I haven't left yet, pt. 10
I’ve mastered the art of dropping out of time and society to be able to delve more deeply into my own psyche. Thus far, nothing else has been more compelling to me, mainly because I have caused myself so much trouble in my relatively young life, that I haven’t had much of a choice. And as the years bear down on me, I’m not willing to compromise and bend to my own weaknesses. My weaknesses have to leave me, and for that, I have to search them out and spend time with them.
It’s an aristocratic mindset, of work being below my own endeavors, but without any of the indulgence. Yet, not quite monastic, either.
With every month that passes without working, and I have gone for great stretches of time without work, and then great stretches of only working, the concept of reputation loosens its grip on me, the concept of a façade, which is being replaced by an articulation of self and assertion of self-will. This is dangerous for someone like me, born into the lower-middle-class, because without work, you go under.
I have a theory about disease which says that not only are our bodies physically overwhelmed by excess, but we are emotionally overwhelmed, being in such close proximity to other people under stringent social rules. Rampant substance abuse is the replacement for wide open space, long stretches of time, and comfort with the extreme range of human feeling. When someone has spent their lifetime working and living without ever being more than 20 feet from a stranger who neither knows nor cares about them, what do they do with the need to scream? Or if the people who do know and love them do not have the capacity to accept their need to scream, to accept and wait out a period of what looks like total madness? I think that the body wails silently as it bears the weight of all this excess, of gluttony and emotion.
Yet, it is such a rare thing to be able to go mad without being taken away. The right to go mad is, ultimately, what I have devoted the last several years to. The rest of my life exists on the other side of a period of madness, and I know this, and I have built a structure for it. I don’t think that this is actually strange. What is strange to me is the idea of pursuing a life that evades madness. Madness is nothing more than the unmediated experience of one’s own depths.