Fertile Doorways

Promises and opiates and untouchable places

21 February, 17:07

The folded-over body is giving itself to the sidewalk: it is a prayer position, the most obscene yoga pose. Not even the concrete can touch me, now, so encased am I in my cocoon of loneliness.¹

This is the unequivocal seduction of the opiate: a promise that somewhere deep within you is an untouchable place, a place where you are impervious to the vicissitudes of the world, immune to the moods and agendas of other people. There is a deep well of ok-ness that can not be infringed upon or compromised. The warmth and security that was once your resting state–before you were raped by language, before you were taken hostage by culture–when you and the Great Mother were one and the same holy spontaneous emergent field–it’s all a distant memory, now, awakening only to the siren song of these gentle exogenous agents that arrive like little angels, beckoning you back to the place from whence you came.

The shadow of all this imperviousness and warmth is that you become untouchable. You lose the ability to be affected. Other people become mere obstacles standing between you and your perfect cocoon of gentle indifference. Suffering loses its educational heft, the very thing that made it worth enduring in the first place. You become both physically and energetically constipated. Nothing moves because stillness, stagnation, has become your north star.

This is an emergency. You were made to be touched.

Henri Eugéne Le Sidaner, La Ronde, 1897, lithograph on blue laid paper

Returning from the cocoon, “withdrawing”, is like learning how to be touched all over again. Your whole being is a raw nerve, and you forgot what it was to be affected, and now everything is an infringement. You are sick of dope and dope is sick of you and the world somehow hasn’t gotten any softer in the interim, so what do you do?

There is something you believe in that got you here in the first place. It is the possibility of an end to suffering. This is as sufficient a north star as any. I return there, to that radiant possibility, and allow myself to suspend my cynicism for just long enough to step inside of it, and risk, once more, being touched.

---

10 Things to Which I Have Been Severely Addicted in my Adult Life

1. The belief that I am the exception to every rule, every standard, every law

2. Misery (my own and that of others)

3. Strawberry Supreme flavored “Kray-Kray” kratom gummies

4. Ignoring bids for connection from loved ones until they finally reflect my own feelings of unworthiness back to me

5. Certain voids

6. The sustained attention of beautiful women

7. Animal crackers

8. Forgiveness (my own and that of others)

9. Vietnamese codeine pills, crushed and dissolved into Laotian opium wine

10. Thinking, and the belief that thinking can out-think suffering

---

27 February, 14:53

Today I am haunted by the (very high) likelihood that any given personality’s most glaring issues will never be revealed to them—that we are all condemned to walk around with these gaping socio-spiritual wounds that nobody will ever have the grace or the tact or the strength of character to articulate back to us. The underwritten social contract to not offend will keep us from ever seeing our most crucial blind-spots. Callouses will grow around our most fertile doorways to awareness. We will speak with total clarity and occasional cruelty of one another’s most tender fault-lines, behind the backs of the people who most need to hear them, and we will relish in our ability to see so clearly how broken every single person except ourselves is. All of this will happen without our even noticing.

Odilon Redon, Il y eut peut-etre une vision premiere essayee dans la fleur (There was perhaps a first vision attempted in the flower) 1883, lithograph, Rosenwald Collection, 1951.10.459

For each person, there exists a corresponding string of words that could completely undo them. There is a summary of your impact on other people that, if presented to you without any pretense or buffering, would utterly shatter you. All of this is so disorienting because interiority feels like expertise: I live inside of this thing, what do you mean I can’t see it for what it really is?

---

---

I was gifted a helpful metaphor for understanding the innate limitations of self-understanding by a practitioner of chaos magick with whom I once washed dishes at a summer camp. “Think of it like this,” he said “the F.R.I.E.N.D.S universe is the only conceivable universe where the inhabitants of said universe can’t watch F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Every other universe could conceivably contain the show F.R.I.E.N.D.S, except for their own.”

In other words: living inside of the thing precludes your ever being able to experience the thing.

On the surface, this seems like a vaguely tragic situation, but I think it’s an act of extraordinary grace. Even deeper than I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member: because my karmic load is my own, because my neuroses are so perfectly calibrated to my system, to encounter these things externally would be so unbearably painful that such an encounter would essentially kill me.

