(5)

And yet, what, in the end, is the result of all the days and nights I have spent theorizing about the inherent potentials to be found in an experientialist mode of living, and of all my attempts to bring these potentials into a state of active achievement?  Ironically enough, I come to find myself too absorbed by the processes of analysis, and feel myself too emotionally exacerbated by the narrow parameters of both my environment and my personal psychology to break free of the egoistic need to understand, and thereby control, my life.  The ability to let go of the desire to shape my consciousness so as to accord with a new, more holistic state of perception seems beyond me:  if I do not continue to make the attempt to express this perception, how can I ever hope to effect its achievement?  Yet like a rubber ball floating in a pool of water, I never know, and cannot dictate, which aspect of my "self" will show its surface to the light at any given moment of time.  And while it might seem that this in itself ought to teach me how to attain the freedom I so long for, it does not.  Instead, I feel merely as if I no longer have any center of gravity, no inner cohesiveness; the will I would use to direct my consciousness, and the experience of reality which manifests for me through that consciousness, is scattered and diffuse.  I try too hard – or not hard enough; I am trapped, weighted down by all the definitions I've invented to describe myself, but within which "I" can no longer be said to exist.  Depression looms, threatening to swallow me up.  There is a sense of impotence, of uselessness, of everything being beyond my control; and the work required to bring it into control seems too much effort, and to yield too little reward.  I fall into despair.

I take a walk through the woods by the cemetery.  Spring where I live is a cold and wet affair, but the plants seem to love it:  they're thriving.  The branches of the saplings, plumed now with masses of bright, green leaves, crowd against my arms and legs as I walk along the path.  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 I notice that somebody's scrawled graffiti on several of the boulders lying in the creek at the gully's bottom.  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 can still be called "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.  "You 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 ferocity to be dismissed as mere play.  I spend an 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 teenagers are always nearby.  The time I spend alone in the woods is the only time I have left that gives me a feeling of being 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.  She looks straight at me and says, "What are you trying to do?"  It's more of a demand than a question.  I stare back at her, bewildered:  "Huh?"  She eyes me steadily, suspiciously, for several long seconds, then turns away and starts talking to someone else, a passenger riding in her car.  "What am I trying to do?" I repeat confusedly as she drives away, though I realize by now that she must not have been speaking to me – must not have been speaking to me – but I feel rather shaken by her words all the same.  Because she was speaking to me – she was:  and 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.  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 no longer really know.

One night, lying awake in bed into the wee hours of the morning, 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.  Depression is something I decide to regard as no more than a self-indulgence, a sign of laziness as opposed to distress.  This it must be, or else I lose all hope.  If depression 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, the sense of depression is 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.  Curiously, in so doing, I open myself up in a strange new way.  Falling into sleep, I enter into that trancelike state which induces out-of-body experiences.  Sounds enlarge inside my head, heralding the entry into an altered state of consciousness.  One night I hear a rhythmic buzzing, another night snatches of ethereal music.  Once I hear a blast of sound so loud that I'm jolted into wakefulness again.  Can it rightly be said, then, that the whole purpose of the difficulties I experience in this world is simply to teach me about the nature of suffering – of its desperate reality, and of its equally desperate illusory aspect as well?  Experiencing it thus, I begin to "wake up" to the dream . . .

But how do I complete the process?  Should I even ask?  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, exploitive 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.  But I had not realized the enormity of that suffering, nor fully comprehended just how thoroughly it is 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 take part in the transgressions committed in it . . .

DEATH CHANT