Week: Starting over, maybe
July 6, 2017
Sitting with myself can be quite a challenge. Not the embracing of aloneness, but the actual quieting of the mind. I don't know exactly when it changed, but I do know that the immediacy of technology has profoundly impacted my ability to complete any mental task or even a physical one, without interrupting it to check on the virtual universe outside myself.
And I feel ambivalent. That is, however much I might like to wring my hands and lament the way things are... well, they are, and that is not likely to shift back, towards a less-urgent mode of interpersonal communication.
We grow impatient. We have the ability to monitor if and when someone has received--if not acknowledged-- our communication. And I wonder if it helps or hinders our development as ethical, loving humans or if it is simply an indifferent, morally neutral human activity. Questions with no answers that we ask just the same.
Today I walked from the apartment that I have rented in the Colonia Del Valle Norte to the Cineteca Nacional. It took about 50 minutes of steady walking, and while the technology was imperfect (or perhaps due to user error), my ability to navigate the ever-changing city as if I were a native who has constant contact with its grey, throbbing ebb and flow was aided by the self-same great leaps forward... technologically speaking, that is. I arrived, feeling slightly foggy, my own body throbbing with the pulsing of my heartbeat at elevation. I think, "I feel tired..." and I distractedly thumb through mind-numbing communiqués of nothingness and everythingness and all the shit and blood and bile between point a and point b. Perhaps it is spiritual, I surmise, and I feel the pulsing subcutaneously in my outer thighs. I am reminded of my corporality. I choose to be kind to myself and not spiral down a tunnel of self-critique, but rather, I sit with the throbbing uncertainty, the hope.
And I put my phone away. But my mind is unsettled and I am not appeased by watching the odd human interactions, rituals of mating, of group-bonding. I feel outside of it, but not lonely. Not melancholy. This feeling is perhaps unutterable, like the true name of God, but it isn't an entirely unpleasant one.
I wonder if I should eat something that my body doesn't need, but instead I choose to narrate to myself. There is a soothing in narration, it placates dis-ease.
I love this space, since the first time I set foot here two decades ago, it has a sort of magical peace about it, in the heart of an otherwise bustling zone of the city, divorced from the injured and moribund at the hospital just across the street.
And it occurs to me how luxurious it truly is to be on this side of the membrane that separates the ill from the healthy-- and also how desperately thin, how permeable that barrier truly is.
On this side, an excess of choice, filling time and space with leisure and entertainment, and on the other, pain both physical and psychic. Of course I don't mean to suggest that we don't carry pain into our leisure--undoubtedly we do--but simply that the order of magnitude is different. First world problems to be sure. And maybe there is nothing to be said or done, or maybe the act of writing precedes the impulse to do, or maybe it is its own sort of doing. I talk to myself on the page and I feel the amplified anxiety of an electronic addiction loosen its grip. This, I think, is good. Good girl, Ilana, you can self-soothe. You can let the world happen around you and not feel responsible for any outcomes but your own. Or you can ignore even those for a few moments.
When you were a child--you think--the world was still mediated by external pressures, but their immediacy was other. Better? Worse? Why, damn it, do you feel the need to evaluate an immutable fact of modern existence? "You're avoiding," your inner voice chides. "I know," she replies, "I'm not ready."
You want to write a love letter to Edie, before she dies of cancer. You want to write against the guilt of being, mostly, genuinely content while someone you love, have loved, is on her steady march toward transition from existence on this mortal plane to whatever else there is or could be. Far from you or what she meant to you. You avoid because you feel guilty that despite ample technology that facilitates instantaneous connection and despite the ease with which you move across continents by air and by highway, in the last decade, you have seen her but once, face to face, because you assumed you had more time, because your childhood laid a foundation that didn't require constant tending, because even when you knew of her diagnosis, it seemed like she would beat it, because people do... and it was just a little sarcoma--totally operable... and so when her daughter and son, your childhood playmates, called your mother to say it was now or never, you even debated whether to go or not, but when you heard her voice, you knew you needed to go to her.
But was it because, as you said, that you wanted to cradle her in love for her, or was it for you? And does it really matter in the end? And when faced with the real, concrete, monumental enormity of her mortality, which is your mortality, why can't you hold that humility in your heart when confronted with the rest of life, with your child, with your mother, with yourself?
When you saw her with the hollowed out haunting of cancer, you felt so much love you thought you would burst. But you can't hold onto that feeling, you forget, and keep living, and let your mind fixate on banal and pointless things, like which pair of shoes will cause less discomfort, or if you must shower today or just rinse off, or whether you want to eat rice or pasta and think you probably shouldn't have either because you need to lose another 50 pounds. For what? You'll still die. To be loved? You are loved. You may be. You will be. Your corporality and trauma, your absurd insecurity should mean nothing, you should let it all go.
But you can't, you don't. It isn't fucking fair that the world continues to live while you die too soon. It isn't fucking fair that even in the dying we hold on to anger and resentment and age-old dynamics. It isn't fucking fair that the pain of your death is, perhaps, less keenly felt, too, than the pain of un-love. God, I'm so selfish. We all are. It defies reason and words and makes my bones ache and my head hurt. And yet. I still want his eyes on mine. I still need to be seen. And I will still enter into the darkened room and for 100 minutes, suspend disbelief and be transported by the imagination of others. It isn't fucking fair.
But it is so God damn human.
