pessimism

i was reading this book called pessimism, a tour of a lot of supposedly sad philosophers, schopenhauer and freud and rousseau and camus and so on. it was supposed to be surprisingly liberating, but it was excruciating to read. i stepped away from it for a few weeks and have noticed that it's been seeping into my brain and leaving me with these impressions that life is meaningless and empty and futile. this morning, i stumbled on this thing i wrote while i was in the thick of it, and feel better now. i am posting it, so i don't forget again:

i want to sit and talk about why pessimism drives me so crazy, but i would rather sit here and tell you about why simon and garfunkel give me tingles, i wonder if schopenhauer ever heard of music.

the thing is, if all these philosophers were in a room with me trying to explain why happiness is impossible, i would know there is something fundamentally dysfunctional with their outlooks and i would spring to action trying to show them the beauty of life. i have been conditioned to respond in this way when people start moaning about their lemons, because that is what a good friend does, because no one wants life to be fundamentally miserable. and that's the thing dammit, this is all a matter of perspective and where you guys see sadness and injustice, i see limits. limits aren't the end of the world, they just put boundaries on what's possible, and i'm wanting to know - who told you to expect limitless freedom and possibility, who told you that if every little one of your desires isn't satisfied, that means happiness is unattainable? are you saying this expectation is instinctive to human nature? it may be instinctive to you white people who own the world, but there are plenty of people who live and die without that idea ever occurring to them and they are not savages, they are just better adapted to existence than you.

i think it's weird how you assume optimism is synonymous with naivete. you talk like you know something the rest of us don't, when really, you have made the mistake of assuming the badness has the final word. but there is no final word, life is a dance between misery and rapture, and optimism is just a resolution to say yes to the whole of it. as if there were another option? you ultimately say yes too, or else you'd kill yourself, you ultimately find a reason to keep trudging on, and this is your clue that your insides don't hate living as much as your brain thinks they do.

let me tell you. not everything is possible.  sigmund, if you were hoping to sex every girl you've ever taken a second glance at, if you want to kill every sonofabitch who's ever crossed you, well then no, that is not allowed and maybe not possible. do what you can and release the rest, that is how you get happy. jean-jacques, if you love your cat, or your wife, or your flat screen tv more than gawd and believe you should be able to hold onto them for all eternity, well i am sorry but that is not possible either. everything perishes, it's called "impermanence," and everything is in flux, these are the facts. what you can do though, is treasure them while you hold them and then mourn them when they pass and tell stories about them around the campfire, sing songs about your memories, make something pretty out of them. if these things are not satisfactory to you, then you bind yourself in a prison of your own demands of existence. i'm saying, you can refuse to let these things quench you, but that doesn't mean you're right. it means you're choosing emptiness.

because don't tell me this is all about metaphysics, about the fundamental deep down nature of the universe. it's about EXPERIENCE and how you choose to engage it. talking about happiness and suffering and flux, these are fundamentals of experience, they're not platonic ideas. and when we're talking about experience, you are unhappy because you refuse to accept all that the universe has to offer. when we're talking about experience, you cry at your mother's funeral, but then you go back to the house and someone has made you some very nice cheese straws and roast beef sandwiches, and then someone will tell a story, and you'll forget you're supposed to be moping and will start laughing and pretty soon you'll be on to some new project and you'll remember your mom, but the patches of pain will be as fleeting as the moments of elation, life will go on. life is fragile, delicate and so precious, the earth is always trembling on the edge of tears, but we laugh and share some beers and look clear-eyed into the uncertain future, holding lightly the few precious moments we've been given. life is light, whizzing by, we are entrusted with the miracle of consciousness for the blink of an eye, and i want to use my blink to live enormously, courageously, the heights and the depths and the monotonous in-betweens, live live live, experience, risk it all because it's so light, live enormously. of course it's sad, sadness is the other side of the coin of MIRACLE, but don't let the darkness eat you up, live dammit.

i am not opposed to pessimism in general, i would label kurt vonnegut as a pessimist, but look at kurt, he's not wandering around moping, he is resigned to it, he is eat-drink-and-be-merrying and laughing at the whole thing. i just mean you are making everything so HEAVY, you make it sound all futile, and it is of course, but not in this dreary way you're painting it.

one time nate asked me why i would want to go on living when life includes so much misery, and i said "because to me, to be alive is thrilling." he didn't get it, he thought life only matters if it's good. i say life matters because it's life, and all i want is to know it, to know it deep down, every corner of experience, i want to know.

when we last talked
we were lying on our backs
looking at the sky
looking through the ceiling
i used to lie like that alone
out on the driveway
trying to read the greek upon the stars
the alphabet of feeling

do you see, do you see how beautiful? i'm saying, i want to know everything, i don't know why, but maybe because then i will finally understand what all these other people were saying, or maybe because some humans are just born with an innate desire to observe and understand.

ask any mystic and they'll tell you, when they find themselves face to face with ultimate reality (and these are people that make a practice of touching the deep down heart of Everything, spend their lives devoted to it), what they feel is not despair or emptiness, but a deep abiding sense of love and overwhelming contentment, they feel reassured that it's ALL ALRIGHT. yeah we'll die, everything will die, but it's alright, the spirit of the universe will endure, life will continue for the foreseeable future, and if it doesn't, then we're all the more lucky to have been here for it.