Since I left the USA on March 10th and came to England and Ireland, I've been asked a lot about why I'm here and when I'm returning home. The answer to both those questions, I think is the same and it goes something like this: I'm here becomes I've been deeply unsettled for a very long time, as long as I can remember actually, and I've gotten to a point where I can no longer deny it or run away from it, it hurts too much now, so I'm here to deal with it, whatever it is. When will I return home? When I've accomplished that. If I never accomplish it, then I may never return home, though that seems grandiose as well as very unlikely. Mostly, though, the problem is that I don't know what the problem is. All I know is that I'm terribly uncomfortable in myself on this earth, and I have an intense nagging sense of anxiety about the passage of Time that has nothing to do with death, but instead with life, like there's something increasingly pressing that I'm not doing, some work I have that I'm perfectly fit to be performing, but I'm yet to grab onto it and therefore, am treading water, wasting time, as I feel I have been for most of my life (even while I was studying, and especially while I was working jobs at hourly wages). The pressing weight of Time has been getting stronger and stronger as I've gotten older and now, at the age of 22, I feel like I'm practically spending 24 hours a day in a pressure cooker. So I'm here to face that, whatever it is, see if I can define it, or grasp on to it and thereby open up the possibility of actually doing something about it.
There now occur to me two distinct issues with which all of my life and pain can be reduced: an internal and an external one. The internal has, in my youth, provided the vast majority of my subject matter for writing and while the focus on it can be seen as narcissistic, navel-gazing, I believe there is no other choice. The issue is too strong, too painful to not focus on the alleviation of it and writing, it would seem, or else simply talking at anyone and everyone who I can seduce with enough semblance of wisdom, are the only options I've discovered for dealing with it, working through it. And while I've made enormous progress in describing it, expressing it, and honestly (as far as I'm aware) dealing with it, I've made no headway in actually alleviating that pain. If anything I feel more oppressed by it now for I feel my whole journey of exploration of it has given birth to a great insecurity that has suffocated and paralyzed me more than the initial trauma every did. This internal issue is the essential pain of alienation. The question that obsesses my mind within this alienation is whether or not I'm alone in feeling it. I know I am not completely alone, but I wonder if all the well socialized people of the world don't feel it like I do and it is only the outcasts and timorous broken individuals that I seem to be able to describe it to so easily that feel it.
The other issue is the essential question of injustice in the world. Of course there's pollution and other environmental issues, the thinking of which kind of devastates me on a daily basis, but I guess I'm most concerned with human rights issues, kind of Marxist views of exploitation and our entire economic system that fucks over so many people's lives before they are even born (not only that, but it disallows them to simply opt out by encroaching on their homes and environments - through pollution and property laws). The state of injustice in the world gets me down so fully that I feel my own alienation from my own people pales in any form of comparison. And furthermore, I feel impotent to approach my own alienation, confront it in the face of my peers, my people, because I feel that simply being alive in America, using American dollars, buying anything at the supermarket, is directly contributing to the external issue.
This leads to an intense spiritual crisis because I try my best to simply 'have faith in the way things are' but compared to a bunch of assholes in China around the time of Lao Tzu, a world on the brink of collapse due to very real environmental issues, and the reduction of peoples lives across the world to a kind of worker ant squalor in the name of "economic progress" and providing a bunch of unhappy, alienated citizens with products to consume (something I suspect has a direct correlation to their unhappiness and alienation) seems a little harder to swallow or, like a river encountering a rock, to just flow around.
And all for what? If all the problems were solved, everyone was returned to his or her own tribal existence, living among his or her own people, not worrying about money or pollution, watching the seasons come and go: an Arcadian or Taoist paradise, then what is it all for? So people can dance and laugh and eat and grow old with friends and family, taking it easy. Fighting the monolithic demon of the history of the world, not in order to bring about happiness for everyone, but just to allow people to live how they once did and have the option of being happy or not, with the sneaking suspicion that human pettinesses and oppressions will stand in the way anyway, in the same way that small town people can be bitter and paranoid about the eyes of their fellow countrymen. Maybe they're just that way because they have something to hide, some sort of guilt, and if they were just taking it easy, going fishing, growing crops, playing music, dancing, then none of that would be an issue.
That's my issue.
