“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
-Walt Whitman
The winter’s first snow has come down on my city this morning while everyone was sleeping. Well, almost everyone was sleeping. I on the other hand was awake because sometime around four in the morning my friend in Podunk, Arkansas called me on the phone, “totally hammered.” Ordinarily I’m the one making these ridiculous phone calls in the middle of the night, so the fact that I was merely the recipient this time is a good sign I suppose. He said, “Joseph, you are a brilliant writer… But the things you say are just total bullshit!” Fair enough. I got off the phone and walked into the living room and looked out the front window. It was snowing in the courtyard. It was a nice sight, but I was more impressed by the fact that the radiator had come on and the whole apartment was toasty warm. When I went to sleep it was freezing and in spite of my best efforts at turning the knob/valve thing randomly, it just stayed cold and inert. So when it did come on I wondered if this were a coincidence or if I had somehow been successful. Regardless, I went back to sleep.
Now it’s morning and a layer of white snow has transformed the whole city. Even the light streaming through my windows looks different, friendlier to my mind. In winter I really do become brilliant. The snow makes me sentimental about something I can never quite put my finger on, as though something once in a lifetime is about to happen. Inspiration. True love could strike to today. Life becomes ripe with possibilities. It seems like it would require an effort to prevent something amazing from happening.
I bundle up and go out for an espresso. Feeling romantic, I consider all the pretty women in my part of the city who want nothing to do with me. Ah, but there is one I really do like, and my thoughts return to her. Walking down Grant Street I pull my collar up and light a cigarette. I can always think well when I’m smoking. The notion of making this one woman mine gets me high and inspired. I think to myself that if she loved me, life would be complete in spite of everything. I imagine a perfect love that settles all the existential questions once and for all. But that, my friends, is where the “bullshit” is. When I don’t know someone it’s easy to imagine something nice behind their eyes, especially if they happen to be pretty eyes. But the reality of it is just this: No matter how astonishing the romance, after a time, the visionary aspect of it burns away leaving the sober realization that the woman I’m looking at across the table is merely another deceitful unenlightened fool –just like myself. What then? The rapture of perfect love was just a weird trip and now you’re stuck with this uninspiring lover who you wish you could get rid of long enough to stare at the breasts of some other woman across the room. Now that other woman looks like the road to heaven. Guess what though: she’s no better than the one you’ve already got. It just seems that way. It’s a nasty trick the mind plays on a man, eh? A real mean fuckaround.
Love affairs always come and go under the auspices of the perfect love I imagine to be possible, but really isn’t. In the end I’m always disappointed and alone and I keep on moving right into the next intrigue. I go through women like toilet paper. As time passes I become less optimistic, but never really learn my lesson from it. And maybe that is for the best. As soon as one lover is out the door, emotionally speaking, I’m already looking for the next fix. I get high on the fiction that if I just keep on trying, I’ll eventually meet someone worth devoting my life to. This perfect love affair always takes place in that magical undiscovered country called “someday.” I think everyone has a “someday” when things will be different or ideal or whatever. That’s when all this horseshit is supposed to be resolved. It’s the excuse for the fact that the real life here and now is a fucking disaster.
Let me share a crazy theory with you: I’ve come to believe that “someday” does not actually exist. There’s only now and the way things are now. Things have always been the way they are now, and they probably always will be. Nothing will ever improve. This theory has impressive existential implications. If someday-ness is a mirage, then that completely changes the meaning of now. We defer everything until “someday” so that today is at least tolerable. If we cease to defer it, then reality crashes down upon us right this minute. Just imagine that this is all there is: you, right here and now, reading this essay with all your imperfections and dissatisfaction and desire in the room with you. It’s heavy, I know.
