For its own Sake

I think today must mark the beginning of monsoon season. I'm sitting here at Bicycle Academy in front of the portable heater attempting to dry my soaking-wet sneakers and pant-legs. The ten-minute walk to work has never been so unpleasant, and struggling against the wind on my way here, my umbrella turned inside out, splaying its chintzy metal skeleton in eight different directions, mockingly making its escape from its vinyl sheath while drenching me in the process. Right now I am watching the teabag in my glass cup seep. It's a gradual, wavy descent, much like cigarette smoke making its way to the ceiling. My life, like everyone's, has been reduced to this—waiting for the flavour to peak, watching the effervescence die down, patiently allowing it to go tepid before sipping, ever-so-cautiously.

I've felt remarkably depressed this week. I don't know how or why it started, but it seems worse than it's been in some time.

My exhaustion is terrible. I fall asleep at my desk at work and wake up, head nodding like a spring-loaded ping-pong ball. If I squint my eyes a certain way, open just a third or a quarter, I think I see things that aren't quite there. I make out shapes in the pattern of the wood, arrows, faces, shadows. In the dreams I have at night, no one speaks, but lately I've been seeing words, like in books I've read, open to certain pages. I start reading these seemingly giant books within my dreams and try to make sense of them there. I read sentences over and over again until the dreaming me becomes very tired and decides to lie down, at which point, my actual physical self inevitably becomes obligated to swat the piercingly loud alarm clock off her night table… Generally, I guess I'm feeling worn out and lonely and oddly philosophical.

Somewhere, it must have been in a book, I got the idea that people don't live for the sake of life, but rather to enrich themselves. Basically, it's the glimmer of optimism at the end of a dark hallway that makes people brave enough to keep walking. We expect all these rewards out of existence: "If I work hard at school, I'll go to university and get a great job and earn lots of money. If I'm kind and truthful, I'll have lots of friends and everyone will like me, If I slave away at a job I find (at least) mildly distasteful for the next forty years, I can retire and sit in the sun and let the UV rays deepen my wrinkles. If I'm a decent person until the day I die and follow my conscience, I'll go to Heaven." Generally, it seems like a really selfish reason to keep on breathing, this anticipation of some reward, divine or otherwise. To do something, anything, really, for its own sake seems both redundant and complex at the same time. It almost verges on the impossible or questionable, like counting blades of grass because you can, or putting together an all-black five-thousand piece puzzle.

Pater once talked about creating "art for art's sake." And whether or not anyone can actually appreciate something for its intrinsic value, for the process and the head-scratching and all the unpleasant moments in-between, is something I feel is both idealistic and doubtable. Many people consider me to be a very cynical person, but if that's what realism comes down to, what does it say about the state of our day-to-day lives, really? Pater's suggestion can imply deriving joy and peace from splattering paint, delicate brush-strokes, or from sliding one's finger's through clay. It doesn't matter, really. The end-result has nothing to do, ultimately, with the respective concepts behind this sort of art.

And, like the art we are all so capable of producing as humans, our own end results are pretty much predictable, not really worthy of honourable mention, maybe discussed briefly over drinks, a morbid little gallery gathering: "Yes, she was very beautiful." All this, before the spectators of our lives' events move on to more interesting, lively "pieces," those that make them question themselves, their motives, their previous perceptions of their respective emotional ranges and ability to feel anything at all.

What I'm getting at is difficult to articulate, I suppose. It's not that I'm genuinely unhappy at the moment. I know I am very lucky to be here, doing what I'm doing, but some days are extremely difficult for me. If I had no one to see on the weekends and nothing to look forward to, I'd be very sad and lonely and without much purpose. I can't (at this point) fathom life for life's sake and were things worse, I may have already thrown in that figurative towel, only slightly damp, since my relatively shallow life has been anything but invigoratingly, dangerously colourful. Think wading-pool versus the hope for some amazing coral reef: basically you can find a way to drown in either, but when it comes down to it, which is more pathetic, really?

Basically, I've come to understand that if anything, most people's harsh biases and prejudices concern themselves rather than other people. And when we finally manage to escape ourselves when we fall asleep and let our personalities crumble away, our sharp edges rounding off in the blurriness of most dreamscapes, then I guess we can finally perceive things like a newborn in a strange world, a clean chalkboard; and all our emotional precedents and fears cease to exist, because falling over the edge here, in the land of sleep, doesn't necessarily mean death.

How can I write about how I feel lately? Other than by stepping outside myself as the writer of my life and thoughts, and writing about someone who is slightly more difficult to recognize (the thoughts she has the audacity to have!), I simply do not know.

