tragic clown in armor

LARS ENGLUND. "Four Trees". 1952. Pastel

There’s something strange about culture shock in your home country (haha how pretentious is that). And it’s not just the crisps/chips issue, which makes me feel a bit like a cringy Anglophile rather than whatever living in England for the last four years can be classed as. I desire no sympathy or correction for those tidbits of slang. It’s not nostalgia, or some end of my time in education and the subsequent bittersweet anxiety that tags along. I think I just never expected to come back here for more than three weeks. It makes me think about where my mind is at the moment.

My relationship with life circles back to this same feeling every now and then. Sometimes I like to do something distracting, mostly by physically leaving and traveling somewhere new. Sometimes I like to take very long, arduous walks somewhere quiet with no people, and do something meditative. Not sitting and thinking, more like dancing and screaming into holes in the dirt, carving symbols into tree trunks. If I stay there too long though, I swear I would go mad. Any respite from society requires a return, otherwise you might never want to retrace that golden thread. The issue with being a hermit and retreating from the world is that you can only teach yourself so much on your own. I love life, but like in any relationship, you can’t be 100 percent over-the-moon in love all the time. Sometimes, with routine, with expectations, I can only feel apathetic. No, not apathetic. And it’s not discouragement. The feeling is best described in the Peggy Lee song, Is that all there is? where she describes herself as not ready for that “that final disappointment,” despite feeling a bit underwhelmed up by the highs and the lows of it all. The question really is, Is that all there is?

Ok, so this is my fear then. And it is not the final disappointment. It’s the many disappointments that are set up along the way. And how I would react to those disappointments, for I can only imagine that even with great sadness or great joy I would subconsciously ruin it all by wondering, “Oh, so that’s what that experience or feeling is like.” Maybe it’s a fear of understanding life as it reaches its points and passes by. It’s like how pilgrims feel disappointed when they finally reach their destination, after having travelled long distances with high expectations for what it would be when they got there. When I was younger, I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and read “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” Since reading that I never worried about if I was feeling happy or sad, because there was nothing to compare it to. How was I supposed to know if this was the greatest happiness I would feel if I had nothing to compare it to? How would I know if this was the deepest sorrow if there could be more sorrowful days ahead of me? That was a great, yet existential, first lesson in subjectivity for me and I will never forget it. I stopped worrying about happiness and sadness back then, which works for me personally as so far i’ve never been predisposed to depression ( I wouldn’t recommend Kundera to those with depression).

When I see the hopefully vast amount of years ahead of me it scares me. I can’t plan out anything in the future, not because I couldn’t achieve it, but because I can’t imagine being so driven by the knowns of life. I can’t imagine living a life, a peaceful and full life, essentially. Chaos is a nice distraction for me. And it makes me happy. But even with my happiness, my mind tends to feel like some troubled seas, perhaps never finding any peace, but rather attempting to lead me to a myriad of locations. I can work with that though. In fact, I have made it work and to be honest I probably bring it upon myself. I don’t really want a purpose in life, or meaning, or some kind of point. I think for me that would be limiting. It’s like what the Rock Man, from the cartoon-film The Point, says to Oblio ,who asks him whether or not he’s in the pointless forest: “You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear.” I think with some sort of purpose, meaning, identity, whatnot, it makes the individual eliminate experience that can deny, refute, or change that “point”. I suppose that’s personal bias and can’t be avoided, but can you at least try?

I think a lot of young people lie to themselves and are good at it. It’s no one’s fault except that those are convincing lies of convenience to make life simpler. Recently, I’ve done a lot of lying to myself about what kinds of things I want out of life. I read in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political treatise that ”Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion go others. He who thinks himself the more blessed because he is enjoying benefits which others are not, or because he is more blessed or more fortunate than his fellows, is ignorant to true happiness and blessedness, and the joy which he feels is either childish or envious or malicious. For instance, a man’s true happiness consists only in wisdom, and the knowledge of the truth, not at all in the fact that he is wiser than others, or that others lack such knowledge: such considerations do not increase his wisdom or true happiness.” Pretty basic stuff, I suppose, getting at the basis of happiness. Ideas like, happiness is better attained through helping others rather than individualism or “self-care” and such. But I think the idea is that we can lie to ourselves about happiness, and whether it is true or not. Going back to our metaphoric relationships with life, we can lie to ourselves and to others about whether or not we are 100 percent ok about it all the time, but that’s not going to help anyone and probably would be confusing in the long run. It’s a confusion that leads to loss of true self, and the satisfaction of a true life.

I consider myself a fool, but I don’t view it as self-deprecating in any way. I view it as a universal truth. I think we are all fools by nature and shouldn’t get down about it or overwhelmed. There will always be someone who knows more than you and there will always be someone who knows less than you. Learning from these people, alive and dead, can be used as an opportunity to fill in the gaps while we’re alive. I think there are knowledgeable fools, as best described in The Beatles song, The Fool on the Hill, but for the most part we are all lacking in that expanse of knowledge that exists about our own lives, the lives of others, what is to come, what has been, and what is already happening around us. Sometimes tarot can help, for those who will it to be, but even that is something I’ve moved away from. I no longer care about what happens in the future. It’s too vast, too unknown, too untenable, too stupid, too boring, too exciting, too small, too short, too long, too sad, too loving, too accomplished, and too full of failure for me to want any of the details. A girl in middle school once gave me a handmade bookmark which said, “always read the last page of the book you are reading, in case you die before you reach the end.” I hated that bookmark.

Unknown, from the Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs, 1552

Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life, 1899

Edvard Munch, themes of isolation:

Woman on sea coast, 1888