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2005-05-14 - 5:36 p.m. - I've been very laid back lately on an intellectual level, and it's starting to concern me. The less I write, the less I want to and the less need I have to express myself; a short glance back at the monoliths I'm trailing in my Diaryland wake would provide some evidence of how irregular that feeling is. And so I'm thinking about contendedness. Happiness. I'm remembering intensity and passion, and I'm thinking of Marlon Brando in Don Juan de Marco insisting to his wife that no, you need that fire and you need to feel that burn inside to know you're alive. I'm remembering Aristotle, whose explanation that you couldn't really say whether someone had been happy until after they were dead and everything was finalized still strikes me as a hell of a cop-out. I guess it's entirely possible that the people of his time thought of life and the progression of their days and desires in different ways than we did. Perhaps things were simply a bit more grey for the Greek and the Roman, and perhaps like the greyscale samurai archetype, they thought only of success and happiness in terms of service and accomplishment. Perhaps their lives were spent striving to be recognized, striving to be worthy of the most elite peerage. Maybe the only way they could think of happiness *was* the breadth of their estate, the reputation of their philosophical meanderings, and the size of their household. I think it was a cop-out though. I think that he backed away from saying, "Okay, now what is fundamental to THIS happiness that I have just described?" because I think the ground felt a little shaky for him. Not quite ready to question everything, not when it means the questions never end. A healthy life may very well question everything, but it seems to me now in my slower and less critical state that perhaps it only questions everything as something of a hobby. Perhaps it's only when we're so full of life that we need to spray it violently outward or burst that we need to grasp onto every one of life's tapestries and pull them down to see what lies behind them and more carefully trace their embroidery. Hell if I know. It sounds good when you say it aloud. I used to tell myself that I would never accept anything less than I had already had. That whenever I was with someone, it would be because they *were* the most fantastic, amazing person that I had ever met and because I couldn't imagine life without them. That *amazing* would describe that part of my life, that *incredible* would be how we'd describe each other. That our days would be lived in hard-edged strobe-flashes of significance, pulsing hard enough at every new discovery to eradicate all the boredom and monotony that would -- and I was being realistic here -- surround the divine realizations for which I lived my life. Here I am, years later, and I'm reasonably certain that I'm the same person. I have a lot more experience now, and a lot less of my life is theory; theory may not always kill when it backfires, but it destroys options when you start dreaming up theories about people where the only real priority is how you can make them work in your life. Other peoples' lives, much like Life in General, are not about us in the same way that ours are not about them. A life isn't meant to be lived so small. And so I sit and wonder whether it's the fanatically intense, passionate focus that I used to dream of or the general amiability and "Well, Alright Then" that really diminishes us. Maybe it's both -- what then? In Simmons' The Rise of Endymion, the new Messiah, Aenea, is explaining that despite the fact that she didn't come into the world with any particular message, she always knew people would ask her for one, so she spent her entire life thinking of what that message ought to be. She came up with, "Choose again." I don't think it's the be-all-end-all of philosophy, but I do remember it when I've talked myself into a box and provided reasonable explanations why every single course is the worst. Lateral thinking, or something. I can't remember what it's called. Think in a new dimension, and abruptly I wonder if the diminishment is entirely a function of how we approach the situation. I still think it's entirely possible to have a *good* relationship full of passionate intensity; perhaps it's part and parcel of throwing yourself fully into a relationship because you value so little what you have outside of that relationship. Perhaps it's having something to value and carefully sharing it. I don't know. She wants this to be forever, and for the first time in my romantic life, there hasn't been a point in the relationship where I was muzzy headed enough to make promises I didn't believe after the emotional high had worn off. She wants a house and a long life together and a garden, and I wouldn't much mind the garden. What I really have to determine is exactly how much I value that intensity that I may have imagined. There's so much tied up in this. There's the martyr complex of throwing everything away and walking open-handed into the rain because I don't deserve anything this good and at the same time I hope for the impossible oh god and the back of my hand is stuck to my forehead and I only wear black because black is the color of my soul and I cut my soul with razor-blades :-((((((. There's the fear of losing something that's nice to nothing more than a vague and constant disquiet. There's the wonder, after I've finished wondering where I'll land once I've fished out every ounce of motive strangeness swimming around in my head and dissected it for self-destructive impulses -- there's the wonder, the wonder of how much of this I would bother doing without those fears to drive me. How much of our life and how many beginnings are driven by our response to our fear? While I think about this I am going to go and eat Ritz crackers and drink soda while I play video games. Because that's the baseline *nice* existence that I have, and it gives me plenty of time for luxuries like meandering around and wondering about LIFE. Makes you wonder who took care of all the ancient sages that gave us the core of our beliefs today. Perhaps someone patted them on the head when they lost their wax slate and said yes dear, I'm sure it was veeery important, now go to sleep and we'll find it in the morning. It sure would make for a funny picture.
DLand |