She feels the word forming on her lips; her tongue goes into position, raised behind her front teeth, as it moves downwards and in. "Love." She is amused with herself for uttering such…such…what? In a crowded bar, music playing, people sprawled on floor cushions sipping expensive drinks, laughing, a little intoxicated by tobacco, incense and their own taste of temporary unreality, she cups her hands over an ear made recently more accessible by a very short haircut, and quite audibly, she speaks. She knows herself, realizes that she is often dismissive of most emotionality, that she regards outward shows of anything too strong to be part contrivance, part 'telling them what they want to hear.' But tonight, her face is calm, her heart beats normally (which for her means a little faster than the usual molasses way). In fact, despite the peopled setting, the red-tied waiters zipping around with Mojitos and Margaritas, she is all alone, uttering a sot of monologue, a bit breathy, but never doubting what she says. For the girl, though it's the first time she's said it to someone, the word escapes from her mouth smoothly, no strangulated tightness, no death of sound on the third and fourth letters. Later, she hardly even thinks about it, it's become so ingrained in her new sense of reality. Later in bed, when he asks her if what she said before was true; she simply says "yeah," because what else is there to say, really?

'Love' is one of those concepts that have generally assumed a sort of backseat in my cynical little mind. So many people have tried to define it that it's almost become corrupted, very lame and embarrassing for one such as myself to admit to feeling. I remember when I was young and sitting in the car with my mother-- a generally rather bitter woman with a tight mouth when I was growing up-- how, if we'd pass a church where a wedding was taking place, or go by a procession of car antennas bedecked with dollar-store crepe streamers and paper pompoms, she'd click her tongue and laugh, shaking her head. "Fools…" she'd mutter as we drove by, "They'll see." I know my mother's marriage was anything but happy, but I can't help but shake the feeling that her attitude about the nature of genuine affection sort of set a negative tone concerning relationship expectations, as well as a general sense of shame about happiness for me.

I realize some might say that I'm not old enough or experienced enough to know what I'm talking about, that I will, in fact, "see." It's just that 'love' to me is one of those words that people throw about like money, buying cigarettes at one store, groceries at another, and being frivolous on the weekends, never worrying about their impulsive or unnecessary shopping until they're broke or have become addicted to something, be it a certain delicacy, brand of alcohol, or tobacco. And then there are the fun bits you regret after you're in too deep: lung cancer, obesity, alcoholism, and anything else rehab might not be able to cure.

I think maybe that 'love' should be un-definable, that there shouldn't even be a word, because attaching something as simplistic, as shallow, as letters to something so inexplicably difficult to understand or express, robs the feeling of its intrinsic meaning. And people who actively search for it, the feeling they've head people call 'love', wanting to have love for love's sake 'just because,' all seems rather consumerist and crass to me.

Essentially, there are no rulebooks or courtship etiquette manuals (sorry Ovid…) that can make anyone feel more strongly or compassionately toward another human being. It's just there, in concept, I think, waiting patiently in a sort of soap-bubble above two heads. Sometimes it pops and falls to Earth like a virus, (or a blessing if you're an optimistic, "the glass is half-full" sort of person) and like a delicacy that can give you a stomach-ache at times, but keeps you wanting more, is greedily consumed. Other times, the pseudo-bubble rises and burns up in the atmosphere and disappears forever, simple as that, the moment having passed.

Basically, though it may seem hypocritical of me given my current writing on the subject, it is my opinion that while 'love' is nice and all, the more people worry about the status of the word, the less time there is to actually put it into practice (like obeying the letter, but not the law).

The past few years, I've told many people about my view of existence, the constantly fluctuating states of entropy—the breakdown of organic material—and optimism—an elevated state of mind that makes one able to get up and continue on in the morning. That is all I believe. That is all I know to be true. It's something that's true not only for the planet and for nations—after wars, when large areas of earth have been destroyed, it's the potential to start again, a sort of hope that makes rebuilding, regeneration, possible—but for people too, since as the metaphysical poets once suggested, man, made of the same elements as his planet, is a microcosm of the universe.

As individual beings, we become weak, we fade away. Our flesh begins to die. We are not built to last, and we know it, yet, holding tightly, desperately, some might say, to that 'hope', the one virtue Pandora was able to regain for humanity, we seem to accept that we are part of a morbid sort of duality—nihilism on the one hand, and the inclining of the heart toward love (for the sake of love, sometimes) on the other. And, I've always been hesitant, because I thought, 'Why should I hope?" when I know that 'love' is like a sort of sympathetic embrace of that which is doomed to decay, either in body or in mind. It makes me very sad, but that's just me, I guess, far too concerned and afraid about my flesh and its consumption, either by entropy or by love.