Darkness Here

Darkness Here

As I walk the evening stars
Map the halls of my memory,

And stars, though bright,
Provide no light for here,

But radiate there,
Where as fires they light dark space.

There's darkness here,
And I can hardly square

What was with what's to come,
Or why the luminous ball fell

And shattered with my dreams.
And all the more, now, to hear

The echoes of that crash,
And not to say "It's this, or that,"

But simply to receive
And to accept the painful fact.

Spring Rain

Spring Rain

She gazed at the pavement, with water dripping down her yellow poncho.  She hadn't moved for five minutes, and I was beginning to wonder what was wrong.  I wanted to speak to her without disturbing her tranquility.  It was to defeat a sadness, whether in her or me, that I stuck out my hand and said, "Hi, I'm Ryan."  Her hands were in the pockets of her poncho, and before she pulled out her right hand she slowly looked up.  Her eyes were a soft green and bloodshot, and untouched tears rolled down her light brown cheeks.

"Hi," she said, shaking my hand.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," I said.

"No, it's okay." Her gaze was gentle, and while holding my eyes up to hers I felt a light pleasure permeate my mind.  She was more attractive than I had originally thought.  A nagging voice suggested that she was too beautiful for me.  "Are you a freshman too?"

"A junior," I said.  "Why, do I look like a freshman?"

"No, I was just making conversation."  She took a crumpled tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose.

"I'm sorry you're upset about something," I said.

"Oh, I'm just imitating the weather.  Sometimes the skies just need to open up."

"Where are you from?"

"A city in Ohio called Steubenville."

"No wonder.  Here strangers don't really talk to each other.  I'm a Midwesterner at heart.  If I had a choice, I would have grown up in the Midwest."

"Where did you grow up?"

"Here in the city."

"Wow, a real New Yorker.  I hardly ever meet anyone who's actually from New York."  Her eyes lit up with sincere excitement, but it was fleeting, and sighing, she fell back into her gentle sadness.  "You don't have an accent or anything."

"I know, I like to think I speak with the universal accent, the kind you hear on TV.  Everyone who gets a certain type of education has it."

"I'm glad southerners aren't educated that way," she said, a look of determination passing across her face.  "what we have is a sort of lack of an accent.  I wish I had an exquisite accent, it would make me more interesting.  When an accent is good it really holds peoples' attention.  I bet no one ever interrupted Robert E. Lee.  There was a man with authority and an accent."

"He didn't have an accent to other Southerners, though.  He just sounded normal to them."

"Kind of like how the city must seem normal to you," she said.  "I don't think it could ever be normal to me."

"It's funny, I don't think a person ever quite gets used to the city.  It's always just a little bit abrasive, a little bit intense."

"You should move to the Midwest then and get some peace."

"Maybe I will."  There was a lull in the conversation, and she dropped her gaze down to the wet pavement.  As I stole a glance at her, I realized that she reminded me of a painting I once saw of the Virgin at the presentation in the Temple, when Simeon tells her that a sword will pierce her heart.  There was some physical resemblance between them, but what was more striking was the way the two seemed to have the same sad silence.  I felt the need to draw close to her, to free her from her sadness.  Maybe she had a problem she couldn't discuss with anyone, and it would evaporate the minute she described it.

"I lost my uncle this past year," I said, hoping to initiate a mutual openness, albeit premature.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yeah, we were really close.  He and I used to play catch on Saturday mornings.  We played in front of the wall of a building, and he would crouch down as a catcher, and I would hurl the ball at him as hard as I could.  We had to stop because he said I was going to break his hand."

"How did he die?"

"Cancer.  He got chemo and everything, lost his hair, but it didn't work."

"It must be difficult losing someone close like that," she said.  The rain had stopped, and the sun was coming out.  She took off her poncho and thoughtfully shook it out, then folded it and placed it under her arm.  "I can't imagine what that's like."  So no one near her had died.

"You've never lost a relative?" I asked.

"A couple of grandparents, but I didn't know them very well.  No one very close to me has ever died," she said, "I'm very lucky."

"That's good.  Have you gotten your midterms back yet?" I thought I would take another tack.

"Yes, and I did really well!" she said, smiling for a moment.  "One of my teachers served coffee during the midterm, and when he got to me he spilled it all over my desk, so I got an extra hour."

"That's Dr. Simon, isn't it?"

