I've been reading Blake's Innocence and Experience and now I am very depressed--but in a good way because all I do is read and read and very rarely do I actually feel the need to pay heed to what lies beneath the words...
Not all children are naiive and not all adults are wise and all knowing as far as goes the world. I wonder where I fit. I know I am not naive because I feel sick to death with nearly everything that goes on around me these days--yet I live in a very privelleged portion of the world and do not expect to see certain horrors that others, decades younger than myself have since grown immune to, if not flourished into rational, thinking beings, within. But maybe it is naiive of me to think that the things I've witnessed are unspeakable. Does it work on a scale? Certainly, I am not wise. I've met very few who are and those who call themselves so are the most naiive of all.
I barely know whether to call myself child or adult. Psychologically I've felt the same way since about 12 or so, and chronologically (including all the idle years and those I continue to waste) I am an adult. Yet, I distance myself, as always from adult things. Here it is important to note that not all children in their innocence are happy (no skipping and catching butterflies in green untainted meadows for me, I'm afraid). Some are innocent of the trappings and corruptions of the world, but live in the horrible hell of their own mind. Are they innocent, when all they see is grey and sadness, death and rot, tears and blood?
It would be so easy to say, "Oh he was corrupted by a book."--Wasn't a Dorian Gray tainted in this manner?--how simple would that be,to be able to pinpoint the undesirable object in order to destroy it? But an innocent whose corrupter was his or herself, maybe through being left too often to dwell quietly in shame in tiny bedrooms with flourescent humming lamps, drowning in the waters of fears and possibilities conjured by the terrified mind, has nothing material to destroy but his or herself. How can innocence possibly be maintained in the face of such a startling revelation? it passes quickly away, as fast as the handfull of pills reaches to the mouth and drops again, as fast as catching one's reflection in the gleam of a shiny new razorblade, faster still than the time it takes for said gleam to became tarnished with the sacrificial slice of the first cut. Innocence and blood. How fucking biblical of me.. Perhaps I ought to be Catholic...(lalala...I didn't just say that...)
Anyway, yeah, I think the loss of innocence is like the breaking point into the maddening adult world we call society. Like, at some unnameable point, we all have a mental breakdown and go insane. Except we're not insane as we know it--we're normal. Those of us who cannot tolerate life and the world and people and their society and maybe walk around with 5 winter coats on in the middle of summer and a daisy in their hats because they feel like it, are clearly mad. Because they're adults. Because they're insane. Because they don't give a goddamn. Because. I cannot personally escape this world that makes me sick. I don't have it in me to be insane enough to escape from consumerism, life, society, etc, but I can't possibly flourish here as others do. I'll grow sicker and sicker and work and work, and make money and become invisible until I'm as pale as the off white standard wallpaper in my workstation--and then, one day, finally, when my spirit has finally broken and I no longer care enough to notice or write depressive blogs about my state, I will die and my money will serve to buy me a nice pine box and a slab of granite (to make sure I stay weighted the fuck down). "They'll" be forcing me to return to an earth I know nothing about through virtue of pretending to be well-adjusted to modern urban society-- no time to play in that sandbox, I'm afraid, though it does look kind of fun, whatever will they say?--and like the nice adult I am, I'll politely stay down and let the lid close over my head.
