Time is running out, and I am regressing in order to maintain the thread of ago.
I have this, like, illness. It’s seriously an illness: my desire always to be in the past. An addiction to nostalgia. And I call it an illness in spite of knowing that the only way to be cured of anything is to cease to regard it as an illness. I learned that recently: the only way to be happy is to accept everything about yourself and your life, all of the quirks and unfortunations and weirdnesses and weaknesses, embrace them and love them and once you stop wanting them to go away, they will leave. Illnesses remain only as long as you wish to be rid of them.
Back to the illness. It is a tautology: I love the illness so much, so narcissistically, so egotistically, that I continue to call it an illness, I continue to despise it, because I love it.
I learned that recently too. Love, real love, is violent, aggressive, and by nature exchangeable with hatred. At least it is for the Russians, and for people who have been brought up by mothers whose sounds of sexual ecstasy resemble the sounds of their insults. By fathers who left, and loved only after 21 years. By parents who loved each other so much they wanted to kill each other. By a mother who probably wanted to suffocate her selfish, wailing infants with a pillow.
Love, real love, is violent as hell in the families who have suffered. I think this can be explained logically. The root of it can be gotten at. Families who suffer cannot afford to love gently. Something about money, and death, and birth, and everything being at stake.
But who wants to live a life, or love a love, without everything on the line?
Ecstatic horror. I have been turning that concept around in my head lately. Trying to imagine, trying to see if I can imagine, an ecstasy so great, so unbearable, that it is frightening, horrifying, painful.
That is God, I think. That is the feeling in the head when one meditates thoroughly, and every cell begins to explode throughout the canvas of the skin, and the energy of the infinite seeps through the pores, rushing into the head, and just before you let yourself become it, you stop. Ecstatic horror is a very difficult thing to confront, and only the bravest of souls attempt it. Only the most generous, the most sincere, succeed.
Why is there something instead of nothing? This is a question that I have asked myself since I was like seven years old. I perceived it, once: nothingness. I used to be able to perceive it when I was little and it was like a high. I would concentrate, asking myself the question over and over and over again, and suddenly I would see the universe splitting in my head, and I would feel the ecstatic horror and I knew.
It’s got something to do with that: and if I try to explain it logically I will lose the thread, the feeling, because logic the eye of the thing, and you cannot see the thing when the eye is in the thing, it is like trying to see the eye with the eye, and this is making little sense but this is how things go in the afternoons with coffee and a hangover and having stayed up until 4 a.m. doing who knows what and waking up in bed wearing only a t-shirt, and finding my pajama pants on the floor, soaked through, dripping, the floor wet. As if it had rained into my room throughout the night.
But it has something to do with that: the ecstatic horror, splitting, or the splitting that led to the ecstatic horror, or their mating, the splitting with the EH and then the Big Bang and everything that ensued so as to quell.
I seriously go through my Facebook messages and my old emails and torture myself, reading old love letters and old hate messages and seeing that they are all the same, and remembering,
I am trying to fold myself back into myself. I am resisting the passage of time by reaching as far backward as I can.
Everybody is getting rejected from graduate school, from newspapers, etc. Everybody is having their dreams shoved up their asses. And it’s funny because in a recent fit of nostalgia bingeing I came upon this quote in my senior yearbook for high school, from Amores Perros: “My grandmother always said if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Well, he can laugh all he wants. I’ll still have my plans.”
And you know what? It’s kind of exciting, to get so fucked by an entity that you know loves as much as it hates you, and to be able to say: fuck you. I am going to love you and love you and love you, and that is it, I am not going to hate you, only love you, and you can go on hating and loving me, I will be better than you, and once everybody learns to do this, once everybody learns to love unconditionally, that is when God will realize that he is being an immature selfish crazy motherfucker and he will repent.
That is what the religions have wrong: they say God is good, God is noble, and humans are imperfect, he is great because he loves us in spite of all our imperfections, we must strive to be like God. But that is a dream.
The only way we are ever going to transcend ourselves is by setting an example for God.
Oh yeah and about the illness. Romanticism, I guess you can call it. Is it noble? Is it beautiful, to respect your past self better than your present self? To never ever be capable of self-assurance, or emotional self-sufficiency, because you are so caught up looking backward, backward…..
The universe is expanding, expanding, and expanding – what a futile and pathetic thing it is, to resist the universe. To say, do not go FORWARD, go BACKWARD. Do not EXPAND. Contract.
But maybe it is the only reaction that some of us can have. Opposites must always exist. There is simply being, and then on one side of it there is romanticism, and on the other side is the perpetual rushing forward. Maybe ecstatic horror is the relaxing of the self, until it is torn apart to go all ways, in all directions.
And perhaps none of what I have just written, or to be more fair, a lot of it, is bull shit and has no basis in reality. That is fine. Fine with me. As Dostoevsky writes in “Crime and Punishment,” talking nonsense is good. “You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me, and if it is your own, I will embrace you! It is almost better to tell your own lies than somebody else’s truth; in the first case you are a man, in the second you are no better than a parrot!” (Page 171).
That is why Dean in Kerouac’s “On the Road” is so likeable, or so annoying, depending no how you look at it. His unintelligible pseudo-intellectual babble is either a really courageous, sincere effort to say something original (Dean = so likeable) or a really pathetic, inaccurate, butchered parroting of what he has heard previously (Dean = so annoying).
You will not attain to one single truth until you have produced at least fourteen false theories.