Solution, working through for now:
Technology and information are here to stay. To work with the current is to accept the realities of the world and not try to tackle them all on top of oneself. When I played football, briefly, and was a center, I had a terrible problem of tackling noseguards onto my own chest. Maybe that's where the first break came. I would sacrifice my own well being in order to gain the tackle. The absurdity of it was that I could easily have tackled in some other way and accomplished the same results without hurting myself so badly, I just didn't know how and, all things considered, never took the time to figure it out. Perhaps now that I'm older, I'll take the time to learn how to do that.
We have a system so entrenched, with so many self-supporting reinforcements, that to shift it all in any substantial way seems to be impossible. Would a new revolution, ousting the bankers and the corporate heads from control of the governments of the world make a difference? I don't know. Would systematically ousting each corrupt leader who represents a mafia-like economic backbone/watchdog of each country and replacing him or her with some Mr. Smith-like beloved local altruist make a difference? I don't know. Would educating the people, or else re-educating them away from materialism and insecurity and towards loving kindness for any and all people regardless of their looks, their talents, their money, or their power make a difference? And furthermore, would it be even possible? I have no fucking clue, but I'm skeptical.
Time and again, I've heard the solution as 'just stick to your own inner vision' don't try to take on the world's problems, just 'be the change you want to see in the world' or else simply 'just be groovy.' I've heard wise men/women say 'I don't try to convince anyone of anything, I just live the example, convince by presence…that's the most anyone can ever do.' And I agree with that, I believe that, but in the thick of the moment of being alive, being present on this earth amidst all these hardships, all this unjust suffering of so many billions at the hands of those who could very easily make things different…it's just too damn hard to stick by that gun. I don't support my American tax dollars going to fund wars, I don't support my American grocery dollars going to support a capitalistic system built entirely on the exploitation of the 'unlucky' many, so my solution? Leave America. Fuck that country, if that's how it's going to be. People then ask, well why don't you stay and fight, work for change? To that I ask, what happened to just living the example? If I'm fighting for something, there is something active, aggressive in all of that and I've already lost the image of the passive freedom fighter. And what can I do, refuse to pay any taxes and get put in jail like Thoreau? Many before me have sacrificed themselves like that for little more than the image that someone cares, someone terribly naïve actually cares.
It's a sacrifice I would otherwise be willing to make, but given historical precedent, I don't actually believe that that would be the correct, or even a particularly useful sacrifice.
It's times like these that I have to admit, I understand the Jesus complex: this view that life on Earth is so overwhelmingly fucked that it would take nothing short of sacrificing your own life at their hands in order to set them on the right track again. Not only would the sacrifice be worth it (if you believed it would work), but should you not make that sacrifice, you would be left with the unbearable weight of having to live in that world with all those misguided souls, feeling the pain of the moral decay and the sadness of oppression, not only at the hands of the powerful, but also at the hands of one's own terribly heavy/guilty conscious. A guilty conscious is hell on Earth. That said, I can understand a martyr sacrificing him or herself simply to be rid of that kind of hell.
From this vantage point, however, I see no place where a sacrifice like that would accomplish anything. Just like the imprisoned tax refuser, the contemporary man or woman willing to die on a cross in order to bring about a cleaned environment and to reverse the injustice and exploitation of just about everyone from those scraping by in third-world countries to the sad middle class of developed countries who buy products in order to alleviate their essential alienation and insecurity within themselves (anti-depressants are the fast growing item of consumption). So the easy way out, by means of two boards nailed together does not seem to be an option either. And as Beckett repeats in all of his prose, "I can't go on…I must go on…I'll go on," I return to myself, sitting amidst this world of sadness.
I have no idea if the people around me are as sad as I am about all of this, or within all of this. That's my question I guess. Are those statistics about anti-depressants and alcohol consumption and drug usage all referring to some dark and distant faction of 'Others' or are they the same smiling people who really do seem to enjoy their daily lives, convincing me I'm so alone in my feeling of alienation? I don't know. Whenever I hear stories about how much fun everyone is having, how much they've enjoyed their this or that…I ask, is this all a big fiction, or am I just far too heavy of an individual? Do I brood too much? Do I take everything too seriously?
Don't answer that. I know I take everything too seriously. But when it is the entire system of daily life on this planet that I'm focused on, hyperconscious of, then how can I not take it too seriously? It is, to put it none too mildly, the story of life.
