Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why? ~Anton Chekhov
Sorry in advance. All I’ve got in me tonight.
I’ve read a lot of what I call, “downandouters”. Truth tellers that tell things as they are and don’t butter it up. What they all have in common is an obsession with the fact that so many of us are destroyed by life, beaten down and eaten up by life … dissolved by life like a Tums© in water.
I’m speaking about writers like Saul Bellow, Kerouac, Bukowski, Dostoevsky, Hemmingway, even optimistic Camus. There are lots of more obscure names. I might even put my beloved Pane Hrabale into this bucket of despair.
I have to admit, I’m tired. I was reading about the Chinese youth phenomena of “lying flat”. Tang ping. A movement running through a generation saying, screw it. Forget the politics, a bigger air fryer, a fancier phone, a wider, clearer, bigger screen, a new color of tie. I hope some find something through it, in it, of it, because of it. But they’ll be casualties - but that’s ok. The will triumphs all.
Turn on, tune in, drop out. Didn’t Leary chant? Does history repeat itself? Or does it just rhyme?
My own crisis isn’t so much societal as it is existential. All does seem at times like a big repeating machine, spinning me, round and round. You realize, no matter what you do, accomplish, succeed in - it will be forgotten. And to top it off, community is gone, it’s flown away. When it appears, it is with broken wings, one off conversations and a catch of the eyes and then life pushes you on, away, from your fellow man.
I truly yearn for community. I truly mourn the failure of the online to produce community. There was the hope in the early days. I loved speaking, conversing with so many around the world. But that river has dried up. It is all now cat calls and brief sortes in the late hours.
The center no longer holds. My center. Maybe yours. But my center is what counts since I’m discovering ultimately, we are all alone. Fireflies do come and shine some light from time to time but rarely.
Have we killed something vital, in our rush to be alive? Like Eliot, I ponder, “Where is the life we have lost in living?”
I used to take solace in memories. But I feel like my whole house has burned down and there is nothing left but Basho’s big moon up there, that I can now see. I reach back in my mind but there is nothing there - of these memories.
Myself, I guess I’m slowly dropping out. I’m just a slow learner I guess. Or just afraid to admit it to myself. I visit coffee shops and sit for hours waiting for something to happen. Never does. I ride my bike and ponder the mysteries of the universe then return to the couch and the solace of rest and food and a mind that has stopped thinking.
I guess what I’m really saying, really writing is along the lines of Chekov. Why one falls to the side and the other one carries on? A la Hemmingway, why do some bend and others break? What’s the divine law at work like this?
I’m asking. Because I’m either gonna bend or gonna break. I’m wondering what its gonna be. Which way? And should I bend, what will that look like - since something’s got to give?
I might cycle the world. I might lie flat and join Li Po, drinking wine in the rocking boat under the bright moon. I might, I might … And that’s just it - I want to know who is holding and working my joystick. I’m told God is dead. If not him, then who?
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” ―Ernest Hemingway,A Farewell to Arms
Writing Poetry Blues
Some nights I think
“what’s the use of it”,
console myself with
the thought that somehow
all this shit
sickness, sex and song
does matter
and that I’ll have
a few words cut from
this cardboard life
to show for it.
Then the morning
and I read the newspaper
about a man killed
from debris
falling from the space,
of 10,000 Bangladeshi’s
now bloated carcasses
courtesy of a monsoon
or
of a child
tossed from an overpass
onto the freeway below.
And it is all I can do
to get
one foot to follow the other
to rub two sticks together
and hide my tears
from a god undeserving
as these silly questions
I ask myself
some nights.
I'm Lying Flat