Sitting with myself can be quite a challenge. Not the embracing of aloneness, but the actual quieting of the mind. I don't know exactly when it changed, but I do know that the immediacy of technology has profoundly impacted my ability to complete any mental task or even a physical one, without interrupting it to check on the virtual universe outside myself.
And I feel ambivalent. That is, however much I might like to wring my hands and lament the way things are... well, they are, and that is not likely to shift back, towards a less-urgent mode of interpersonal communication.
We grow impatient. We have the ability to monitor if and when someone has received--if not acknowledged-- our communication. And I wonder if it helps or hinders our development as ethical, loving humans or if it is simply an indifferent, morally neutral human activity. Questions with no answers that we ask just the same.
Today I walked from the apartment that I have rented in the Colonia Del Valle Norte to the Cineteca Nacional. It took about 50 minutes of steady walking, and while the technology was imperfect (or perhaps due to user error), my ability to navigate the ever-changing city as if I were a native who has constant contact with its grey, throbbing ebb and flow was aided by the self-same great leaps forward... technologically speaking, that is. I arrived, feeling slightly foggy, my own body throbbing with the pulsing of my heartbeat at elevation. I think, "I feel tired..." and I distractedly thumb through mind-numbing communiqués of nothingness and everythingness and all the shit and blood and bile between point a and point b. Perhaps it is spiritual, I surmise, and I feel the pulsing subcutaneously in my outer thighs. I am reminded of my corporality. I choose to be kind to myself and not spiral down a tunnel of self-critique, but rather, I sit with the throbbing uncertainty, the hope.
And I put my phone away. But my mind is unsettled and I am not appeased by watching the odd human interactions, rituals of mating, of group-bonding. I feel outside of it, but not lonely. Not melancholy. This feeling is perhaps unutterable, like the true name of God, but it isn't an entirely unpleasant one.
I wonder if I should eat something that my body doesn't need, but instead I choose to narrate to myself. There is a soothing in narration, it placates dis-ease.
I love this space, since the first time I set foot here two decades ago, it has a sort of magical peace about it, in the heart of an otherwise bustling zone of the city, divorced from the injured and moribund at the hospital just across the street.
And it occurs to me how luxurious it truly is to be on this side of the membrane that separates the ill from the healthy-- and also how desperately thin, how permeable that barrier truly is.
On this side, an excess of choice, filling time and space with leisure and entertainment, and on the other, pain both physical and psychic. Of course I don't mean to suggest that we don't carry pain into our leisure--undoubtedly we do--but simply that the order of magnitude is different. First world problems to be sure. And maybe there is nothing to be said or done, or maybe the act of writing precedes the impulse to do, or maybe it is its own sort of doing. I talk to myself on the page and I feel the amplified anxiety of an electronic addiction loosen its grip. This, I think, is good. Good girl, Ilana, you can self-soothe. You can let the world happen around you and not feel responsible for any outcomes but your own. Or you can ignore even those for a few moments.
When you were a child--you think--the world was still mediated by external pressures, but their immediacy was other. Better? Worse? Why, damn it, do you feel the need to evaluate an immutable fact of modern existence? "You're avoiding," your inner voice chides. "I know," she replies, "I'm not ready."
You want to write a love letter to Edie, before she dies of cancer. You want to write against the guilt of being, mostly, genuinely content while someone you love, have loved, is on her steady march toward transition from existence on this mortal plane to whatever else there is or could be. Far from you or what she meant to you. You avoid because you feel guilty that despite ample technology that facilitates instantaneous connection and despite the ease with which you move across continents by air and by highway, in the last decade, you have seen her but once, face to face, because you assumed you had more time, because your childhood laid a foundation that didn't require constant tending, because even when you knew of her diagnosis, it seemed like she would beat it, because people do... and it was just a little sarcoma--totally operable... and so when her daughter and son, your childhood playmates, called your mother to say it was now or never, you even debated whether to go or not, but when you heard her voice, you knew you needed to go to her.
But was it because, as you said, that you wanted to cradle her in love for her, or was it for you? And does it really matter in the end? And when faced with the real, concrete, monumental enormity of her mortality, which is your mortality, why can't you hold that humility in your heart when confronted with the rest of life, with your child, with your mother, with yourself?
When you saw her with the hollowed out haunting of cancer, you felt so much love you thought you would burst. But you can't hold onto that feeling, you forget, and keep living, and let your mind fixate on banal and pointless things, like which pair of shoes will cause less discomfort, or if you must shower today or just rinse off, or whether you want to eat rice or pasta and think you probably shouldn't have either because you need to lose another 50 pounds. For what? You'll still die. To be loved? You are loved. You may be. You will be. Your corporality and trauma, your absurd insecurity should mean nothing, you should let it all go.
But you can't, you don't. It isn't fucking fair that the world continues to live while you die too soon. It isn't fucking fair that even in the dying we hold on to anger and resentment and age-old dynamics. It isn't fucking fair that the pain of your death is, perhaps, less keenly felt, too, than the pain of un-love. God, I'm so selfish. We all are. It defies reason and words and makes my bones ache and my head hurt. And yet. I still want his eyes on mine. I still need to be seen. And I will still enter into the darkened room and for 100 minutes, suspend disbelief and be transported by the imagination of others. It isn't fucking fair.
But it is so God damn human.
posted by ilana at 6:49 a.m.
0 Comments:
Publicar un comentario
<< Home