The anxious animal seeks out a corner somewhere in space-time, to sit and be still with the hunger that is our "natural state," and to contemplate, to reflect upon this [one's own?] life in all its horrific proportions. I understand that, in a New York Minute, everything can change, and that we would be wise to be kind to those we secretly or openly are emotionally attached to.
I have deep regrets of beating a dog with a leash at about the age of 17 because he ran away from "the yard," to gulp water from the creek. He turned and growled, chomping the air with his jaws. I feel great shame for hitting my beloved animal-friend with that leash. He had been tied to a tree by my father's second wife. He was dying of thirst. I had just gotten an automobile and was neglecting the care of this animal when he really needed me, his old age. For this maybe I am heading into Hell? I'm not THAT superstitious. I just feel bad about this event. The dog would die only months later. That was his last summer: Baron von Hentrich I had named him - an Old English Sheepdog. I once killed a groundhog with a club-stick in the early morning darkness when it had attacked Baron (or just bumped into him in the dark). I remember dragging the animal corpse like a natural born cave-man … that contact with death, mammalian altercations in the dark gone wild.
If I had been the kid in the film, E.T., when that poor creature popped its fat head out' the closet, it might have had a baseball bat lodged in its soft skull. I must be some kind of primordial spaz, just a frightened, squirrely, spooked bundle of nerves. I thought the groundhog was gonna bite my poor dog's big old nut sack off!
The reason I mention the memory of this unethical behavior with my childhood "Animal Friend" is because I want to catch myself when I am behaving insensitively around "my mom." I don't want to remember myself as not being there emotionally for "Mommy / Mama" when she begins to be frightened by deep things such as her own mortality and the creeping death, how certain traumas, such as strokes, have permanent ramifications, such as nerve damage.
Well, to be honest, a great deal of crying gets under my skin. I experienced it as an early teen during my parents divorce. It was difficult to concentrate on my "school work" with all this crying and gut-wrenching hatred and pain. Well, today I do not want to care so much that I am crippled by it. I can only offer philosophical contemplation. I will not entertain notions of some kind of Family Clam Bake in the Sky where we are reunited with our ancestors. I have no idea what to expect from death.
The fact is it has been purely accidental that I have this close bond with this creature, My Mom, and I have had to exert great patience throughout my life for all the Wrong Ideas she has attempted to pass down to me. It's all rather complicated, and I'm not here to entertain any Freudian psychoanalysts.
I have many conflicting emotions, and at this time of my life, I want to be alright with the absence of any particular emotion whatsoever. I feel hungry stomach and slightly aching heart, but the heart is not too heavy, you know, like I feel I can make it … as long as I have this, that, and the other thing over and over until the end, until the creeping death comes to gather me up as well.
Does the anxious animal find a corner to hide in? On the psych ward I would rise as early as was permitted and try to make some instant coffee in the cafeteria before the residents awoke and the staff switched. I would try to gather my thoughts, to get my head together without being tormented tossing and turning waiting to be told what to do, where to sit, etc.
I hit the hay extra early last night so as to wake up in the middle of the night and not be bombarded with demands. It's as though I do not have my own life, but am an accessory of my mother's life. I know I am walking on delicate ground here. Maybe I am afraid I might secretly delight in not being hounded over and bossed around. Holy shiit, I have reached a point where I no longer have any patience for any goddamn boss, and here I am the obedient yet disgruntled slave of my mother. Often I hear the thoughts of the silent protagonist, the real self, and he seems to be longing for liberation. Presently, this anxious animal has consciously sought out this "space-in-time" to HIDE. Really, I need to think before another round. I do not like to be psychologically overtaken by another person, especially when that person is less reflective than I am. I have disdain for "parental authority." Yes, I have many dark hidden secret thoughts, many subversive and defiant thoughts!
Like Cioran, I do not wish to be tormented by this world while I am still living. When I can no longer take it, if I find myself homeless and starving and getting institutionalized for public drunkenness, I will find some way to kill myself and end it all. I understand that this woman I call "Mom" has animal love for me that few others will have for me in this world. Many landlords were actually evil, using all their authority to harass me, to haunt me, to get me thrown into the streets.
This world hates me, and I know it. My personal "diary" may unfold on scraps of paper in a psychiatric hospital or jailcell, for this world does not really have a place for the like of me.
My mom needs me. This world has no need for men such as me. We are expendable. This world has no idea what to do with someone like me. I am a useless burden, a quandary, just another nervous wreck who will not be paying any doctor bills.
