Hindsight

“The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

The truth is that pain is a necessity. If life were not painful it would mean very little, and it is this that I would like to explore through one more time. My writing came to an end several years ago and all semblance of attention disappeared from me, including my ability to fixate of either literature, film or conversation. I have held the stage, and I have hollowed myself out with strange intent. Underneath this garment of flesh and veins is an even deeper pattern of consciousness indebted to the pain it receives from outwith. In order to express something silent it is only through vocalization, through the violence of communication that we might bring it across, and the more tenaciously that people hold onto this internal silence, this internal peacefulness, the more that opposing violence, that strange need for exploration outside of ourselves in order to see within, the more that opposing violence swelters the calm and thoughtful for they have not words, and have not given them their trust. The strangeness of religious and moral sentiment for me is not that it does not always have practical repercussions, but because there is a silent expectation of trust which does not go expressed, does not have the value of having been lived. And symbols from the past are rendered silent and even without purpose for the individual, for they have not been lived; a symbol, a sign, an order of things cannot alter someone's trust unless it aligns with what lies of the interior, which is always a different sort of crystallization.

Silently we know that there is a black hole being rendered inside of ourselves through time and through the acceptance of overarching principles and values. A legal system which remains as fixed structure regardless of the malleability of social values, a religion which entrusts itself to inflexible renditions of Biblical readings when the abstract is the keenest of values, can be read most flexibly and variously. It is like my earlier reading of Esdras, the apocryphal text of the Bible, which speaks of an event similar to the Eastern Tao; who could travel into the broad without having passed through the narrow, who might understand the separation and also confluence of flows within himself and other people without coming to understand values within himself first? The ancient wisdom of the past is not without value, but we of course need a certain intelligence and brevity to give it meaning for people of this age. It would be impossible to explain pain unless we were to give it a certain necessity of meaning, pleasure unless we allowed it is discontents. There we have the strangest of divides; the division of the pleasurable and the painful, the filling in and the hollowing out.