An Optimistic Post ...

I feel a strong urge to write to you, as it’s been quite a while, and I miss our connection, which is very meaningful to me. But I’ve been waiting till I had some good news for you, and my overall experience in this recent period has been pretty much unrelievedly dismal.

But as I started typing just now — or maybe just before I began typing, when I first felt the impulse in my fingers — it struck me that my perception of my situation has been largely untrue. Which is to say, what I am trying to type to you is truer than the voice that speaks to me from within my own brain.

My brain, with low-mood chemicals sloshing around in there, is telling me to give up, that my situation is hopeless, that I’ll never get better.

But these fingers that are typing to you know that there is hope — for me, and for us (you know what I’m talking about). My fingertips, pressing on the keyboard, can almost touch the beauty that is evident in the world around me — starting with my family, and my friends, and very much including you, my correspondents.

Perhaps my finger-brains are freed, somewhat, from the centralized dominance of my head-brain’s consciousness, which has been hijacked by genetic flaws. Sara is sewing a beautiful shirt for me in the kitchen. I’ve learned of ancestors — long-ago Brothers Kornbluth — who were tailors. An ancient photo of these classy gentlemen stares into the tiny minds of my 10 digits, where I receive warmth, hope, and the desperate expectation of joy from ancestors who made beautiful things to wear, little realizing that their gaze would one day lock into that of their somewhat mentally damaged descendant. Meanwhile my centralized, totalitarian-ish brain subjects the same image to a fisheye lens, distorting the handsome faces into garish troll-people.

I’ve overheard enough Netflix documentaries about octopuses to know (or at least to think I know) that they have brains distributed into each of their eight tentacles. (Please feel free to correct me in Comments.) If so, perhaps my un-nihilistic self has been redistributed into a kind of … decapus? An extreme solution to an extreme problem: The “I” of me has been brainwashed, and only the “us” of me (of we?) can free themselves from rogue chemistry’s shackles.

Yes, I can’t follow any of what I just wrote either! It’s not you!

Or, rather, it is you. You who are allowing me to decentralize, who are democratizing my soul.

Share

My father once said that he and my mom had to walk out of an underwater documentary because she was so freaked out by how human the octopus’s eyeballs looked. (Dad was responding the same way, and was relieved to escape.)

Where was I?

Oh, this: I know — my fingers know — that the world, even given all the suffering, is suffused with beauty. They know that this is because for a brief time, each of us is granted perception of the universe we are a tiny part of. Even when that perception is distorted into ugliness by endogenous forces.

Centralized me feels doomed. Decentralized me knows that this is untrue. Because I have gotten to experience the generous love of craftspeople whose own fingers are often tired.

In my head it is late, very late. But as I reach out to you — and feel you reaching back — I sense, somehow, that it is very close to dawn.