Totally Bemused

Can this be enough for you?

I don’t want to kiss you,or hold your hand, or fuck you.

I don’t mind a hug now and then, your heart to mine.

Sometimes being held in your arms is exactly what I crave.

But my body is my body, and my life is my life.  I cleave

only unto myself.  I do love you.  I want you to know that.

I want to sit near you, not even speaking, and think my

own thoughts, and know that you are thinking yours.

I want to do hard work by your side, eat with you,

tell you about my day and life, and listen to your

dreams.  You are very important to me, and you are a

part of my happiness.  It’s just that I have already devoted

my life to me.  I am my life.  And I want you in it.

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

(via loveyourchaos)

I love the synchronicity of the internets.  I was thinking about this very thing today.  About what it means, our brief, passionate lives, our long, uneventful deaths.  Here’s my take:  We all die.  Take that into you early and often.  You will die.  Everyone you have ever or will ever love will die.  And the moment you die, you will be exactly as dead as you will be when you have been dead for millions of years.  And in 200 years, almost everything you have ever touched, created, kissed, caressed, owned or coveted will be dust.

Sure, there’s Stonehenge and the pyramids, old buildings that have seen centuries go past.  Mysterious cave paintings that may or may not prove the existence of aliens.   Things of ours will last so long.  And in some future version of Antiques Roadshow someone might make it to the front of the line clutching your beloved whatever and have it appraised.  Maybe you’ll even make something that will live on in a museum, and people will write papers and argue about what your life must have been like.  Whether you really made it or if the conspiracy theorists are right and it was really someone else.  With the possible exception of Barbie and our other non-biodegradable offal, nothing much will survive.  (On a side note, I would pay good money to travel 200-500 years into the future and watch future anthropologists try to interpret Barbie, or rollerblades, or Starbucks.)

But in 200 years, human culture, even what it means to be human, will have changed as much as it has in the last 200.  To the people of 2209, we will seem as quaint and old-fashioned as the people of 1809 do to us.  Whether technology advances or declines, they will think of the iPod the way we do steamboats.  Our medicine as primitive as leeches for a headache.  ”Can you imagine?” they will say, “They used to give poison to people with cancer!  They used to expose them to radiation!”  To them Obama will be as important as James Madison to us.  Our space exploration their Lewis and Clark.  Not that the comparisons devalue either party.  Just to place it into perspective.  Our clothes and music and art and decor and politics and ideas of gender and race and class will go through revivals and bastardizations and backlash.  And eventually fade into non-importance.  Those people will be thinking about their own lives, about what they can do to change the world. Nothing stays the same, and nothing lasts forever.  The goal, to my way of thinking, was never to either live forever or create something that will.

Even the Pyramids will someday erode to nothing, and very few of us will create anything like them, so we need to know, to understand, what we can do.  Create something that is so wonderful and important right in this moment that it doesn’t matter if it ceases to exist in the next moment.  Live a life that means so much to you that it doesn’t matter if anyone else ever knows the tiniest detail of it.  And share it, share it with the people who really matter to you.  Travel, and make art, and make friends.  Go crazy, paint your house purple, plant flowers everywhere you go.  Love somebody, reallyreallyreally love them, and do everything that scares you silly.

Do what you really want to be doing, because you’ll be dead forever, the very moment you die.  And in one or two or five hundred years, there won’t be the slightest scrap of proof that you ever lived, not one that any scholars can agree on the meaning of, and it won’t matter one bit.  Leave the place a little better than you found it, and enjoy the hell out of yourself.  Forget hate and resentment and bitterness, even if you can only do it for a minute a day.  Don’t break things, build them into new things.  Don’t throw things away, reform them, take them in like a stray pet and tame them, teach them new tricks.  Don’t care who’s looking, because it doesn’t matter.  Learn how to be happy, and do a good job of it when you can.  If you don’t, it won’t matter, either.  So why not?

