– Looking for the Down Slope.
I have been living under a constant belling knoll of fright for years. The clamour of accumulated strikes from life’s demands set my mind-body-soul to reverberating with the everlasting overtones of calamity and I cannot shut it off.
Disenfranchised from society – distressed by its sounds, smells, movements, requirements, questions, muffled dialogue, booming music, rapid pace – I find no sense in it. Completely disinterested in its false promises of reward for ambition, having expended all the tokens (of will and energy) I was allotted to be able to ride its sideshows of entertainment, I sit apart, yet not free of it.
I am exhausted. Except in rare fleeting instants gone like stray smoke in strong wind, I can no longer feel rest in my body or brain. So much bullshit and crazy expectation has been my fare that I just – can’t.
I can’t ‘life’.
I wonder at the point to being here when my point appears to be to wait out the time until I am not here. The propaganda of human activity, that it will give me something in return if I engage with it, stopped convincing me of its sincerity more than a decade ago.
I feel like a broken wind-up toy. Regardless of how many times I turn the key, my body automaton will take only a few tottering steps and stop. Even on a downhill slope I hardly pick up the pace. Is it because I live in Sydney, with more than 4 million people and a constant drone of everything to do with human metro and overclocking of life just to make a few dollars? Before that it was Brisbane with 2 million people. I abhor it, just to be clear, so many people packed into small areas speeding about doing things I don’t understand the purpose of or need for, just to be alive, so they can be there, doing things.
Meanwhile, here in my little space, my own piece of mind and conscious awareness, I feel like nothing much at all.
A 34 year old man with mental health problems was shot dead by police last Saturday night ( a week ago today as I write this). He ran out in the street with a knife, apparently having issues over a passing car. And he ended up dead, after a life of struggling to be humanized enough to fit in and work and carve out a safe place for himself just to exist in without feeling overwhelmed by everything.
How crazy is it to be alive in this century when the invisible machine of this civilisation is winding everyone’s springs tighter and tighter, just to squeeze a little more productivity out of everything. Our civilization is so highly productive, yet starving, homeless, malnourished, highly agitated, addicted, despairing, unable to plan for a future. Can’t you feel the tipsy slur of insanity all around you?
I live in relative security, more so than many others, yet I cannot turn off the alarms in my cells. I detest feeling broken, reading it as a kind of failure to be human. I want to enjoy the small moments that I have, but living stripped away the confidence which once enabled me to believe that it would not reach out and f*ck me up at any moment it so chose by seemingly arbitrary rules which change more frequently than a pop idol between sets.
I really do feel empty and suspect that I am hiding out so that the mechanism of this civilization I was born into can never find me again. I have enough usable coils within me to get the house work done, just, yet spent years exercising and dealing with nerve stuff so I could do that. And I just don’t get it. What is the objective of being here when here is just all about working hard to be functional enough to get your toilet cleaned and shower scrubbed whilst hiding from the grocery store and hoping to all the stars in the heavens that you never have to get behind the wheel of a car and drive again?
All of my ‘inner work’, my striving to understand the workings of reality, and my place in it, to survive interaction with the meta of physical life, has prised off my moulded shell, scraped out my gears and cogs, and made of me a hollow shape which breaks inertia only in the presence of greater gravity.
Is this it then? To make of myself so broken a toy I can no longer be played with by the toddler of the universe, be it an algorithm of mechanics or an aloof deity?
There likely is purpose – for the higher soul, the visiting consciousness from that part of myself not local and overwatching the whole tormented ordeal of human life; yet for the human me, the small, the tired, the pain-squeezed – the purpose seems irrelevant to being here, or staying sane and well for the sojourn.
I do not live in depression, but I do live in an oppressed body, seemingly allergic to civilization, a lone white blood cell in a petri dish of infection, overwhelmed by the resident information of a growth out of control which replicates for the sake of survival so it can replicate some more, whilst devouring all resources available to it.
To facilitate my nervous system’s ability to maintain functionality, I keep downsizing my expectation of self. We (my body and I) do not seem able to handle much at all since more than a decade ago. I stick to the simple – handcrafts involving yarn. Knitting speaks to me of human ingenuity and is holistically satisfying. With it I can sense centuries of human genius, feel the hum of an inherited genetic memory, touch the loom on which human fates twine the cloth of creative potential. I can smell chimney smoke and feel the bite of iced breezes over misty fields, hear laughing melodies, admire the many long hours of experiment which turned thread into lace.
Through this timeless art I can enter a type of communion with centuries of women, men and children spinning and weaving to be warm and hopefully fed through barter and sale of their wares. It reminds me that the difficulty I feel at being alive is a shared experience across millennia of human existence. Harsh sensations which rattle my body and mind are not an aberrant dysfunction, but an average response to the strange reality of being a creature persistently forced to live outside of a supporting habitat, unclothed by hair or fur, unfed except by long labour, unable to survive if left exposed to wild elements.
Entirely unsuited to a symbiotic life on Earth yet pretending to be natural to the environment – we are eternal comedians.
Previously published on Substack - Aug 04, 2024.
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