Delirium and Drift

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” 

- Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

It is so unnatural to even return here, after so much. One might question returning to an old haunt, where everything has been so long dead, but there is a debt which cannot be forfeited, a collapsing star back then that went unnoticed. These past years have passed by in such an unclear manner that I may even have forgotten that I was living, merely existing in this loose fabric of time, stuttering out the minor parts of a much longer story. Ever since I can remember it was this way; losing footing, losing my way because of some underlying suffering that I could never resolve. It expressed itself uncannily, through a high bound empathy with all suffering, it brought me down, it dictated the terms of a reality that was incompatible with actual reality. Two worlds; that of the impossible dream and the actual realities where emotional resilience is not so commonplace.

So let me be very clear in what I say: intelligence can only bring us so far; there are such things as poverty of the pocket as there is poverty of the soul. Rich, tapestried intelligence can be sequestered away by the most commonplace sufferings, the convoluted reality that is so mercilessly hidden under logic, statistics, and reasoning. This is why for me to say anything simply, it is at once so difficult, and at the same time highly unfair. There is a coercion afoot, a polite social reshuffling in which wants come before needs, wherein the soul is left in despair, whilst the intelligence thrives in its monstrous homogeneity. The authors can no longer alleviate the kind of spiritual poverty, the kind of loneliness that I am trying to describe. Once the world becomes aware of need, it distances itself. Real, raw need, for spirituality, for sustenance, for emotional connection. All of this so suppressed under a seeming ordinary world.

The logic of this modern man is so dreadful, so comprised of microfascisms and territorial behaviour, advanced and affirmed by logic, by a certain scientific criteria. There is a reason for my aversion to the scientific understanding of man; it is incomplete. It discredits spiritual belief whilst affirming in its very system of the universe that the universe is infinitely mysterious. The same with man, the same with every neighbour you will have. Infinitely potential, unremittingly solipsistic. The belief that man stands by himself, the growing inequality of man, can only mean that we have not learned that our greatest strengths lie in knowing one another, in forgetting ourselves and any ideologies we might have in the favour of a fluid and flowing figure of man, that of which gender is mutable, in which difference is magnetism, in which we are wholesome and winsome creatures, capable of being ourselves.