I can't feel much. I think it's likely that when I was 11 or so and dedicated myself to abolishing fear I also abolished joy. There were other pairs: I tried to abolish sadness and I lost hapiness. I tried to abolish uncertainty and I lost moral strength. Maybe we don't get to choose what we feel, only how strongly we feel it. We can't choose to feel only good feelings, we can only choose between intensity and numbness, and each covers the full spectrum of feeling. So, if you force fear, for example, down into numbness, you also experience your measure of joy in numbness.
I remember when I was 11 suddenly feeling just overwhelmed by feeling. Mostly, I remember feeling anxious and alone and not having any sense of how to get out and being near panic most of the time. I didn't know anyone that I thought could help me, and I think I probably didn't even know that asking was ok. I think that much of my public persona is what I created to avoid intense feeling: competence masks insecurity, articulateness masks befuddlement, agreeableness masks contempt which masks my sense that I'm missing what most people understand about happiness, etc. I miss joy, but I'm not sure I could handle the anxiety and feeling of exposure and aloneness that would come rushing back if I opened myself to feeling intense joy again. Living with the live possibility of loss seems like too high a price for joy.
Am I totally misunderstanding this?
Yeah well that's pretty much how the math keeps coming out for me, too. One real possibility is that the real thing is that the way to some full(er, ish) version of aliveness involves years spent gacking up the hairballs of panic and hatred and vanity and so forth. I've been so so grateful to Jane Jacobs for prefacing Death and Life with that thing from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: "We are all very near despair." He was addressing a room full of young lawyers recently admitted to the bar. What must they have thought? But that's what's a stake, I think. If you live really really bravely, maybe you can stand to be on the planet. And if you don't live bravely it becomes easier but you may never see the planet in all its unimaginable but quite visible splendor and crazy variations on a theme, let alone the sad and lovely spectacle of other sentient beings.
ReplyDeleteSing it as bess as you can, brother, and I'll yowl along, all I can say.
related to this, or at least admixtured with it, is the general progressive bluntedness of sensations with age [unqualified as I am to claim such a thing]. When I extrapolate between ages 16, 21, 28 and now out to 40-whatever, I'm surprised that you can feel your toes, much less joy. Suuuucks.
ReplyDeleteI'm not totally convinced yet that feeling necessarily diminishes with age. I think it USUALLY does because most people opt for numbness at some point. Most middle-aged people i know drink for numbness at least sometimes, and many have isolated themselves, which is always my personal go-to strategy. The really truly diconcertingly-scary ones are the people who actually seem to LOVE going to work and doing the same crap every day for decades. That really makes me quail. I get the feeling that my role is pretty much over except to be a kind of bouncer charged with protecting my girls. All that education and striving and self-denial and crap was basically an elaborate mating dance.
ReplyDeleteI actually love and take heart at Kirk's formulation of bravery: it's what's required to not end up a mute doofus ensconced in anaesthetic choices.
ReplyDeleteI try to fight the numbing every day. It feels unintentional; biological.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm much too young for uncensored stuff like this:
"All that education and striving and self-denial and crap was basically an elaborate mating dance."
Yeah, I don't think numbness is obligatory. It seems more like a young person lives in plans. And plans have the effect of helping you focus your energies and identify certain kinds of opportunities and patterns in the world. But plans and narrowly cultivated expertise, especially if they more or less work out, can you to miss the actual world and see only the things that figure in your plans. The sadly diminished version of the 'real world' touted by unhappily successful businessmen seems like an example of this. Better to be disillusioned and to face a fuller version of reality for which you have few defences, few strategies for minimizing. It makes sense out of the beginning of Rilke's Duino Elegies: "For beauty is nothing/ But the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure." This is too simple if regarded as binary in any simple way: plans/reality. I don't mean that. But to get knocked around enough that you see that any handle that you afix to reality is arbitrary and temporary, even if it seems to afford you a real good grip. Or again, all the planning is a mating dance but ultimately the dance is with reality. And ends in death.
ReplyDeleteI think that hits the bull's eye. Maybe i'm fortunate, then, to have seen my best plans come to naught so many times. I spose repeated failure to get a grip does put me in the uncomfortable but HEALTHY position of having maybe the next 3 decades to really be in live experience. And if i understand the Germans, only the uninsulated anti-anaesthetic life leads to wisdom. So: hey!!!
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