Ramblings

Imagine where I am sitting. The room is clothed in a not-quite-victorious darkness, two lights breaking its intent at opposite corners of both of my eyes. Sound is on exile; beauty now has the throne it once possessed. Each breath is a meditation. The atmosphere insulates, commiserates. I am stretched out on his lovely couch. Absolutely nothing is wrong with the world. The aesthetic has disappeared, evaporated into the cloud of my freedom. The cloud is flavored with it, colored with it; everything is beautiful precisely because I will only what I can will. My existence is beautiful; that is, it has its telos in itself. And somehow, in the margin of typing these words, within the five minutes of contemplative slow-steps involved in actualizing my intention through the assertion of my will -- I am happy. I was unhappy. I was waiting for happiness, constricted by the inertia of the aesthetic.

Inertia applies to the aesthetic. It must, or else transcending it requires no exertion; transcending it means asserting freedom; freedom means the crucifixion of our adaptation. One would otherwise stumbles into happiness, just as easily as happiness stumbles upon the aesthete. The sting of the aesthetic is, of course, beauty; that is the dream of living without movement. What good is beauty? It is a nudge to exist. But as an overdose it is like a water chamber: man is drenched in it, engulfed at all sides, suffocated, each moment a superlative in pain, and he can do nothing at all but take it and wait for an end. Why? Beauty invites desire, and desire stretches.

Here: this happiness is beginning to drain -- and as I am writing, asserting my self, it is draining no more. I was beginning to doubt; added to this doubt: worry. I was thinking, ten seconds ago: my writing is false, pedestrian, artificial, naked of metaphor creativity, terse, Hemingwayesque, flaccid, boring, revolting. These doubts were freezing waters that contaminated my being, lethargized it, froze it. The more one doubts his own center, the more he is lost in his own periphery; to be aesthetic is to have one's periphery as one's center. The periphery is the world, and the self is meant to act upon it; the aesthete has the world as his self, which is to say: his self doesn't exist.

I was out tonight, haunting the streets with a trivial end in mind. I am in the center lane, the right-of-way is mine; green arrow, left. In turning another car cuts me off. Female, collegiate. Just as I trail behind her, just as she turning before me, her face turns to mine; her eyes evidently facing mine, but in moving so quickly I cannot discern her mood. I look to find a parking space, and make my way out. She has circled around, and again I catch her but -- ah, the look is concentrated clarity: a subtle contempt, unasked for, undeserved, her eyebrows contract with an infinitesimal fleeting movement; I walk on, emitting a mechanical spark-sigh, and suddenly I am alienated from the world of humanity.

Human beings are little transcendences. Apperitifs. They signify possibilties. To play this game, to wager one's happiness on the other, is to be for others. These days virtually all is being-for-others. Corollary: all is appearance. To attempt to exist for the sake of something else is not to exist, but to act, and no man can contravene his own script without his conscience stinging him; no man can escape his self, though he can work at forgetting, and forgetting is the cleverest invention of cheap happiness. All cheap happiness is myopic; it has the childish conjuration that each moment exists without relation to others. What is the greatest machine for forgetting? Alcohol.

If all is appearance, nothing is appreciated for being what it is. It isn't absurd to conceive of a woman who dates a man to prove a point. Her "lover" is a means to an end: the attention of others, the gradual climb up the ladder of admitted existence, whose rungs flutter ahead like a ten mile train that bends out of sight. In a world where nothing is appreciated intrinsically, everything is means -- for something else, which means that nothing in the world is an end, save the fleeting and arbitrary attention from others: a ghost whose essence is possibility. Today one only wishes the historical claims of the poets were true: that love hurts, love is pain, for at least here love exists, at least here instrumentality isn't all, for instrumentality is all when nothing is valued intrinsically. The eternal qualities are leaking from man; all that will remain is the eternal vice: existential hand-waving whose meaning is hollow, a massive sign, penetrating the universe of society, that signifies nothing.

What is the cure?