Quite gloomy thoughts

Ugh, everything is wet.

Gutterism

“We are all in the gutter” – Oscar Wilde

Of course, the second part of the quote doesn’t matter that much to me.

In his time, Wilde made his name on being witty and insightful; misanthropy, on the other hand, never sells.

I believe the quote, cut in half, tells the greater truth.  We all have heard stanza upon stanza about stars and hopes and dreams, but what remains to be a more perplexing problem, is how we understand and accept the painful truth that we, all of us, are in the gutter.

Maybe not exactly all, there are certainly a few who are blessed with ignorance, dementia, or other sorts of mental peculiarity that are beyond me.

But the majority of us do live in the gutter. We eat and drink in the gutter.  We converse and create in the gutter.  We believe and we pray and we lose faith in the gutter.  We love, kill, and write poetry in the gutter.  But we do not die in the gutter. 

No, to find death, we have to go someplace else.

But were we born in the gutter?

If only I could ask an infant.

Newborns and the dead are the only hope we have, in this world of the living.   We’d like to believe that souls are coming from somewhere innocent and pure, and are going to a realm free of burden.

The mumbles about stars and heavens only attest to our misery.

Obsessive

I've always fear the power of obsession.

        Being encompassed by intense emotions, overwhelmed, either by love or hatred – it’s like a horror to me.

Whenever I sense the coming of a tide stronger than reasonable, I retreat and hide. 

Sometimes it’s an artist that captivated me; there are too many times when I couldn’t bear to hear a song because of performer (it’s quite embarrassing to admit). 

Sometimes it’s a friend I’m too fond of, and I have to run away before the affection grows.  There were, of course, exceptions.  J was the one who relentlessly pulled me back; with Kate, I never consider her for more she is; and for a brief while, I was convinced Chen was worth the torment.  But most of the time, I can’t help but push away those who attract me.

“He who loves and runs away, lives to love another day.”

All the deserters did was follow their instinct.

And I might never fall in love.

Night

In a London Review of Books article, Nicholas Spice wrote of the connections between insomnia and the second act of Tristan and Isolde.  “A simulacrum of eternity,” he so describes the night.

How mysterious it is, that night invokes such universal feelings.  At night, time is suspended, yet limitless.  Reading and writing at night is to wander in a lucid dream, let consciousness permeates the air and feel with abstract precision.  There is imagination undreamed of in day, in an endless cage where everything is permitted.

And there it was, speaking to me, in Words of Love:

At night, awake, high on poems or pills
or simple awe that loveliness exists

Because at night we are not real, we have no body nor shape; we flow, in delirium.

       

        In the sleepless nights, the dawn seems intimidating.  As Tristan and Isolde sang, “free from sighing, sublime elapsing/free from languishing, enclosed in sweet darkness,” but the dawn is near, and day, compared to such endless night, is so much like death. 

In Sartre’s The Wall, it was the literal death.  But the repugnance for sleep is strikingly similar.  When the day is near, death starts to emerge.  It rises to the surface on the cloth of reality, manifesting itself in the table, the lamp, the wood, haunting every touch – until finally, even the air is death.