On suffering and empathy

I really like a couple of books I’ve been reading and re-reading forever.  One is Nick Hornby’s About a Boy and the other is The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.  Maybe they don’t have as much in common as I think they do, but for me the Hornby is a vignette of exactly what is so excruciatingly wrong and so exhilaratingly right in our human culture.  The things we fluff and ace, trying to be with each other, trying to form groups, families, lives.  And Peck talks a lot about the same things, albeit writ much larger, explicated more broadly.  He talks about how the way we learn to handle suffering as children colors our entire adult life, and that having someone who is willing to suffer with us, to model suffering in a way that is useful to us, saves us a lot of trouble later.  How if we don’t have a role-model for suffering, we waste a lot of time trying to avoid suffering or change the way we feel about it; complaing, jumping up and down, whining or jamming a lot of substances in us to make us feel better or worse or something, nownownow.

So there’s this kind of brilliant passage in the Hornby that I love, and I think about it a lot when I’m having some legitimate suffering that (counterintuitively) doesn’t need anything done to change it.  Marcus’ mother has recently tried to kill herself while Marcus was being kept by his mother’s friend Suzie, who just happened to be on a date with Will when they find her near death (Dead Duck Day).  Marcus ends  up hanging out at Will’s house a lot, and the story is mostly about the changes they cause in each other’s world and life-view.  It’s long to quote, but bear with me:

…Will said, ‘How’s it going at home?’, for no reason at all that Marcus could see.

‘You mean my mum?’

‘I suppose.”

It was so obvious that Will would rather talk about the fat bloke on Countdown than about what had happened before that for a moment Marcus felt a little stab of temper because he didn’t have the same kind of choice.  If it was up to him he”d spend all this time thinking about the fat bloke on Countdown, but he couldn’t because there were too many other things to think about.  He wasn’t annoyed for long, though.  It wasn’t Will’s fault and at least he was trying, even though it was difficult for him.

‘She’s all right, thanks,’ Marcus said, in a way that suggested she was always all right.

‘No, you know—’

‘Yeah, I know.  No, nothing like that.’

‘Does it still bother you?’

He’d never talked about it since the night it happened, and even then he’d never said what he felt.  What he felt, all the time, every single day, was a horrible fear.  In fact, the main reason he came round to Will’s after school was that he was able to put off going back to the flat; he could no longer climb the stairs at home without looking at his feet and remembering the Dead Duck Day.  By the time he got to the bit where he had to put his key in the lock, his heart was thumping in his chest and his arms  and legs, and when she saw his mum watching the news or cooking or preparing work on the dining table, it was all he could do not to cry, or be sick, or something.

‘A bit.  When I think about it.’

‘How often do you think about it?’

‘I dunno.’  All the time, all the time, all the time.  Could he say that to Will?  He didn’t know.  He couldn’t say it to his mum, he couldn’t say it to his dad, he couldn’t say it to Suzie; they’d all make too much of a fuss.  His mum would get upset, Suzie would want to talk about it, his dad would want him to move back to Cambridge…he didn’t need that.  So why tell anyone anything?  What was the point?  All he wanted was a promise from someone, anyone, that it wouldn’t happen again, ever, and no one could do that.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Will.  ’Sorry, I shouldn’t say that in front of you, should I?”

‘It’s okay.  People say it at school all the time.’

And that was it.  That was all Will said.  ’Fucking hell.’  Marcus didn’t know why Will had sworn like that, but Marcus liked it; it made him feel better.  It was serious, it wasn’t too much and it made him see that he wasn’t being pathetic to get so scared.

I love that.  I even love that a few pages later we get Will’s POV and he sees it as a horrible exchange where he makes the kid sad and then swears at him inappropriately, but of course, it all works out in the end.  Part of the moral of the book, as I see it, is that there really isn’t any appropriate thing to say to someone you care about who is in pain, all you can do is share yourself and show your willingness to suffer alongside them for a moment.  To give what you can give, and to know that despite our best efforts we never do know the effect our words or actions will have.

I was going to save the world today, but something glittery caught my eye.

(via gatekeeper)