Existentially Angsting
Jan. 25th, 2016 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraContinuing in this low-grade panic attack mode. Everything feels so ephemeral; I can’t bear it. I was looking at some photographs of Key West in the 1960s yesterday, and they had exactly the same look to me now that photographs taken during the 1920s used to have to me as a girl: old, out-moded, a foreign country whose dialect nobody speaks anymore or would go to the bother of learning.
And I thought: But I was alive then. And not just alive. Animated. Making discoveries.
There’s the recent past – I suppose the 60s qualify – which people still reference for nostalgia reasons. And then there’s the ancient past – I suppose World War II is the cutoff – that nobody is interested in whatsoever.
I mean – I’m interested in it. But I think I’m peculiar in that regard.
And the present just keeps turning into the past. Bright flare turning to ashes. It never stops. It repeats itself over and over and over.
And I think: There’s gotta be something more to it than this.
But there isn’t.
Nothing bad is happening. My life is quite pleasant; my time is pretty much my own, which is an enviable position to be in really. I’m useful. I’m creative.
But I feel exactly as though I’m on a conveyor belt. In some really strange German Expressionist factory that makes no product.
There’s nothing really one can do with feelings like this since they’re not based in circumstances. Distractions take one’s mind off it, and numerous distractions are available. Nothing one thinks is real – all thoughts, sensations, reactions are mediated by brain chemicals and imperfect sensory apparatus that restrict one to seeing in variations of three colors. I know this.
But I want to be a vessel through which some sort of cosmological wind blows.
And I’m not.
I suppose this is the point at which Prince Andre, dying on the battlefield at Austerlitz, looks up at the blue sky and realizes how immense and beautiful that sky is.
Maybe I should reread War and Peace.
And I thought: But I was alive then. And not just alive. Animated. Making discoveries.
There’s the recent past – I suppose the 60s qualify – which people still reference for nostalgia reasons. And then there’s the ancient past – I suppose World War II is the cutoff – that nobody is interested in whatsoever.
I mean – I’m interested in it. But I think I’m peculiar in that regard.
And the present just keeps turning into the past. Bright flare turning to ashes. It never stops. It repeats itself over and over and over.
And I think: There’s gotta be something more to it than this.
But there isn’t.
Nothing bad is happening. My life is quite pleasant; my time is pretty much my own, which is an enviable position to be in really. I’m useful. I’m creative.
But I feel exactly as though I’m on a conveyor belt. In some really strange German Expressionist factory that makes no product.
There’s nothing really one can do with feelings like this since they’re not based in circumstances. Distractions take one’s mind off it, and numerous distractions are available. Nothing one thinks is real – all thoughts, sensations, reactions are mediated by brain chemicals and imperfect sensory apparatus that restrict one to seeing in variations of three colors. I know this.
But I want to be a vessel through which some sort of cosmological wind blows.
And I’m not.
I suppose this is the point at which Prince Andre, dying on the battlefield at Austerlitz, looks up at the blue sky and realizes how immense and beautiful that sky is.
Maybe I should reread War and Peace.
