One of those mornings where everything I think, write, read that I have written, is followed by Not going to work, Why am I doing that, This is shit, Nobody is interested, or You’re too old for this.
A general self-loathing disguised as an enlightened realization, or is it the opposite.
I often wished I had followed my first adult dream — immediate intuitions are so much more insightful than long rational reflexions — of doing music, I wish I was a working musician (and not the backseat musician I am with Chris), I wish my art didn’t involve neither meaning nor my self. Music, an exterior object, an abstract language, a thing of beauty that means nothing.
I tire of words, of having to write things. I don’t have much to say, in fact few people do, they just babble about the same things, in different shapes. I’ve come to a point where the only things I feel the need to say are corrections. Corrections of the overflowing babbles of this volubile world. Things are so poorly said and thought.
I tire of my self moving in the mirror in the dance studio, my body like unruly clay that endlessly needs reshaping, my muscles and articulations, that I’ve been trying to dominate since I was 3 years old, that are less and less enjoying this pretty torture, as the years remaining are fewer and fewer.
Yet, the words come relentlessly and with force, and dance’s divine exhaustion calls irresistibly, I need them more than anything, sitting idle on the couch, so far from the world, so quiet and still.
I listen to the murmur of the world, people saying things that have been said so often before, as poorly, or so much better, and it’s all a loud mess that I can’t but want to clean. I clean what people say in my head, I rearrange their thoughts, their grammar, their concepts, their reasonings, their conclusions. I sit there looking at the transparent air, and rearrange the words of the world, this poor tired world always having to listen to the same confusions and fallacies. I am so old, I am at least as old as the world, I’ve heard everything, said so many times I don’t even remember silence, my poor head, the poor world, we are old and tired, we wish there was music, the music of birds, the river, the sound of cars in the night, we wish people would shut up.
I’m so busy cleaning all the time, I don’t have time to say or do anything myself. I am the unsung, useless janitor of the popular mind, working night shifts, never done, underpaid, overwhelmed. I have millennia of cleaning to do, there are piles and piles of dirty grammar on the sink, broken concepts on the floor, reasoning that needs mending, and I sit in the middle of it and I am tired, so tired, and I wish I could have a clean slate on which to write a poem, do a little dance, sing a little song. I wish the mess didn’t bother me. I wish I could dance in garbage, write on landfill. The landfill of the mind, on top of which I am sitting, with my old philosophical broom and my sad, bent spine.
There is so much mess that I feel I shouldn’t add to it, I refrain myself, I stay in my corner, quiet, reluctant, disgusted by it all, not wanting to be part of it.
Is this aging? Feeling less and less like interacting with the world? Needing it less, wanting it less, finding it less attractive? A sort of incarnation through disappearance. A sort of drifting.
Yet I miss something. Someones. I can’t find what, I can’t see it amongst the clutter. My vision is blurred, I only see spots of colours, I have vague feelings about whatever. There are so many things around and yet I feel so empty, so alone. Sometimes, very rarely, something detaches itself from the loud vagueness, something clear and defined, something remarkable and coherent. An object, a phrase, a personality. Something that actually says something. I only want to be surrounded by such things. I only want to be surrounded by exact, beautiful, accurate things.