Things change quickly. A week ago, I felt like I was accomplishing things. Nothing of importance, really, but life felt cumulative: each book I read contributed to my total amount of knowledge; each project to my competence and resourcefulness and ability to achieve my goals; each grocery bought or towel folded or walk taken or conversation had seemed to move me along in my motions towards something. A successful life. A good day. A high score, or something. I don't really know more than that I felt like I was always knowing more.
Now, on the other hand, nothing amounts to anything. Nothing aggregates into anything bigger. Life doesn't sum. What I thought of as setbacks a week ago are now failures, inadequacies. I keep turning my failures into self-critiques.
The other night I worried that I was the kind of person who doesn't brush his teeth enough.
It's because I'm not making anything. There's no story of my life that I can tell, even to me: I've worn the narrative of Matthew-goes-to-grad-school into inarticulate hopes. I want, a little, to Peace Corps myself to Zambia or Benin or Honduras, but I want to send the resourceful intelligent me, rather than this one.
There's a Mallarmé quote that's something like "Alas, my flesh is sad and I have read all the books." Cara would know exactly what it is. But it sure feels like I have, and the grand projects of three weeks ago are preposterous.
Cindy says happiness isn't something you chase after. It's probably not, but what I had said before that was that I felt like I could see my vision of happiness receding over the horizon, and I do think like happiness is something you shouldn't lose sight of.
C.S. Lewis thinks all desires are partial, fragmentary desires for whatever is True, and that all earthly desires when satisfied turn into disappointment. This rings true with me, a little, although I don't think I buy his next step. Mag says that happiness is in itself a state of transition, before the serotonnin can be absorbed by the nerve. This rings true, too, but I can't believe that the next 40 years of my life are going to alternate between elation and this sort of minuscule despair.
Despairillo.
I don't particularly want joy. I don't need elation or ecstasy. I'd like to feel like I'm moving.
Sometimes, when I was most lonely in Memphis, after my parents moved, I would just get in a car and drive in big circles, around town or out the interstate, and listen to loud depressing music. And sometimes, I wouldn't be able to do that. It'd feel pointless, like it'd remind me that all there was for me was big empty circular motions leaving off just before they began.
I'm terrified of that kind of paralysis.
--
Hofstadter, in Godel, Escher, Bach talks about a particular sort of wasp, that will sting a cricket, to paralyze it, then drag it back to its cave, where it lays its eggs in the bug's midsection and then reseals the front of the cave with mud. The young hatch and eat the living but paralyzed cricket and then bust out of the cave.
The amazing thing about this wasp, for Hofstadter, is that before it drags the cricket into its cave, it goes into the cave and checks to make sure that there aren't any harmful critters in there. This seems, he points out, to show an astounding amount of foresight on the part of the wasp.
But, then scientists tried a simple experiment on the wasp. While it was inside they'd move the cricket about an inch. The wasp would come out, fly over to the cricket, drag it an inch back to the cave and go back inside to check for harmful critters. The scientist would drag the cricket an inch over again. The wasp would come out, drag the cricket again, and go back in to check again. No matter how many times it had checked before, it had to check again whenever it got back to its nest.
I feel worse for the wasp than I do for the cricket.
--
(a Robert Creeley poem, stolen from Mag.)
I KNOW A MAN
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
