Re-learning
The act of coveting has become a blind obsession. In one sense, you could say it’s a form of ecstasy, in the original sense of the word, ex-stasis, to move outside oneself. On the other hand, you could say that looking at the world as a set of potential photographs untimely serves only to remove one from the reality you were seeking to observe. As with anything, there’s a balance to be found. But finding that balance would involve possessing a state of mind, and serious volition, a sensibility and a curiosity towards life beyond the superficial transitory cheap thrills that now define me. Like the Paraguayan anarchist Rafael Barrett said: "While I possessed nothing but my catre and my books, I was happy. I now own nine hens and a rooster, and my soul is disturbed. Property has made me cruel […] Where is my old peace of mind? I'm poisoned by distrust and hatred. Evil spirit has taken over me.” I have two weeks off to centre my soul. Re-learning to look at world. But I won’t. Instead, it’s Naked Lunch and Karak tea for me, sat on cafe terraces beside Tunisians smoking shishas and clearing their throats, wringing their hands at the passing girls like flies on a turd. No different to me. Disembodied lust, lascivious indulgence, an excess of empty longing. We’re all just big kids in expensive suits out here. I no longer give myself over to anything, or observe things as they are or stop to enquire, I never look at things stripped of their instrumental value, all the while knowing these acts of coveting and indulgence are formed out of, and lead to, my own misery. My life has become that of a hungry ghost. Sitting in expensive restaurants alone, living other people’s conversations, borrowing their smiles in place of my own, vague snippets of worn-out beauty appropriated from afar. There’s nothing I’d like to do or see I’d just as easily not do or see. I even turned down a night with three girls on New Year’s Eve, in favour of walking alone by the sea in the dark. The feast is finished, because it never began. And yet I seek it out constantly. A halfway hedonist, a junky’s understudy: peering over the pages of last month’s Gulf Times, dark flickers of fear and lust in my eyes, sentencing every passing stranger: studying the strength of every man I see, the beauty of every woman I witness. No book could ever capture the sound of a woman’s laughter. No book could ever capture the breezes so soft you have to close your eyes. And yet reality, I finally believe, is enhanced, not betrayed, by the semblance given to it by art; in the same way that the veil doesn’t hide a woman’s beauty, but creates it. So I’ll go on sipping little cups of this and that in the fancy little uptown joints, until the chink and murmur of the high-toned chatter either fades away or becomes deafening, everyone grinning over little plates of this and that, their kneading mouths a blur of who saw who where and what was said and lunch tomorrow would be simply divine. The slow nods, the quick agreements, the unheard words as each of us seeks to assert our own inconsequential views and offend the December evening with our stale avarice and fragile flashbulb souls. “The upside of being old and tired,” Clive James wrote, approaching death, “is that a little thing like a finch’s call sounds like heaven.” But we always leave it so late. We take so much of life for granted. How many mornings, how many minutes, do we really appreciate being alive for the miracle it is? Just being here would be enough, the necessary and sufficient end in itself. Here I go again. Mental masturbation. Forty five minutes now pontificating while dedicating. It’s drying around the little hairs. Forget stream of consciousness. It's just a stream of shit. Trying to pass off my sorry as art. Trying to communicate with dead men because I’m too far stuck up my own ass to make any friends. All the while knowing the parade of sterile taste and feeble handshakes and elevator jazz and loveless sexual encounters and blindly bending to the whims of my desire is carrying me away and taking my place. We are all sensation junkies. Another day of life passes us by. Of life. Something so sacred, so valuable, so miraculous to billions of people. Yet totally forgotten and taken for granted by billions more. Forget what was said about the rich being unable to enter the kingdom of heaven: we are cut off now from life itself! Too busy looking at our own gilded reflections and burdened by the weight of our avarice to ever actually enjoy the splendours already at our table! Getting nowhere in a hurry. If we sit down with a quiet heart and an open mind, we all know what to do, how to live, how to act. Be kind to others, practice simplicity, live each day like it was our last and not worry too much as everything will happen in its own time in the end. Better to not always think about what we want from life, but what the world might require from us. The thing is doing it. Why not start now? Right now. I remember a time when I burned completely, when I gave myself over to everything, with an unburdened curiosity towards life and living, with no thought of time or appearance or haunted by uncertainty; when I lived for and with the mountains, the sea, the old quiet cities, the being-on-your-way thrill that is always already there waiting to screw in all your senses at once like a florescent bulb: When I would go out early in dawn’s blue half-light, shivering and cold, leaving a warm woman waiting, the rhythm of my blood coursing through everything more wholesome and certain and final. An end it itself, though a journey. I never once regretted going out early. In Tarragona, by the sea with the cobbled alleyways; in Tangiers, with the pre-dawn tea near the port in a fog of ghostly Arabic mumblings; in Iruja, with the blonde Swede and desert highways and being drunk with friends by the lake; sleeping on rooftops in Ait Benhaddou etc etc. When the dawn seeps under the door and drags you out. The air still thin. Rucksack heavy at first. Something reaches into you, and drags you out. Something beyond