"Yeah.  Oh look, here comes a bus.  It's not the one I want, though."

"This is my bus," I said, disappointed.

"Well it's been lovely talking to you.  Maybe I'll see you around," she said.

"Yes, I hope so.  I haven't asked you your name."

"Abby."  I boarded the bus and glanced at her as it pulled away from the sidewalk.

I saw her around campus, and she maintained her mysterious sadness.  It was strange, because it didn't make the people around her sad.  They were usually smiling and laughing.  She even radiated a certain joy, yet the sadness persisted.

About a month after I met her I went to the campus health center for a sore throat.  There she was, sitting in the waiting room.  I walked over and sat next to her.  "What're you in for?" I asked.

"I'm meeting with the counselor," she said.

"Oh, I hope it's nothing serious."

"No, not really."  She leaned toward me, put her hand up to my ear, and whispered, "I'm bipolar."

I almost said "of course you're bipolar," but instead I just nodded and said "Oh."

 

A Poem I Wrote - Evening into Night

Evening into Night

The evening sky,

 My woven fantasy

I'd love her

With a sweet caress,

And would not alter

What I could not reach.

She flows into my eye,

 The gentlest sun

 Is falling, softly,
 Into unknown depths;

I’d follow her

On downy wings

But then she would

Just rise,

Forever and forever

Around the curving globe.

Perhaps she sinks

Into my questioning heart,

And echoing doubts

Dissolve like dark in light,

And in those depths

She warms me through the night.

Notes on the Current Age

Among many Americans, a worldview has gained traction and become so prevalent that it has eclipsed postmodernism as the characteristic outlook of the age - A good term for it is "Emotivism" - The emotivist judges his or her world according to positive and negative feelings, which are produced by (often subconscious) emotions - In the general culture, when a person reacts to something with a positive feeling, he considers it "good," and when he reacts to something with a negative feeling, he considers it "bad." - In current high culture, negative feeling, or suffering, is often liked, and thus considered "true," because it puts the person in contact with the general darkness of the subject and his world - A clear divide between the general culture and current high culture.

Primacy of feeling in general culture - Emphasis on the feeling subject - Things make sense and are perceived as relating to one another exclusively within the person, on the level of feeling, rather than an objective, exterior one (e.g. "I'll vote for X for mayor because I feel like he's a good guy," rather than "I'll vote for X because he was a CEO, and so has leadership experience...") - Can become as extreme as "I feel like this sunset is just like our cat Binxy" - Things are “true” because they are “liked” - Two contradictory ideas can be maintained at once, if the person likes them both (e.g. "I feel like every person has the right to define her world," while maintaining "He has no right to trespass on my property.") - A good person is someone who makes one feel good - A good action is one that feels right.

In emotivism the nucleus of the person, the heart, is thought to primarily produce emotional reactions and feelings - Identity gets heavily tied up in how one reacts emotionally to stimuli - Spontaneity of emotion is coveted - Gusto is coveted - Variety of stimuli (experience of new things) is coveted because it brings out a variety of emotional responses - One begins to seek out more intense stimuli - Youth is prized because it is the time when emotions are strongest (and prized for other reasons as well) - "Love" is purely emotional - Where there are no feelings or positive emotions, there is no "love" - Relationships oscillate between positivity and negativity, depending on the feelings of the people involved - Romantic relationships are intense, but often short-lived.

In general culture, personal engagement during leisure generally takes place at the level of entertainment rather than intellection or intuition - Sex and violence, two deep human impulses, become desirable as imagized through film and pornography - People increasingly relate to images and ideas rather than to persons - Strong emotions for immaterial ideas and images often cause frustration and abstraction (absent-mindedness, AKA inability to listen) - People are often not aware of the images and ideas they are passionate about.  This leads to interior noise that drowns out movements of the heart.

Many friendships occur in a meeting of images and ideas - A friend is satisfied when the image his friend projects bolsters and accompanies the image he himself is trying to project - Ideas are primarily possessed emotionally rather than intellectually, so disagreement is seen as a danger to friendship, which is couched in positive feeling; there is thus a uniformity of ideas among friends - Individuals may hide their ideas to fit in, but with the dissolution of the family, friendship and television increasingly become the locations of inculturation, so young people receive all their ideas from the same sources, and do not receive many ideas they feel the need to hide - Television is image-oriented, and so is youthful friendship, so the creation and nurturing of a likable image becomes an obsession from a young age.

