You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
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It is very difficult not to constantly be crushed by the weight of a disintegrating world We are at several intersections of destruction which have never been reached before and is moving at a hyper-accelerated speed. I don’t know if there’s virtue in constantly exploring it, but it feels like I’m attempting to reanimate a corpse-self to ignore it and instead indulge whatever other frivolous half thoughts I may have. It’s like stepping off the sea shelf but there’s never a drop off into the sea. I don’t know how anyone is content. E said to me once, the things that move you are really macroscopic And I come back to this a lot — I find most peoples ability to split and remain unfazed through the drudgery of the day to day while we are being extinguished repellent and maddening. That isn’t to say that I believe I am more useful. I can’t place myself just as well. I picked up a slim book on a whim to finish while I wait for my next batch of reading to arrive: Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich. I had never heard of him and it turns out this novel was originally published in 1973, only recently rediscovered and translated into English in 2022. In part of it, the main character, Leo, is letting the night take him where it may when he starts ruminating with his companion on how the world has shifted into something unrecognizable: “Nothing’s the way it used to be.” “We’re living in quite depressing times, but what can we do about it? We have no choice.” Do we have a choice? We do. But it’s much bleaker than one can truly grapple with alone. We need each other and we are very late to the party. We can break down our uselessness into points, we can explore why we are so disempowered and disorganized, but fundamentally I can’t help but feel we are an unmoved people. As a whole. There’s no bite. And Americans are proud of this: they wear it with hateful irony, (which really just betrays a deep sense of self-contempt) — compulsively memeing every part of existence they encounter, incidentally, of course. I don’t have an answer. The passage continues on, “It’s stupid,” she said softly. “What is?” “Feeling nostalgic for something we never had.” I don’t have any answers but I can recognize the infirm nature of those around me and it’s enraging. The anger is always below my surface and it is never quelled. I feel a shell hardening around me. I used to be more fleshy and exposed — like a cat rolling on its back, exposing a vulnerable stomach: you-can-kill-me-I-trust-you-not-to The walls that are up now are higher, I feel like it’s harder for me to peer through them or out beyond them, at once. And I don’t know that they’ll come down. Recoiling from a hand coming towards me — I asked my dreams to show me something true. I ask: Show me the truth? Show me what is true — And then I dream it. I remember these dreams like how you know how the light comes in through your window at a certain time of day and lays spilled out on the floor, or curved against different objects, but you can’t paint or draw it from memory alone. It’s like sleeping in the sun, some kind of cellular recollection that can’t be qualified What feels like dreams: when you feel slow moving and heavy limbed, treading water, sleeping in the winter when it has snowed and the sky doesn’t darken all the way, half-asleep sex. There is pleasure in dreaming and in stirring from sleep into waking life. There’s also grief — It’s like death and birth in whichever order I had a dream I kept voluntarily entering a prison because a person I loved was there. I was searching for my love for them. I was desperate. The prisoners kept turning me out: You don’t belong here I had another dream I was in a house that broke away from land and was adrift on an angry sea. The house was haunted and the humans were gone and I felt I needed to be exorcised. I know these dreams were warnings.
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