The obscene violence of depression is the manner in which it forces a reckoning with the True Nature of Being, completely devoid of any compassion and reduced to its most base expression. The clarity, awful as it may be, is an invitation, but the valence is so dark and the material is so threatening that it’s nearly impossible to accept. There’s a wonderful moment in Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia when he seems to be grappling with this very conundrum:

(The depressed man) also seems to us justified in certain other self-accusations; it is merely that he has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened self criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.²

---

1 March, 2:31

Wittgenstein urges us: we must dismantle the edifice of our pride. Not our pride itself–God, no. Our world is vicious and cruel to those who have been stripped of their pride. No, the edifice of our pride, which is to say the performance—the external play of indications that we take ourselves seriously, that we actually believe in the singularity of our gifts.

Harold Edgerton, Bullet Through Balloons, 1959

This, in my eyes, is what makes a person boring: too wide of a gap between the actual experience of what it is to be in their orbit, and the edifice of their pride. It is not enough to have a personality–there has to be something more substantive, some offering–and everyone has it, everyone has some irreducibly unique offering that they’re trying so desperately to share, but sometimes the personality is too loud and the Mystery gets drowned out. Understated, subtle people, people in whom the Mystery is still visible and alive but not overtly expressed–these are the most interesting people to me, and it is such a tragedy to watch the slow devaluation of subtlety happening in real time.

Knausgaard understands:

“I have no problem with uninteresting or unoriginal people–they may have other, more important attributes, such as warmth, consideration, friendliness, a sense of humor, or talents such as being able to make a conversation flow…but I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.”³

For which modes of expression are our children rewarded? What subtle reinforcements do they receive that mutate them later on down the line, turning them into hideous monsters of ego?

---

10 Things That Are Infinitely More Interesting Than Your Personality

1. The songs, mating habits, and flight patterns of the world’s 11,000+ species of birds

2. Language itself

3. The facial expressions of a non-human primate

4. Most myths

5. The origins of any given phrase in any given language

6. The miraculously symmetrical, staggeringly complex structure of any given leaf or flower

7. The sound of rushing water

8. Pain

9. The history of tool-making among humans and non-human primates

10. The texture of silence

---

∞

You confess: you awoke with a sense that I’d stolen something from you. This was the same morning as Honor’s discovery of my astral body in her dream realm.

I too felt as though something had been stolen from me. The dream was as follows:

There was a whole other world inside of ours, accessible only by a hyperdimensional elevator of sorts. “This sort of travel isn’t supposed to be comfortable,” and I kept forgetting who it was that we had brought with us. Not only was nothing presently wrong there in middle-earth, but nothing had ever been wrong. The entire record was clear and everything was just beginning. Silverish pools dappled with light. Total ease, absolute relief from the sense of having to have “earned it”, “it” being such joy as can only be experienced when there hasn’t ever been a trace of misery, when even the memory of suffering has evaporated.

Gordon Parks, Sculpture, 1997

But we got lonely, was the issue. You wanted to be back among the misery-seekers on the earth’s surface. We got back in the elevator and you were so frightened, and whoever it was who’d come down there with us was trying to comfort you but it wasn’t working and I knew in my marrow that we were making the worst mistake of our lives.

The real struggle began when I tried to explain this other place, this middle-earth where everything was perfect, to the people on the campus (?) to which we returned. My argument was–where have we been for the last few weeks? Think about it–or–oh, did you not even notice we’d been gone?

Trying to explain it, failing to explain it, I felt my own belief in it ever having existed in the first place wavering with each botched explanation, each wave of doubt from the surface-dwelling misery-seekers who, even if a pitch-perfect explanation was presented, still would not understand for the simple reason that they didn’t want to, it was too disruptive, but that didn’t stop me, and I cried like an infant each time I tried in vain to convince them that such a place was real, I went there, it was real.

1. The fold is the most extreme expression of the very same downward-looking spinal collapse that one notes in every coffee shop, every crowded subway car, every public space which have now become little more than holding cells for all of us mass-hypnotized cocoon-dwelling fiends, no better and no worse are we than the fenty folders, who at least have the audacity to be extreme in their fixations.

2. Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916)

3. Knausgård, K. O. (2013). My Struggle, Book 2: A Man in Love (D. Bartlett, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.