"Consciousness is a form of logic."
sometimes it happens by itself. i have to simply open my eyes, stand on my feet, and it's all there, wayne's world. alas, it often slips away as my thinking (reason) kicks in. suddenly i despair of ever getting through the day. effort, putting on my socks, shaving, fixing breakfast, it all becomes a matter of WILL and i soon use that up.
i don't always have a strategy to move on, especially if i don't have a plan. addictively, i can swallow a couple of tylenol. this my cheap way of escaping depression, despite the fact i don't know what it's doing to my liver. traveling, i discovered i recover upon taking a hot shower. maybe it's the pure pleasure of the warm water like a newly born immediately put in a basin and bathed.
yes, i still take prozac and usually that takes the edge off, even if i've lowered the dose. and if i can get through to noon something else kicks in. consciousness has done its work and reassembled enough of the universe for me to feel safe. think about it: at night i give up reason. that's the main thing i have to do for the mind to reboot twice.
and evidently my brain more active in slumber than in what i call waking. during the night everything is thrown up in the air: elephants, dragons, ladies-in-waiting. golf-carts transform in to spaceships and other freudian symbols. i've heard of lucid dreaming, where the sleeper can keep a measure of control. unfortunately, i've never reached this divine state.
one must be a god, i suppose, who never needs rest in order to keep everything in position, probably that's the power they have as gods. i have to let go, then in the morning put the table and chairs back together, i have to take everything i don't recognize and say to myself, 'this is the room where i live.' otherwise i fall into a form of stage fright.
an actor, suffering this condition, has to draw a small circle around herself and look carefully in it: her dirty fingernails, the split hair lying in her lap, the cracked glass from which she is supposed to drink. once she's grasped this tiny universe, she can gradually expand her vision, thus taking over the many floating impressions hitting her eyes.
hard for me to believe but four billion bits of information hit my eyeballs every second . i'm capable of perceiving forty at most. a person suffering schizophrenia can't do even this, overwhelmed by the treasure flooding the brain. there's no way out of it. i have to constantly form the life in which i can live. it's very tiring. sometimes i'd rather just jump off a bridge. and sometimes i survive by watching an ant in the dust.
finally, i know the face of my enemy: the clock face. just back from a month in australia and suffering the time between solstice and the new year, the dead space, i'm falling back into the abyss. can time ever be on my side? only in the case of sickness it seems, or maybe in a time of war. in other words when the dark clouds loom.
otherwise, the minutes and hours rope me in as though i were a wild steer. i'm driven to make appointments for the dentist, to arrive at work on time, to submit to deadlines. ah, dead indeed. true, the ultimate fear of hitting a wall can motivate me to do an astounding amount of work at the last moment. as someone wiser than myself said, "A goal without a deadline is but a dream."
how can travel, then, be an escape from time? don't trains have to be caught, museums opened. banks in business? can these treacherous waters be successfully sailed without a watch! no, but being on the road and not constrained by duty, that's where the freedom comes in. vacations exist as a timeless space, despite beginning and end. yes, the termination has to be forgotten in the luxury of spacing out.
and here we choose what to adhere to and what not. a journey of the best kind consists of our choices, not somebody else's. can there really be a working holiday? i doubt it, not for me. AND WHY DO WE WANT THE SPACE WHERE MINUTES DON'T TICK. they take us, those ticks and tocks, to an ultimate end. i still find it strange i am to die. it's very hard to imagine a universe without me.
and i think it's the human condition. as buddha said, 'try to find someone who has not lost someone.' can't be done. and aging seems to be a desperate attention to the time we may or may not have left. and we're around people obsessed with the same question. i see the worry in their eyes. and retirement isn't a vacation, having no end except the inevitable, simply a waiting game.
and what is sleep but death and the abolition of time. in the dream-state everything exists, side by side, morphing into opposites. i start the night male, as i fall asleep. soon i'm a prostitute on an empty street, suddenly picked up by three giant mice offering me a piece of cheese. if this isn't the beyond, i don't know what is. and isn't insomnia simply the fear of not returning? when i can't sleep, i find myself trying to solve the everyday problems of existence.
yes, time and sleep equal death. yet, if we can fall into the right rhythm, i escape both time and death. that's the paradox. and any journey to foreign territory is the same. "Everything you ever wanted lies just outside your comfort zone." time, death, and depression, what can they be but pattern repetition, wearing out our ability to focus on what's near us. and science reinforces time, everything in it based on it. no wonder so many people come to hate science.
what about art? can it do anything for us? hopefully, art takes us into a timeless space. the techniques and visions of art, when they work, have us floating free, in a brain wave of trance. art is a spiritual vacation. those who want us to be working drones fear art, downgrade it.'keep to the wheel', they say. no, if you want to defeat mortality, if only for a moment, go on the road, and stand before the mona lisa.