us, yet ourselves. It is at the same time so completely personal and private, yet something we all share, that reminds us we are not separate beings. The heart wrenching sense of longing for a place you never knew before, and still didn’t leave, and which has nothing to do with the place itself. The old country roads ever-receding out over the horizon. While a few stars still remain overhead. And the mountains and rivers without end. Borges once wrote that “after some time, one learns the subtle difference, between holding a hand, and chaining a soul.” So few of us ever learn to live by this and instead fall into the old quotidian habit patterns of work, family, eat, sleep. But these really are trivial matters. Petty worries that could be overcome with a bit of elbow grease and a few days in the pool or in a library or manual labour. Far greater concerns are afoot! Those voiced a century ago by the great political thinker Rafeal Barrett. His arguments were not new, and they aren’t now, but they are eloquently laid out and, as the chasm between rich and poor begins to yawn again, his words carry great importance: “Nine tenths of the world’s population, thanks to written laws, know the degradation of poverty […] that extravagant waste of human energy. The law rides roughshod over the mother’s womb!” It is not enough, says Barrett, to substitute one set of restraints for another: humanity must throw off the old shackles of inequality all together if it is to fulfil not only its potential but its duty to live well as citizens, as custodians of the earth. Lofty ideals, to be sure. But as Barrett says: “The sailor plots his course by the stars.” If we should not be guided by ideals, then by what? Social inequality has become engrained in the human mode of existence to such a degree that it appears to be a natural phenomenon. But one doesn’t need to be very learned in Sociology or History to understand the intrinsic flaws and shortsightedness of so-called civilised society: “The majesty of the Universe shines above us and makes our humble exertions sacred. Little though we may be, we shall be all, provided we give ourselves completely […] Our mission is to broadcast our body parts and our intellect; to open up our insides until our genius and our blood spill on to the earth. We exist only insofar as we give.” We can say that there is no greater joy than coming face to face with the largely incommunicable pleasure of touching and being touched, watching and being watched, that essential yet allusive affirmation of our existence as conscious body-subjects, whereby momentarily there is an as it were ‘lifting of the veil’, a stepping into the light. We move outside ourselves in those moments of ecstasy, in a very real way, become ourselves when we give ourselves over to another. And in the manner in which we sense and touch and see consciousness externally, succeed in interacting with the world from a new perspective which is, in fact, our own. From a moral standpoint, as well as a perceptual one, we all too often see others in the third person, as part of the 'furniture of the world’, rather than as first person ends-in-themselves. It is the nature of consciousness to forget its own phenomena. “Perception hides itself from itself”, writes Merleau-Ponty. We are understandably absorbed in the objects of consciousness experience, in the world around us. Yet we never completely give ourselves over to these things, or immerse ourselves in phenomena with real attention, instead in habit and the vagueness of routine. In this middle distance we lose sight of our own experience, until we decide to deliberately examine it, whence it is always already there. Merleau-Ponty writes that “We must think of the human body (and not consciousness) as that which perceives nature which it also inhabits”. His ontological reversibility of the body, the other and the world is rooted in the notion that perception at a pre-reflective level is grounded in embodiment and, in broad more simplistic terms, a kind of Taoist theory of existence which, in terms of morality and freedom, entreaties us to integrate our lives more intimately with the earth itself, by treating others as ends in themselves, overcoming the habitual modes of thought (which leave us in a no man’s land between experience and world whilst not fully amercing ourselves in neither) and to realign our existence more closely with natures own rhythms, and with things-in-themselves. We should seek to live as much as possible, for the good simple things: Sex, a good book, little Sunday morning walks, being in nature… the quiet glorious moments in life when you realise it’s not only worth being on earth, but miraculous. "Our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the absolute value of anything, even / especially the totality of death. We cannot help but imagine that our own consciousness endures," writes neuroscientist David Linden. Governments have historically leveraged this predisposition in the form of the "pie in the sky when you die" promise to keep the lower classes subservient. Instead, we ought to savour life's sweetness, knowing that it will be proceeded by nothing, nothing forever. And so I offer up my prayers to the stars, and to myself: that I might escape this air-conditioned nightmare of steel and glass and pious interminable bickering, and get back to the land, and learn once again to give myself over to the simple things and patient rhythms of life itself, as they are all that matters and bind us to the unknown. I pray that I might regain a degree of curiosity and easy-mindedness because, as Barrett says, “the only crime is sterility.” So I pray that we can all hold onto the simple things, and at the same time learn the value of letting go, with a kind of detached vigour, the same kind of laid-back seriousness you see of little old Japanese men walking down country roads in the movies. And as the old saying goes: be in the world, but not of it. Amen.
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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