People wonder why I'm so incredibly frugal with money. I have two answers: it's not mine, it's all either a gift or borrowed (with the exception of some small amounts I worked for in shops and restaurants). Second, I can't escape the feeling that spending money perpetuates that which disgusts and depresses me so badly. So I tried to learn how to live on the fly and spend no money…but all I learn how to do was accept free dinners when they were offered to me. That just made me reliant on people, when the whole point of learning to live this way was a kind of freedom from the heaviness of obligation.
The next solution offered was why not live on a farm, or grow your own food? I tried that briefly in Hawaii, but I realized how massive of a project it really is, how much it relies on community, how when life is reduced to growing your own food for survival in opposition to a culture that surrounds you, when you turn yourself into an island like that, you are imprisoned by the sea that surrounds you. I still have debts to pay back. I'll need to make some money to pay them. I lack food growing skills, the likes of which it would take practically a rural upbringing or an intense dedication to pick up. And the community that you must rely on must be like-minded people who take you in as family. So many of those kinds of families I met in Hawaii (those living off the land in communes) were riddled with the same petty jealousies and socio-political skirmishes of everyone else, but they also seemed so strained in their daily existences. It was as though they were each, individually holding back a dam, swiftly collapsing. Plus that kind of non-involvement in the issue at hand seemed to be even more a form of escapism that simply complaining about it from within society.
Which brought me to the place I'm at now. I know I believe in working towards getting to the core of the problem, not running away and protecting myself in isolation. From there, though…I'm mostly lost. I'm in Ireland right now, studying Proust, Joyce, and Beckett in the University College Cork library. I'm curious about why it is these authors have held such an intense fascination for me for so long, but at the same time, I feel like the goal of being here is less to learn more about them and philosophy, than it is to learn to let go. Let go of a sense that art is nobler than politics, let go of the essential elitism or false sophistication that comes with studying the humanities from within ivory towers of privilege. I can't do it anymore. I find the calls of the world outside of the library doors to be too alive, too present to kill time explaining to myself the pettiness of history in the face of philosophy, or why everything all along has simply been an allegory for the essential search for self in the face of misplaced egoism, and a terrifying void. There's no time for that now while people are suffering and the balance of the world spins more and more out of control as each second ticks by.
People wonder why, when I travel, I tend to cruise so damn fast, not even taking the time to take pictures, just to see and be and move and have been. The best answer I can give is a deeply unsettled feeling in my stomach that there is so little time remaining. So much of what we may take the time to see and experience is so fleeting that it's may not even be worth taking the time in the first place. I don't know. Then why travel at all? I don't know. Lao Tzu says we can know the whole world without leaving our homes. Maybe it's just for the sake of confirmation that the suffering is consistently spread across the world, even if it comes in many different forms. I don't know. I can feel my interest in traveling draining out of my feet more and more. It's being replaced by an intense desire to be useful, to settle down if need be in order to concentrate on what can be done with this poor, ailing world of men and women and toxic chemicals. I want to put myself on the front lines and work for what I believe in. The only problem is I really have no idea what that is anymore.
I think I believe in liberty: the freedom of any person anywhere to pursue his or her own life as he or she sees fit and to be happy and not have to put up with all the bullshit imposed from without, not have to work in sweatshops or starve to death, not have to prostitute his or herself or starve to death. I believe everyone has a right to good food and water and power owned not privately or by the state, but by the community: Power equally in the hands of everyone and existing only for everyone's benefit - take finance out of the equation, all the better to empower everyone. And finally, I don't believe in the continued decimation of the Earth in order to simply keep powering massive cities full of unsatisfied and alienated people for a few decades longer. In an unrenewable world, destroying it to maintain a mediocre existence for a little longer is nothing short of insanity.
I'm sure I have a few further beliefs, but for the most part…that's it.
So here I am in Ireland, laying to rest my 3 favorite dead guys of the 20th Century, looking for the answers to cure alienation - in society, in the countryside, in history, in faith, in politics…to somehow wake to happiness in my self and ease in my own life…but it wont last much longer. On May 5th, I'm going to volunteer with projects of sustainable development in West Africa for two months and see what kinds of solutions can be found in the work already being done, to look for hope for the world. I'm trying to come to grips with myself here and maybe the rest of the world there. I have no idea if I'll make any progress on either front, but…well…that's what I'm up to now.
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