There was a time not very long ago when I loved a woman. When I met her I was so amazed by what happened between us that I thought someday-ness had finally dawned on me. I wrote apocalyptic love letters and swore I’d found the happiness that would justify my otherwise pathetic and failed life. I thought all my overblown idealism had finally been vindicated in real life. Now she’s gone (of course) and I realize the whole thing was a fantasy, an especially dangerous kind of fantasy because it gives one the impression that perfection is actually possible “someday.” These types of experiences are proof that someday-ness is not real, but just getting close to the mirage sometimes reinforces that mirage. You could take your interpretation of the facts in one of two directions: optimist or realist. Optimist says, “yes, this love affair was a disaster, but it was at least close, so someday I’ll find the right one. Realist says, “I came this close and true love was still ultimately elusive. The only reasonable conclusion is that it will always be this way.” And in deed, I have been dating for about ten years. It’s always the same god damned thing, a cycle of obsession that leads to nothing. Even in the rare case that I did get the lover I desired, she turned out to be a liar or a freak or a secret bitch or whatever.
The woman I loved is gone for sure. Now I’m back in the same old miserable now-ness that’s always been there, rule rather than exception, like a static background of shit behind the occasional adventure of romantic optimism. But at least the now-ness is real. This is what we’ve got to learn to accept.
So what I have established in this twenty-ninth year of my life is that there is probably no ultimate love that’s going to solve everything “someday.” Perfection simply isn’t coming. Now this is a major revelation. It alters the foundations of my thought process on the most basic possible level. One could think of it as a sort of liberation from illusions, from the painful cycle of trying and failing in search of real love. I’ve seen behind the curtain and now I know the game I have been desperately striving to win was un-winnable. In light of this realization, the only self-respecting thing to do is to stand up and say, “fuck this” and leave the table. And what then? The motive force of daily life has been destroyed. I flashed on the lights and killed the illusion of someday-ness. Illusions can only live in the murky gloom of dim twilights. When knowledge comes they wither. Can a man survive psychologically without his sense of someday-ness? It is possible that illusions are an organic necessity for life. The mind’s ability to undermine illusions with cold rationality is still a rather recent development in our evolutionary history, and might very well be a fluke, an interesting yet lethal mutation. One could very well argue that the hopeful illusion of someday-ness is the only thing that makes it possible to get out of bed in the morning, bathe, eat, work, and talk to people. Without it a person will rot. It would be effectively the same thing as depression. If one were to take this conceptual leap of faith out of someday-ness, then they would have to have a place to land, and the only option is to land in now-ness. So we’ve got to find out if now-ness can ever compete with someday-ness. The tragic flaw here is that now is inherently unsatisfying. We don’t have what we most desire. Our dreams are out of reach. Life feels painfully incomplete. But maybe that is just a mere side effect of our deep-rooted psychological dependence on someday-ness. It is at least possible that if we could give up on someday-ness whole heartedly, now-ness would immediately seem holy, just like the Zen people say it is, just like Walt Whitman says it is.
Of course this is a risky operation. Rewiring our basic consciousness of reality this way is nothing to take lightly. It could lead either to enlightenment or insanity and death. No one really knows because it’s an adventure in completely uncharted territory.
One of the basic premises of Zen is that we can escape the illusions, not in theory, as I just have, but in direct existential experience. That would mean a totally different state of consciousness. Now this seems so daring and dangerous to me that I’m sure I feel about Zen something similar to what my Southern Baptist mom feels about Satan worship. It’s a scary thing to plunge into, like an acid trip you can never expect to come down from. One thing that’s true of mystical insights is that for the most part the dye is cast and there’s no going back once you have stepped through that door. It’s a permanent transgression, a stepping over of some line drawn in the sand of the soul. Who’s to say a man can even survive without the illusions of time and the ego and that someday-ness that haunts life in the now? Who’s to say we want to see reality for what it is? Those who’ve seen it tell us it’s pleasant though, and there’s no reason to doubt it. Of course we don’t have much information on the topic from those who went insane from too much of god’s white light. One ought to step slowly and carefully when dismantling psychic functions that have been in place for eons.
Heading home now I walk down a street where all the trees have just shed their leaves and you can still see them under the snow. I think to myself, now-ness. Suddenly, as though a switch has been flipped, I am alone in the now. And interestingly enough, it really is beautiful.
10/10/09
