Molecular mess #3*

I had come home from work around 6 p.m., watched some news with my wife, then ambled into the bedroom to empty my pockets and found myself, with no forethought, lying down and being semi-conscious to unconscious for the next five hours.  I hadn’t known I was tired – in fact may not have been tired.  So I wonder if it was the turning of part of the subterranean mood – my own personal ocean – to deliver its almost completely recondite truth.  I couldn’t call it depression exactly, or a sense of “end of the road” exactly.  Maybe it was some meaning down there that will always be invisible.  Maybe it was an anticipatory inchoate curtain, or exhaustion, or giving up, in touch with –

I already work Monday through Thursday and Saturday and have now added Fridays.  The weekend looks like paperwork; my wife is moving out west to get a head start for our family; the month’s income has been weak but is showing a nice but futile surge at the end.

Or maybe it was none of this.

At 11:30 I got up and took the dog out for our typical evening walk.  But this time I was in a unique (never-before-known) state: My brain did not engage, had no thoughts, had not given me any mood “program” positive or negative.  There was only the emptiness that felt the breeze, the quiet, the street lights, and the quietest inner state that deserves the name “molecular mess.”

I wonder if that’s who we all are, deep within, when we ditch all thoughts, all assumptions, all wordless attitudes, the silent resting on any laurels, current-events feelings.  What if our psychology equals that undifferentiated mass that consists of first birth templates and discrete things – earliest baby sensations – forming over time discrete impulses, then unspoken conclusions (“emotionalized attitudes” – Axline), fears that become thematic fears, nervous system feelings with unique or proprietary psychic meanings.  And then, as we grow, wider organisms of meaning – jubilant deathless feelings along with dead parts (lost childhood) that feel like needing to die; the scaffolding of adult persona: concrete reinforced and undermined by childish needs – Citizen Kane’s Rosebud – and meanings that we think are adult-mature  but are really our child’s need for love and touch and being-in-itself wonder.  Remember that there was a time, long ago, when our full meaning existed without our determining it, without our deciding that this or that cause or goal or credit was important.  Catching lightning bugs was all the meaning of the universe in itself.  The blinking glows, the summer night – all of meaning.

But then we think.  We think so much.  Haughty concatenations of words, ideas that become the scaffolding, the stilts we walk on forevermore.  These germs become diseases: philosophies and categories that include political ideologies and psychiatric labels, religious clubs and declarative meanings we give ourselves: I’m a failure, or I’m a success, or I’m good, or I’m “guilty” not to want to caretake my cold mother.  We live primarily in our head which declares tin-can truths and eternal truths with every utterance.  We bury in the forgotten past wonder and good ignorance, which would feel-see the molecular messes of people and the world and react with natural subtlety.

I suppose we all must paint everything, must believe that we know.  But I’ve proven, on my midnight walk with Simon the miniature schnauzer, that one can be observant or “experiant,” empty of all questions and feelings, and the world consents to it just fine.  And possibly, in touch with the “mess” by being it, we feel our original good – life before pain, questions and sentences.

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* See the earlier two posts, Oct. 6 and Oct. 10, 2013.