On Death, and I Warn Ya, I Feel Contentious :)

This is another of those longish posts that several people may read but that I don’t expect anyone to comment on (somehow in a very predictable way, that disclaimer up front tends to bring comments, and I still haven’t fully processed the way in which my total indifference doesn’t affect the way that this disclaimer ACTUALLY WORKS).

One of my favorite skills, for about fifteen years, has been the ability to write very long sentences without needing a period and without using extreme verbal gymnastics; in this, the semicolon and the parentheses are key tools.

In short, then, what the fuck is all of this life, life LIFE going on in the blogosphere, and especially where parenting and children are concerned? Does NO ONE, has NO FUCKING ONE, ever felt the way that I do about this, this deep dark soak in the darkest death you can possibly imagine without actually in any way confronting physical mortality?

With rare exceptions, I remain healthy, flexible, powerful; my appetite is unaffected, my hair does not grow feeble, the whole high-pro glow of healthy puppies is there. I’m life all over the place. I remain extroverted and ready to deal with people and even with unpleasantness; I change catboxes and wash dishes and even clean bathrooms on request. I tell you, I am life out loud.

What the fucking FUCK, then, with all this dark death stuff? What the FUCK is that all about?

Some fluffy identity-woe-is-me thing, some change that is so fucking slow in the acceptance…

That bit about the path to enlightenment being “extreme death,” I loved that. Still do. But it’s not a logic problem, and the converse isn’t true. Just because I can’t get any access to my endorphin-factory self of old doesn’t mean that the whole world is death. But it feels that way, and feeling is being, isn’t it? How transient or not is this long phase of dying/mourning?

And WHAT is it?

Can you ask that? Can you feel the question? My physical reality is brightness and power; so what the fuck is all this death bullshit? Which one’s bullshit? You can live and die at once, right; I said that a post or three ago, yes?

About a kid: “Oh great, another reason to live.”

I don’t feel that in the least, but giving up was never my problem. Often my problem is and has been NOT giving up. Not giving up a relationship, an ideal dream, a pursuit. LET IT GO is what people have said to me for twenty years and I’ve said FUCK YOU I CAN GET IT. Climbing walls’ attractiveness, anyone? Metaphysical proof, which of course is only physical motion and has nothing to do with metaphysics except for metaphors with which one can stoke the pride oven.

I’m attracted to “I can’t” these days. Not the belief that I can’t, but to things that ACTUALLY cannot be done. I think it’s an examination of letting go, by virtue of trying the ACTIVELY IMPOSSIBLE.

Death shows up there; mortality, as Trungpa and others have put it (and a lot of the Gita is about it actually), is the key card, it’s the ace, it’s the only card that matters, really. And I’ve said that before, tried to found a counter-metaphysics to Christianity on it. Landed, eventually, on the Situationist International, but that’s a long tangential story.

Like a desire to BE impossible. Not to find out what the limits of the possible are (although I’ve tried that too, most specifically in the line between inebriation and unconsciousness, operating there, trying to SEE IT), but to BECOME impossible. It can’t be done, but the asymptote is out here, out in parenting and the death of the past identity.

Why is it “out here,” why is this such a fringe thing for me? Isn’t parenting terribly, TERRIBLY mainstream and mundane? Yes, in its day-to-day, in its catboxes and its diaper changes (funny how those two examples are excrement, eh? Bataille, anyone? Let’s have a revolution! Bring me a diaper pail!), but in its emotional “place” in me, it’s fringe territory, edge play.

There is something I no longer believe, when I practice asana or climb walls; there is a questing grandeur which is gone, which can’t be stood any longer. I can still feel it, and believe it, under the influence of loud music (so loud you can feel it rather than hear it) or smell, but if I’m not pushed that close to tangibility and have any thinking room, it’s gone.

And that is mundanity, for sure, the vengeance of housework, but it is also a kind of weird reality like that which Buddhists talk about. A wonderful ensorcelled warriorship and love and anger, giant emotions in quest narratives, is gone, is revealed to be paper. Something, some realization, I neither wanted nor pursued. Life brings one these things, too.

And the pain of that is not the pain of THAT but of losing that, of losing that mask. I doubt I will ever be able to clearly separate it from the relationship trouble or the insomnia or anything else, but the LOSS hurts, not the presence of any given thing that replaced it (although I certainly complained enough).

In a way, it’s like a chronic illness took that from me, but I don’t need it, didn’t need it, not really. I did, of course; wanted that mythology, that sweat and quest derived therefrom, for twenty years, wanted it since I was a teenager. But I never NEEDED it, not seen from the reality of me now.

And one becomes quiet, but not really mundane. The binary crumbles: warrior/householder or however you’d like to put it. Mundanity is not a LANDING point; it is not the end-all of all kinetic energy and it’s not a tomb, although we have I forget even how to count the number of writers who’ve actively or otherwise described it as such (American Beauty, anyone? Rick Moody? Hell, Hermann Hesse? See? And believe me, the list goeth on!).

But to break mundanity up into simple actions–to see it as a cloud of transient verbs rather than a solid anything–can NEVER be done by the warrior consciousness of which it is the other side of the coin, and for obvious reasons.

And the whole American shebang of the outlaw hero and the self-made man and that bit about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, has to go with it. Massive surrender. But a totally different kind. This isn’t surrender to death at all (although it will feel like it, has felt like it, you’ve read the evidence which I did not fake); it’s surrender to a world without a specific mask on. That’s all.

I suppose that parenting can be a quest, a “point to life,” but I didn’t experience it that way; for me it pulled off the mask of the noble quest for power, Castaneda magic, warriordom, Conan-John McClane-you name it, the archetypes that I collected in posters, Travis-Bickle-Tyler-Durden, and insisted on mundanities first, and I think of something about the ecstasy and the laundry, which apparently I should read now.

This won’t end with life becoming parenting, with me pledging my power to parenting; being a parent for me is a verb, transient like housework, exactly like housework. I’m not uncommitted (although I feel that charge come silently from J every day), I’m simply unmystified, not buying the magic, anymore than I am now allowed to buy the Conan magic. If I can’t swing a sword with full belief, I’m not going to just substitute mythologies and push a stroller with full belief. The problem has been the pledge, not the direction.

Directly after that last sentence, the boy awoke in what I think is teething pain, and teething pain SUCKS, in case you wonder. So that’s it; new directions now, old directions lost. The summary here that I like is, mundanity can’t be taken apart (that is, won’t fall apart, which we need it to do in order for the actions which are collected under it, to be tolerable for our so-American subjectivities) until the warrior consciousness which opposes it (is opposed to it, in the binary we can rarely question) also falls apart.

Death creates life, and it does so in a cloud of transient verbs.