No poetry as of late, though, I am reading profusely, and I came upon an article I think may be of interest to those like-minded individuals stumbling (or feeling as if) through life like myself. You know, the overthinkers, those souls living on the edge of reality, the introverted inspector of what is, what was, and what is to come…
From The New York Times Opinionator
I’ve been feeling freshly conscious of an aspect of being human that’s so constant and fundamental it seems weird to me that it isn’t a subject of everyday conversation. It’s simply this: that at the background of all my activities and interactions, behind all the containers I pour myself into from moment to moment, is my awareness of the boundless ocean of awareness itself.
I feel it as an amoeba-like latency, an unruly sea of infinite possibility, lurking in the back room — exciting, ominous, darkly beckoning. It conjures up the image Jonathan Franzen uses in his novel “The Corrections” of an impending thunderstorm: “big spiders in a little jar.” Only the jar in this case is infinitely vast, the spiders correspondingly enormous. They huddle in the back room, waiting for the lid to come off. Waiting to leak or seep or sneak through some hidden cat-door and flood the room I live in.
With it is the chronic background anxiety that if I don’t pour myself into this or that (read my book, clean the house, or at the very least think a bunch of thoughts), I’ll fall into this ocean of shapelessness and lose all sense of definition. I’ll be ejected from the safe confines of my predictable foreground world, where all the familiar experiences live: the sensations and tastes and textures that confirm my sense of who I am.
I live in this foreground world. I depend on it for my orientation, my ability to navigate through a day. It supports my belief that I am a separate, cohesive individual.
But I’m haunted by the knowledge that foreground can’t exist without background, any more than weather can exist without sky. The existence of the one necessarily implies the existence of the other. Despite this, I restrict my attention to the foreground. I keep my settings on “busy.”
Still, I’m haunted by implications. Something whispers that I’m only living half a life. And the half I’m living is coming way too fast. I’m on the down escalator trying to run up, but no matter how fast I run, I stay in the same spot — always a little agitated, a little lost, a little hungry.
What to do? The logical solution would be to check out the background. Be adventurous, explore this vastness that breathes so continually down my neck.
Easily said. Unhappily, when I do stray, accidentally or intentionally, into this formless background, I recall all too quickly what the foreground commotion is doing for me.
It’s protecting me from the intolerable experience of being a personality: a rabid consumer of ego-supplies with a curiously cruel capacity for self-awareness. A capacity that leads perversely to the realization that despite my hard-won knowledge that all my yearnings are ultimately doomed, still there will never be an end to yearning.
It’s protecting me from my meanness, my ugliness, my judgments about my looks and my smarts, my uncertainty about my lovability and my capability.
It’s protecting me from tasting the certain knowledge that I’m not built to last, that no matter what intimations I may have of after-states, I still face an irrevocable loss when I die. Everything as I know it, gone.
It’s protecting me from the secrets I keep even from myself.
It’s protecting me from the unbearable taste of my separateness, my chronic disconnection from life, within and without. It’s creating the wall of white noise that distracts me from my deep sense of meaninglessness, my feeling of being locked in and locked out at the same time — trapped on the surface of my life, nose against the glass, dimly aware that somewhere a feast is going on. Somewhere I’m not.
Extreme irony, given that this foreground commotion is also the cause of my disconnection.
What could be crazier? My mind incessantly constructing a wall of white noise to distract me from the dreariness of its incessant constructions. Stale solutions continually reproducing the same stale problems, locking me in to a life in the shallows. A life that had one school of existentialists believing that suicide was the logical “cure” for the human condition.
I look in vain for a consolation prize. What do I get for taking these pains, for subjecting myself to a glimpse of the background?
Most of the time, a convincing argument for staying in the foreground. The whispered suggestion that it’s probably best to just keep up the clatter. And the implicit judgment that I’m worse than pathetic if I can’t take the heat. After all, everyone else (mostly) seems to be staying alive.
I circle my jar of spiders…
At some point it occurs to me that circling my jar is quite possibly the worst of it. It’s so neither here nor there. I give up. Out of sheer exhaustion, I take off the lid and slide in. What else is there to do? I tell them to go ahead, eat me alive.
They’re only too happy to oblige. The white noise gradually subsides and they set to work, sucking the sweet, juicy marrow of hope from the bones of all my constructions.
(Somewhere a feast is going on…)
One after another the buildings collapse, until all hope is gone and I’m alone in the rubble.
I know this place. It’s flat and empty and dead. There’s nowhere left to run and nothing left to hide. After a long while, I notice the quiet: bleak, but oddly relaxing. No straining, nothing to hold up. There seems to be something left of me as well, though I’d be hard pressed to give it a name.
It finally dawns on me that I’ve made it through the switcheroo. Background has become foreground. I’m now the thing I was running from — the formless ocean of awareness itself.
My sense of an impending thunderstorm has dissolved. It was apparently a feature of life on the run. Now the spiders are all over there, where the foreground used to be. They look small and hectic from here, more like ants. Noisily milling about.
Me, I’m the emptiness inside the jar, though the jar itself has vanished. I’m spacious and peaceful and vast.
I like this place. As always, I resolve to remember what a relief this is.
I vow to bring myself to the feast more often.
As usual, I forget and get trapped outside again. Circling the jar.
Margit Hesthammar is a writer, career advisor and teacher in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is the author of the forthcoming book, “Choosing Work (Before Work Chooses You).”
Like this:
Like Loading...
