(3)

Spring where I live is a cold and wet affair, but the plants seem to love it:  they're thriving.  The branches of saplings, plumed now with masses of bright, green leaves, crowd against my arms and legs as I walk through the woods over by the cemetery.  The sloping sides of the gully are lush with myrtle; moss spreads thick and spongy over the water-logged trunks of fallen trees.  I'm enchanted by the sight of all this burgeoning life; refreshed, invigorated, empowered.  Then, one day, when I reach the creek at the gully's bottom, I notice that somebody's painted graffiti on several of the boulders lying there.  Nature of course doesn't care, is not even aware of the small act of transgression that's been committed – but it angers me.  It disrupts my aesthetic appreciation of the woods, the only place I have left within walking distance that remains untouched by human hands, that is still "wild" to any degree.  Another day I'm walking there and I hear a group of teenagers nearby – whether the same ones who sprayed the graffiti or not I don't know.  "Hey!" one of them shouts to another.  "Your hand just touched my ass!  What are ya, a fuckin' faggot? . . .  Well, whad'ya touch my ass for then?  Ya fuckin' faggot!"  These words spit out with just a little too much venom to be dismissed as mere play.  I spend a whole hour that day trying to find one spot in the woods out of earshot so that I can sit and rest a little – without success.  Wherever I go, it seems that the gang of kids is always nearby.  The time I spend alone in the woods is the only time I have when I feel genuinely at peace.  But such moments will, I know, be denied to me more and more often as the season progresses and the number of people to be found in the woods grows.

Leaving the cemetery one day I see a woman slowly driving her car along one of the narrow winding roads.  As I approach her she peers out at me from behind a window rolled partway down.  "What are you trying to do?" she asks, looking straight at me.  I stare back at her, bewildered.  "Huh?" is all I can think of to say.  She eyes me steadily, suspiciously, for several long seconds, then turns away and starts talking to someone else, a passenger sitting beside her in her car.  "What am I trying to do?" I repeat confusedly as she drives away, and though I realize by now that she must have been speaking to her friend, not me, I feel rather shaken by her words all the same.  Once again dream and reality have overlapped.  The woman's appearance before me at this point in time has been something more than merely coincidental, of that I feel certain:  she was speaking to me.  I turn the woman's question over and over in my mind as I make my way home.  "What am I trying to do?" I ask myself.  "What am I trying to do?"  I have no answer.  I realize that I no longer really know.

One night, lying awake in bed far into the wee hours, I snap.  I need to sleep, and cannot; and I'm feeling panicky about it because I know that, without sleep, I'll be tired and morose all the next day at work.  It's raining outside and so both my cats are in, but they're restless; they wander my tiny apartment, caterwauling and scrapping.  I cannot think straight, and yet I can't stop myself from thinking; I'm desperate for sleep, but cannot find the necessary lull in my own self-induced tempest to sink down into it.  Suddenly, I bury my face into my pillow and begin to scream.  I scream – and then find, to my horror, that I'm unable to stop.  My hands turn into pummeling fists; my feet beat against the mattress:  I throw a regular temper tantrum of frustration!  When I do manage to stop, finally, and lift up my face again, I am amazed.  I cannot pretend, even to myself, that that tantrum had been a willful act.  I'd simply lost control:  for the space of a few seconds, I had been, quite literally, mad, bonkers, my mind unreigned and galloping, a shriek in the dark.  Snap.

There is no one to pity me.  If there is no one to pity me, perhaps it is because I do not deserve pity.  There is no one to comfort me.  If there is no one to comfort me, perhaps it's because comforting is not what I need.  Frustration and despondency are emotions I decide to regard as no more than a self-indulgence, a sign of laziness as opposed to distress.  This they must be, or else I lose all hope.  If my psychological disarray serves any useful purpose, I think it is only this:  to demonstrate just how valueless the process of self-analysis really is.  Sometimes, crawling into bed at night, I feel a sense of depression so crushing that there is no other recourse than to wad myself up and throw me away, like a scrap of old paper.  I close everything down:  my mind – my emotions – everything.

The cause of my depression lies partly in ignoring my own experiential existence in favor of an analysis of that existence; partly too it lies in the anger I feel towards humans in general:  their incompetence; their ignorance and their arrogance, particularly as it manifests in their abusive, exploitative treatment of nature and of nonhuman animals.  Yet I too am complicit in that exploitation, however unwillingly:  I have long been aware that suffering exists all around me, though never realizing the enormity of that suffering, nor fully comprehending just how thoroughly it was disregarded; neither had I foreseen just how profound would be my guilt once I came to fully understand the implications of its continuance, and of my involvement in it.  I cannot help but be part of this world, and so cannot help but take part in the transgressions committed in it . . .

DEATH CHANT