existential amnesia

“All gone is as good as never was” –Goethe

“Existence has no memory” –Sartre

“If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest.” -Cioran

I got out of bed today around noon and ambled down here to the café. I’m sitting outside on a crowded patio in the warm sunlight of an unseasonably pleasant January afternoon, feeling well rested and happy in spite of last night’s drunken madness and it’s weird fallout. But what I really want right now is to somehow get behind the wheel of a car and drive it west at a maximum rate of speed until I run out of highway and glimpse the misty distance of infinity looming up over the sand and black cliffs of the west coast.
I just want to go, and that’s the truest expression of my spirit. Hit the road and never slow down. My song is the sound of an engine and wheels on the blacktop, the wind whipping through an open window, the loud soaring music of a life in motion and a road that never ends.
But the road does end, and there’s no way around this fact. Life is finite and in spite of the desire to go forever, I know I can’t. The end comes too soon, and I know I’ll never want to let go. I have a strong attachment to my life and it’s beautiful phantasmagoria of brilliance and love. I am terrified and depressed by aging and death in spite of my best efforts to come to terms with the idea.
Death is the ultimate reality, the final word. Man, unlike any other animal, has the blessing and curse of being aware of his fate in the grave. This is what gives us our most unique quality as a species. Man is complicated by his knowledge of death’s imminence, that inescapable end that is impossible to cope with or accept.
There is no solution, although people deceive themselves in many ways to escape the fact. A considerable amount of human activity boils down to just this. The illusive sense of immortality may come from one’s offspring, an important legacy, prolific creativity, worldly accomplishment, or even the wildest religious delusions involving promises of eternal life. I on the other hand feel a strong instinct to confront the terrible fact without deluding myself this way. I’ve got an obsessive curiosity about what’s really happening. It’s a mystery I want to peer into regardless of the emotional cost. I maintain an ideal of bravery and honesty with myself, and I want the truth even if it should prove to be intolerable. It’s a strange and interesting obsession that no one can really explain.
Death’s certainty is the one thing the mind knows, but can never hope to digest. I certainly cannot come to terms with it, nor can I ever hope to accept it. My own personal reaction to this impossible problem is to try and grab the thing by the horns, to barge out of existence in the most confrontational way possible. At this time in my life, that seems to mean suicide. Maybe I will feel differently when I’m older and wiser, but for the time being it appears that this is the best way to approach it. Rather than flee until I can no longer evade the inevitable, I choose the way of Hitler in his bunker. I will not be taken alive by old age, senility, incontinence and physical decay. Mine is not an answer of any sort, but it’s one of many ways of dealing with the total impossibility of an answer. Really, it’s frightening and sad because I don’t want to die.
I guess I can’t know anything certain about it until the time comes to raise a pistol to my own temple and truly confront the strange and inconceivable concept that this thought is to be my last thought. When I pull the trigger the curtain will come down in the form of a paradox of being and non-being. I’ll cease to exist, and with me the whole world will vanish. When it’s gone, there will be no trace that it ever did exist. The zero-glyph circle of nothingness will close over my past in a way that causes it to have never existed. And if this sort of retroactive annihilation erases my existence, what is today? As I sit writing this, my world and I are both positively real. But when I die there will be a backwards-in-time motion sweeping everything that ever was into oblivion. The future will erase the past, with the falling of the hammer on a Smith and Wesson revolver.
In light of all this, I can only assume that here/now is not real and I do not exist. In my perception, reality takes on the suspicious qualities of a phantom. But we are here and this is clearly real, even if only through these human perceptions. That’s the mysterious aspect of it. It baffles the mind that something can emerge from the all-encompassing brackets of nothing. But reality is not carved in stone and nothing has permanence. The idea of permanence is just an unreal characteristic of the mind. Everything is ethereal, just so much vapor dispersing in the empty air. No permanence. No memory.
In the end my conclusion on this musing is that since there’s no real solution, then there’s nothing to worry about. The rest is entirely out of our hands. The impossibility of an answer removes the burden of trying to find one. So we live today and whatever happens tomorrow isn’t our problem. The only thing to do is get on the road and feel the bliss of this fleeting mystery we find ourselves in the middle of. Until the road ends, there remains the speed of life.


January 18, 2009
Market Café / Denver