Through exertion that is often subconscious, the self gradually becomes located in the self-image - But a person is far more complex and deep than a single image, so from a young age people put a great deal of effort into rejecting those aspects of themselves that do not fit their images, lest those aspects pop out at the wrong time and at best embarrass them, at worse turn their friends against them - This rejection of self leads to self-loathing, as well as low self-esteem (ironically, emotivism produces its principal evil, low self-esteem) - Emotovism’s myth that a person has the power to decide who he is necessarily runs up against who he actually is, which includes the parts of himself that he rejected for the sake of his self-image.  This collision is part of what makes up the "quarter-life crisis," - The youth-image hits a wall, shatters - One is compelled to accept some of his weaknesses, and a more mature image is put in in the place of the old.

With the obscuring of the heart, the understanding of personhood dissolves - Man, formerly elevated, dissolves into surroundings, whether nature or machine - A person's perception increasingly ceases to favor persons - Fundamental confusion about what is important - Admitted imperfect knowledge of what is important - Imperfection is treated with suspicion, so importance itself is thrown out and deemed indiscernible - Object-oriented perception, that one thing is important at a given moment, begins to dissolve - Loss of focus, loss of clarity of vision - Action becomes increasingly random - People reach out for life preservers, and find easily accessed paradigms (e.g. New Age religion) - Paradigms, dismissed in postmodernism as metanarratives, are grasped and applied intensely and without much reflection - Emotional satisfaction is seen as the primary goal when paradigms are applied.  The paradigm is often discarded once it becomes emotionally unsatisfactory (though the emotivist may hold on to parts of it that he likes), and another paradigm is sought out.

Emotivism holds on to certain aspects of postmodernity - Irony: Allows one to emote in ways one would not normally permit oneself to emote, to experience desired emotions while protecting one’s image as being a person who ultimately does not care about things that run deeper than his image permits - Alienation: People share good feeling, but it is ultimately at the level of image, and therefore friends do not connect at the level that truly satisfies - Fragmentation: A person can feel good about something, then bad about it, then good again, without ever knowing why; feelings often don’t fit into paradigms, they occur at random, and the purely emotive person witnesses a seemingly random world, made up of values that the emotivist has picked and chosen for himself from various paradigms - Abstraction: the person increasingly feels for images and ideas rather than persons and objects.

Emotivism rejects certain aspects of postmodernity - Erudition - Coerced acceptance of the opinions of experts - Rejection of metanarratives (they are acceptable so long as they are emotionally satisfying, which they often are) - Marginalization of poetry - Active metaphysical denial - Irony for irony’s sake (irony now serves what is deemed a higher purpose).

Emotivism and modernity - The modern principle that one can do whatever he wants so long as he doesn’t hurt anyone is being combined with the primacy of emotions to produce the notion that one does not have the right to hurt another’s feelings - Peoples’ beliefs will be increasingly policed, so that no one will be permitted to believe that another person does anything “wrong” or “bad,” since that might lead to feelings of guilt and persecution.

Daily life of the emotivist - Young people often dislike their work, and live for the weekend - The most obvious reason for this is that work is difficult, but part of this difficulty is that work often forces one to transcend emotion and engage the world on the level of thought, because it is economically expedient to do so - Weekend nights are a time when one can get drunk and express emotions suppressed during the week - Thought and feeling are separated and compartmentalized - Unity of thought and feeling in work occurs only in those who "love what they do" in a way that transcends moment-to-moment feeling by means of commitment.

Emotivism and self-image - People generally don't permit themselves to care deeply about things - Intense emotion is only acceptable in playing and watching sports - It's better to have an emotional relationship with sports than an intellectual one - The image of "nerd" is acceptably intellectual, though a nerd's leisurely intellectual activity is expected to be frivolous.

In current high culture - There is an authority of the sufferer - Sufferer/sinner seen as having "true perspective" - The world must be felt, and since it is considered a dark place, the person who feels darkness, depression, is closest to the way things are - Authority of the mentally ill, who have a special knowledge of things as intellectual sufferers - Many influential essays and stories about mental illness - Death is the ultimate reality - Life is quaint - Rejection of the quotidian - The bent perspective of the mentally ill is seen as a frontier in the  search for newness of feeling.