I'm told there is a tunnel underground that leads to another part of the world. It is dark, infested, dank. There are only two points of access, egress. Enter on one side and hope to make it to the other. The journey will forever mark your future.
It touches the viscera, the deep insides, and the profound. Beyond mere tears, beyond the immediacy of crying. Beyond the worldly realm of emotion. I remember it all, as one does with the things that we never leave behind. The things that mark us deeply and beat us to an unrecognizable pulp of self. Perhaps it's simplicity, after all: that it only changes us, that it is a natural course of things, that it is a process, that it is of the metaphysical. That is makes us human.
The daylight was faded most days. Mostly artificial. The touch of a lost lover never to be felt again and the cold murky waters of the English Channel (the Sleeve) swaying back and forth almost calmingly. Mockingly.
Whispers traveled across oceans. Screams, over wires.
Darkness is a fucking cliché and so is sadness and grey-hazed vision. Clouds, muddled waters are cliché. How, then, to describe it? How, then, to employ language for something that language does not dictate? This is the great paradox and the great impossibility. Language does not reign over anxietas nor fear nor vomitus nor ...
It was perhaps Kafka that got it right. The change, the grand metamorphosis. And Glass later, in a different discipline. It was Duras that new it really well, and even Saint-Exupéry. It was the liar Houellebecq and the compulsive liar Christine Angot. It was Foucault and Kundera and Mishima and the ladies with the white painted faces. It was Ravel and Hugo. The cockroaches come out in all of these, at times more visibly than others, but believe me, they come out.
I remember that apartment. The one we lived in. The red carpeting. The view just as Monet had seen it. The cathedral, the clock and the virgin. The sounds that didn't travel and the heights. The bar on the corner that sold cigarettes on Sunday.
Silence. It is definitely marked by silence. A profound silence, an inability to speak, a non-usage of language. A taciturn existence. Waiting. It is definitely marked by waiting. Of the slow passage of time, tick-tock, tick-tock, over and over and over again. Solitude. It is definitely marked by solitude.
Solitude is an interesting case. The one that is always there but we only think about in these moments. The one that we ignore most of the time. The one that we try to deny is part of our existence. The one that we push away with promises of communities and friendships and lovers and families. Solitude. Alone. One. (Which makes it that to which we aspire, as well.)
I am forever marked by the parents I have and the influence of my childhood. I am forever marked by the lovers that I have had. I am forever marked by the journeys on which I have been. I am forever marked by ...
When Claire called, I nearly dropped the phone. The room was spinning and I began to shake. But, it wasn't until some time later that I became an insomniac. That I was afraid of dying in my sleep. That I couldn't function. That I was ...
Anger can lead to it, and so can intense sadness, but it is neither of these things. It is cathartic. The tunnel, back to the tunnel, whose length is simply too long for there to be a light at its end. Until.
1 comment:
Read this over at manteen's first. It really captures the disjointedness of remembering depression's fallout. My memories are like that: snapshots of firings, goodbyes, phone calls that never come, leaving places.
Well done.
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