Intro Attempt: Overture for the Doomed, by the Doomed
Actually written JULY 19, 2023 -
Next random mental spew:
When suffering, write a shitty book about the relief of suffering.
Depression has ruined my life. I make the best of it. I obsess over how suffering can be relieved. Not just mine, but everyone’s. I think about it and think and think and think. And sometimes I write what I think. But my thinking and writing is all disorganized because I’m depressed. And my thinking is probably wrong, just plain wrong, for the same reason.
Now I also panic. With my physical health deteriorating by accelerating degrees, maybe I got 2 years to live. Now I gotta produce my shitty book about relieving suffering as quickly as I can, making it even shittier for being a rush job. And I might not make it in time.
Will the ideas in the book redeem its otherwise garbage presentation? Will it be an unexpected hit? Will the sales pay for better health care? Will the sales and popularity bring me new kinds of problems I can’t foresee? Will I remain self-absorbed in my own suffering whether the book be a failure or success?
Sometimes I sit at my computer, trying to figure out how to make this book tolerable, relevant, and helpful to someone who suffers. So often I draw a blank. I just sit here, feeling like I’m about to cry. Like right now as I type these very words. It’s fucking 3:54am and I’m screwing up my sleeping schedule again just because I thought it was so fucking important to write this particular version of an introduction for the book. I’ve done this so many times. I’ve written so many introductions, trying to make sense of the book as a whole so the reader won’t get frustratingly lost. These damned introductions could comprise a special chapter within the book itself. And none of them fully bring valuable cohesion to the book. They’re all just stabs in the infinite abyss of confusion. I can’t even make coherent sense of my own damned book ‘cause it was written by some poor depressed loser overwhelmed with the … confusion of being a human who cares - or pretends to care - I don’t know ‘cause I’m deeply confused. Depression sucks.
Next random thought spew:
Are you a hope junkie like me?
People speak fondly of hope. I have my doubts. Hope is the drive to press on when all the evidence indicates one will fail. What kind of bizarre drive is that? It’s inexplicable, foolish, and romantic as fuck. And I’m addicted to it. And I have a hunch that most suffering humans are likewise addicted. Can you vouch for this?
I think you can so vouch every time you get drawn into yet another telling of the hero’s journey. It seems to me Campbell discovered the deep psychic narrative structure of hope.
I wrote this book driven by hope. All the evidence indicates the book will be a total flop. The energy for the fantasy of success comes from foolish, futile hope. Whoever you are, reading this book; you are looking at an artifact of some poor sucker’s addiction to hope. You are holding my hope in your hands. Feel its weight, the paperback or the e-reader. This creation of hope and failure has a gravity making that hope more real to the world – and to you. Plus all that romantic bullshit about making an artifact of my soul that will endure after I’m dead: that goal I did achieve.
But, don’t you sometimes feel like hope is a big swindle, or swindler? Anthropomorphize hope and it seems like a particularly cruel trickster, bating you to keep trying only so its partner, anthropomorphized reality, can sucker-punch you. Makes you feel really stupid, how you keep falling for it, even when you know better. You vow never to be fooled again. But … but …
But yr life is such shit that hope is the best option you’ve got. Without hope, the bleakness would be unbearable, maybe so unbearable it drives you to suicide. So you let hope have its way with you over and over, until that final sucker-punch is too much and reality ends your very life.
Speak fondly of hope. Then call it out for the sucker-punch trickster it is. Then reluctantly crawl back to it on your knees. And then finally, die. This is my life. Can you vouch?
To all the sufferers of the world, I have desperately hoped to say something other than: “No matter how bad it gets, there’s always hope.” I have even hoped we miserable folk might go further than mere relief – that we might reach a life of soul-quivering joy. From the shit my life really is, I look plaintifully upward, to fantasize yet again that humanity might someday achieve paradise. Everyone crying in ecstasy instead of misery. Please tell me you’ve done this too. I’m terrified of being alone in this. Can you vouch? Send me a letter.
[Cue: Martha and the Muffins - Garden in the Sky]
Sorry. Nevermind.
This is for those who know they’re doomed:
You live two lives. While awake and dealing with the world, you pretend you’re not doomed. The pretense is imperative. Expressing your doom in public will get you shunned by the very people whose help you need to survive. Your misery is the wildfire we keep contained with dismissive comments like: “Get professional help.” Good luck with that.
