Dear Others,
I fell into a space, a largeish one, filled with unimaginable sadness. I thought I might have read it in the calligraphy of clouds, which is very readable this time of year, even in the shorter daylight, or maybe because of it. It holds, this time, for sure, the coming gloom, the chill, the end of at least the year, and maybe many other things that we daren't consider. But, as I said, the clouds might give us the message even while we bustle around trying to avoid it.
Maybe sadness isn't the word, isn't the place. Maybe the place is pathos. Or my favorite, abject melancholia. To be sure, I was reading about a case of the AMs. An author that is now dead and gone.
Now another thing I read or heard, Laurie Anderson saying that we must not be sad, only feel sad. It was a distinction I hadn't kenned before, and sometimes I still don't. She said, I think, that it was a tenet of Buddhism. Or perhaps I imagined that she said it and I read it in the clouds?
I try to maintain these two separately; the feeling and the being, I really do, but the gaping hugeness of what I think must be everyone's sadness, is sometimes unavoidable. If you are like, or like I have been, you will micro analyze your blue snit, your dark brow, until you fear actual madness. What we are supposed to do, say the sages, is to make space even for this, this yawning horror, to feel it, not to scrutinize it silly.
Ah but, you still may try to; you are clever, you are smart, you will outfox this feeling. You might, perhaps, suffer from anhedonia; a word I am obsessed with since I read it a few years ago. Anhedonia, anhedonia, my country 'tis of thee! If you Google it, chances are you will see that you have it too.
But again, you are smart; you know, because of your monkey cleverness, that people don't really respond to your work, to that which is your messy self, they just like the outward you; and of course they do, because you are endlessly seeing to their comfort, feeling for them, telling them what you'd like to hear: you are fine, you are well, you are acceptable by every metric! You are good.
Sticky wickets all around. Try out this concept: Beautiful Mess Effect.
It's a balm, for certain, but, it doesn't take away the cavern of sorrows. It's like a missing limb, you learn to live with, next door to, around, the cavern, I guess. Because of our really serious case of anhedonia. Because of the calligraphy of the clouds. Because of the light. Because of time.