An aside: I am curious as to how others might interpret the first line in Camus' The Stranger:
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be.
note about The Stranger (by Camus): I understand the "racist" background of the novel, or the "anti-Arabic" undertones … I don't know what other words to use. The point is most likely lost on modern readers (the youth) that
the likelihood of a Frenchman in colonial Algeria getting the death penalty for killing an armed Arab was slim to nonexistent. That plays a role in the novel as well. The reader is to understand that the protagonist is being executed for not crying at his mother's funeral, for smoking a cigarette during the "formal event," for his personality or lack of personality. The sun blinded him on the beach, he thought the guy had a knife. He shoots him dead, like in the Wild West, Clint Eastwood style, I suppose.
Eh, yet, in colonial Algeria, getting the death penalty for killing an armed Arab was very slim. You see? There is no way to convey that aspect of the novel to the youth of today, or to my generation even, for that matter. The arguments about the word he uses for "Mum" or "Ma-ma" are important, I agree, but I wonder how to translate the context of what he is actually being executed for: his attitude … no? He has a bad attitude. He does not cry on command, at the appropriate times. He appears disconnected from the present animal-life moment.
Anyway, my animal body is hungry, and by now the mother of this animal body - The Mother - as I coldly refer to her [here, in typing] with a sublime affection, twisted with existential resentment with deep philosophical roots - is up and about preparing her eggs. Soon it will be safe to grind the coffee beans … and reflect upon this predicament of depending upon stores for vegetables. She will also require ample space-time for meditation, reflection, reading … some kind of inner life (beyond the reach of harassing phone calls from Bank "associates/employees/soon-to-be-replaced-by-robots" wondering why payments have stopped on the credit cards). I try to be a good "cell-mate" to my mom. We get along fairly well, as long as we're both not drinking. Drinking, we're both most likely "psychiatric ward" material. I pity either of my parents or my sister in the hands of institutions (hospitals/jails). Of all 4 of us, I am the most well-adapted to such places as I tend to bond with the pitiable creatures trapped in such places with me … like the more recent Planet of the Apes flicks. I would be very kind to them (my kin) in such environments. I would look after them. Why not display some of the jailhouse hospitality with our living kin, even if it's just one or two? We break bread, we split hamburgers. We're cell mates. I want us to get along, to be part of a healing process, not part of the nightmare, like poor old Schopenhauer and his mother. They were both careless with their relationship, or their natures/personalities were such that cohabitation was impossible. We are wild phenomena, after all, and some people just can't stand to be in the same room or house together, can't stand to hear opinions from, etc. People may not be able to tolerate each other. So be it. I cast no judgements on anyone. I take it back what I wrote about them being careless. Maybe they were both insufferable - the whole tribe tainted with a peculiar intelligence which made them repulsive or just annoying to be around, to be "in their gaze."
________________________ Chapter 3 of this single post ? ________________________
The garden is done, so it is back to frozen spinach. There is none in the freezer. I have to get some. This is our existential predicament. An automobile required to do what our ape cousins in the wild do reaching for a branch to munch spinach-like leaves off of. The complexity of what it takes to get the leaves to my stomach do not seem worth all the trouble. I am going to end up nothing but a decaying corpse in the end like everyone before me.
At what point do we see too much to function?
_________________________________________________________
a clue to my distress (or, the significance of the particular texts I am working through at this time):
This would be the material I was "not getting" during my existential meltdown at age 17/18.
I almost suspect the unconscious mind, the "gods" - whatever - of forcing my mind to become intimate with the material of this text as a method for Slaying some kind of Phenomenological Dragon. I fear the mortality of my own parents, even though their union has caused me a great deal of anguish, despair, and heartache. I am just a consequence of their disharmonious attempt at cohabitation. And yet, here I am, and I suppose I may have already paid my dues here on earth, so I reckon I can pass shortly after them.
I don't "get high" anymore. Even if I toke on expensive green stuff, I merely become a tad bit more philosophical, but since I am always somewhat philosophical, there's really not much effect, and I most likely am wasting money watching it go up in smoke ---- which causes distress to the belly and the part of me that wishes to gather more empty notebooks and a fresh set of pencils. Then again, it does help me breathe easier. It's just, quite plainly unaffordable, and therefore a potential gateway to slavery (laboring for money).
Wine would be cheaper, but that method ruins the calm state required to take delight in algebraic manipulations and geometric representations.
I am not looking for advice, just arguing with myself …
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