But in the quietude prior to somehow getting some sleep, you discard the pretense and let truth burn. You once again account the evidence, all of which affirms that you are indeed doomed. You know damned well you are doomed.
Of course, when you wake up and start your day, you immediately resume the imperative pretense that things is gonna get better. Work your job, if you have one. Otherwise, fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. [<- Allusion to Pink Floyd’s song “Time”.] If ya be lucky, you can get high, go clubbing, hit the ball courts. Shoot the shit with yr pals in some bar. If yr not so lucky, you can ring the nurse just to get help taking shit. You can dig for dumpster scraps, steal some fruit, and maybe escape the thugs (or the cops) who want to beat you up to relieve their own stress and boredom, or just for sport. While the details vary, there you are: civilized and discontent. [<- Allusion to Freud’s book Civilization and its Discontents.]
[Cue: Pink Floyd - Time]
I wish I could write in a way that made you feel like I’m present to you, there with you, showing you in person all my weirdness, my quirky speech mannerisms, my fear of scaring you away, my subtle and tiny disclosures carefully crafted to earn your trust. Hey there, my fellow doomed hope junkie. How’s things?
What flavor is your doom? Is it the crushing impossibility that someone whose affectionate touch could thrill you will ever want to touch you that way? Does that impossibility hurt you so profoundly that tears swell up whenever you recognize its reality? Is it literal hunger pangs while having no reason to believe you’ll ever eat again? Is it the pains of physical disease constantly killing you by degrees while your doctors can only offer palliative care? Is it the endless terror and loneliness of being hated and/or bullied for who you are - for as long as you’ll live? Is it the irreconcilable and permanent anguish of losing your loved ones to old age, disease, natural disaster, suicide or murder, or war? Is it the gut-wrenching terror of knowing that you yourself will most assuredly die from one of those same causes? Is it the vast, isolated, emotional echo-chamber of gloom from perpetual rejection and abandonment? Is it the vacuously infinite despair of long term incarceration that will ruin you for life?
I think of you occasionally. I wonder how you cope with suffering. I wonder if there’s a better way to cope.
Looks like sucker-punch hope is all we’ve got. That’s really shitty. That’s the horrifying torturous ebb and flow of unanswerable doom. That’s the doom that, when fully comprehended, drops your body to the floor in a cold shock of panic, where you writhe and scream and weep until exhausted.
It’s also the kind of doom that brings me to tears just realizing that other beings experience it - especially when I try to empathize with some fellow doomed person through imagining the narrative of their life.
To you, the doomed, I wish I had something helpful to say. I don’t. I’ll tell you that I too am doomed. Does that help? Would it help you in those calm times before sleep just to think of this writing, to think of me, writing it while knowing I’m doomed like you are?
But … I hesitate to ask. Do you want to think and talk honestly with me about relieving everyone’s suffering – as if that would really help – as if two people talking about relief could actually reduce the amount of hurt in the world? We could be martyrs, two sufferers who know they’re doomed to suffer, but who at least do what they can to relieve everyone else’s suffering.
Would it help to join a special club for the noble doomed martyrs of the world?
The oath to join might be fun to compose, so I’ll do it now:
I, being doomed to misery for the rest of my days, seek to avoid a life of total futility by directing my best objectivity toward investigating how widespread sustained suffering can be relieved most efficiently. I vow to try, even as my own suffering will continue eroding my objectivity and destroying my attention span, even as my best efforts will be meager, inadequate and ridiculed by others. I refuse to give up and be futile.
Shit. All I’ve done is write an oath that glorifies my own life. Hey, want to join a club of people just like me?
Ya. To my fellow doomed folk, all I can offer is the fantasy of joining a non-existent club of well meaning, yet useless martyrs.
No such club exists. I don’t have you to talk to. I have a computer on my desk in my bedroom where I write to myself about relieving everyone’s suffering.
I’ve come up with some odd ideas about it. Some of them make me cringe at the prospect of showing them to anyone else. Some of these ideas make me worry that I’m insane. This book is a sampling of my writings expressing these ideas.
Between you and me, I ask whether you want to … to read these ideas, the best spurts of analysis I could muster for the project of relieving widespread sustained suffering, pathetic though they may be.
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