and I say it with no complicated sentiment, only love. She went to that edge, and whatever effort her body overtook to survive brutalized her mind, leaving her demented for the last year of her life. I know this is better than the cards dealt to others. But on that early deathbed we had a moment alone, together, and while she held my hand I asked, childishly, "So hey, how's it going?" I kinda meant it in an "Is there anything I can get you?" way, but instead she answered, cutting through every layer of bullshit that ever existed with a voice that still quietly and with unflinching exactitude serrated the mountains: "I'm afraid."
You have to understand just how tough my grandmother was. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse when she was still in what we now think of as "teenhood". She married outside Catholicism because fuck you. To her last day she had what I would consider to be burnt toast for breakfast, and even throughout her mental degradation could impeccably recite the poems of her childhood. She was hard, but never brittle. When I, more afraid than she, asked, "Afraid of what?" she said, with a note of quiet internal revelation and a little bit of a question mark at the end, "Well, of dying, I suppose." No one else was in the room. It was a secret that I am betraying to you, and I don't exactly know why. We just kept holding hands.
|
I was thinking about cruelty and kindness. I once told myself that the day I stopped walking up escalators would be the day I moved out of the city. But now I think up escalators, and it's not the time to move yet. When that time comes, I might have to find a horse. Both kindness and cruelty are so easy, so requisite of no effort, it just seems baffling, unreal, abhorrent to me that we systemically choose to be cruel. I mean, I'm far below the "poverty line" in terms of taxable income, which is still HUGE in terms of western privilege, but it still systemically forces me to buy my underwear at some big box store. And I don't even live in a small town anymore, where, even if I had the disposable income, I wouldn't have access to some kinda artisanal birch bark/ethically-raised chicken-feather Snuggie.
So on this systemic level we are forced to be cruel. To people we'll never see or meet. It's crazy. Like, that's not anyone's definition of sanity, right?
I was walking up the steps, coming up out of Metro Acadie, where you're pretty far underground, behind a struggling elderly woman. Since my grandmother's last years, I've continually had the impulse to offer my elbow, my arm to elderly people walking up stairs. I never do. Because that's weird, right? It's some unspoken social restriction, and if I were to offer my help I might well be met with consternation. Or--and even worse--it might seem as though I am somehow emphasizing their fallibility. But we all get old, and we all eventually die. I see no reason to pretend otherwise. I likewise see no reason to embrace abject morbidity as an aesthetic choice the way so many people I consider to be friends and peers have. There are no politics here, no stance to be taken: life is life and death is death. The line cut is sharp and inextricable. So be it.
I am not a religious person, not by a long shot, though as I get older I understand more and more the value and perhaps necessity of ritual and rites. Nearing the end of my grandmother's life, I chose to begin accompanying her to church on the rare occasions I was able to visit. It all seemed like such random, pagan bullshit, except that I was there, with her. Grammy was a person of words (and the reason I know how to punctuate, for example--no thanks, school system), but never a wordy person. So it happened, in unspoken but understood terms, that I became a churchgoer with my grandmother, for a time before her death. My mom, who raised me areligiously and holds a similar Catholic-damaged agnosticism to my own--she and I would stand together during that whole part where people line up to eat the body of Christ or whatever, and save a seat for Grammy. It brought us all closer together, so church has that going for it, at least.
I know I've written about this before, but in my mind and heart it bears repeating. I wasn't there when my grandmother died, but almost exactly one year prior, her system failed, and she may as well have died then. We signed the "do not resuscitate" thing. It feels callous writing that, but I believe it to be true, and I say it with no complicated sentiment, only love. She went to that edge, and whatever effort her body overtook to survive brutalized her mind, leaving her demented for the last year of her life. I know this is better than the cards dealt to others. But on that early deathbed we had a moment alone, together, and while she held my hand I asked, childishly, "So hey, how's it going?" I kinda meant it in an "Is there anything I can get you?" way, but instead she answered, cutting through every layer of bullshit that ever existed with a voice that still quietly and with unflinching exactitude serrated the mountains: "I'm afraid."
You have to understand just how tough my grandmother was. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse when she was still in what we now think of as "teenhood". She married outside Catholicism because fuck you. To her last day she had what I would consider to be burnt toast for breakfast, and even throughout her mental degradation could impeccably recite the poems of her childhood. She was hard, but never brittle. When I, more afraid than she, asked, "Afraid of what?" she said, with a note of quiet internal revelation and a little bit of a question mark at the end, "Well, of dying, I suppose." No one else was in the room. It was a secret that I am betraying to you, and I don't exactly know why. We just kept holding hands.
|
09/11/12
I once saw a place so filled with abject, irrational beauty, that its inhabitants had scooped out their eyeballs to facilitate the bald blindness of their tears, in a ritual expression of the incompatibility of love with reason, of the paucity of plurality, and the wisdom of one thousand generations of systemic illusion with the chaotic, heterogeneous unity of the locust swarm.
In it walked a man so overburdened with sentimentality that his shoes rebelled against the loving abuse of his constant heavy plodding in cyclic, irregular systems of emotion, and eroded willfully until his gnarled feet were bare, and his clothes, whipped by the gale force of the lunatic storm erupted by the meeting of all feelings felt at once, fell away in tatters, until one day the man, naked to the bone, wept in a market square before a crowd of one thousand, not out of mere sorrow, but as an expression of the caterwauling simplicity and infinite simultaneity of the entire spectrum of feelings, like the waveforms of an oscilloscope expressing the madness and acute measurements of a broken, spasmodic God.
|
In it walked a man so overburdened with sentimentality that his shoes rebelled against the loving abuse of his constant heavy plodding in cyclic, irregular systems of emotion, and eroded willfully until his gnarled feet were bare, and his clothes, whipped by the gale force of the lunatic storm erupted by the meeting of all feelings felt at once, fell away in tatters, until one day the man, naked to the bone, wept in a market square before a crowd of one thousand, not out of mere sorrow, but as an expression of the caterwauling simplicity and infinite simultaneity of the entire spectrum of feelings, like the waveforms of an oscilloscope expressing the madness and acute measurements of a broken, spasmodic God.
|
