Holding itself together is Life’s main job. We create ourselves out of the bits and pieces of stuff lying around and then spend the rest of our time desperately grabbing at the detritus of ourselves as time rapidly and indifferently happens and our bits and pieces crumble into dust and atoms that we can no longer grasp. It happens to us at different rates, those who have health problems in our youth perhaps witness the horror of our helplessness a little earlier than most. And sometimes there is an ugliness residing within those of us who have young broken bodies because we see the dumb bewilderment and despair on the faces of people who only experience physical suffering in their elderly years and our sympathy for them is tempered with the bitter knowledge that they never had the wisdom of experience to comprehend our own sort of agony when we needed it. So they are as alone in their pain as we are because we hate them for suffering at a slightly different frame rate to us. We are not as compassionate as we think we are and admitting that about ourselves is perhaps the most compassionate thing we can do. Hold my hand, tell me you love me, but don’t pretend you understand and I will do the same for you. Suffering is universal yet painfully solitary.
I am furious all the time. Furious at my mortality, furious because when I scream “help!” nobody can because that’s just not how it works, furious at myself for being so deeply involved in this, for not being Zen enough, Buddhist enough to rise above this. Sometimes I can sit with this. Often I can’t.
Holding oneself together is a full-time job, a hard job. Lately my edges have felt particularly crumbly and I haven’t been able to hold my consciousness above it, instead it is like I want to succumb to the violence of disintegration and in fact contribute to it, like I can no longer endure this laborious process of paddling my kayak upstream but if I paddle while going down with the current, it will be fast and glorious. But then everything will be over quicker which I don’t want because my belief systems have me close to certain that there is nothing over the waterfall but for empty oblivion and despite everything, I adore being alive. In fact, that’s what makes it so fucking hard, this goddamn mortal shell. This moronically limited mass of meat, fat, bones, genetics, electrical signals and emotional baggage. Biological machines are by their very nature imperfect, life has a desire to exist but there is no law of the universe saying it has to be easy.
Today is one of those days where I wake up sore. It’s perhaps been been months since I’ve had a proper sleep because my body is failing me again. I woke up with no fight in me, I would probably fall into one of those depressions where you sleep all day but for the fact that my body won’t allow that sort of escapism. So… I don’t know what have been doing with myself today. Drifting. Wearing my ugly grey dressing gown and filling the sink up with hot water to do the dishes. Trembling with frustrated fury.
I screamed in rage and hurled a glass at the ground. What had been a functional object of substance, of density and mass, shattered into tiny fragments. For a beat, I felt horror and shame but one of the luxuries of being home alone is that you get to be crazy when you need to and so I started taking photos with my phone. Then I grabbed another glass, launched it at the kitchen floor and delighted in the eruption of my colourful cup from Kmart.
I luxuriated in the madness of it, of wasting resources, money, of creating the loud and ugly sort of sounds that might disturb the neighbours, of watching benign objects that I had comfortably lived with exploding into dangerous slivers that can get stuck under the skin and draw blood. It was the most fucking beautiful thing I had made in years. A moment of violent intensity glittering amongst the mundanity of domesticity. I broke two more glasses and then I stopped. A cacophony of clucking, the neighbour’s chickens must have been startled by the sounds. Maybe I smiled.
I felt better. The light and colour through the glass moved me and I took more photos, dodgy documentation that is not the actual experience. I felt better. I cleaned up. I resolved to feel no shame about this, to strive not to hide the ways in which being broken breaks me but to accept this non-acceptance as part of the price of existing. To write about these things and share these things and allow myself to fall into these things, do not be afraid of the mundane ugliness of it all but to find the poetry in the misery.
For a brief while I had a lover who used the word “catharsis” a lot. He understood something about that which has stuck with me. Broken glass is fucking beautiful.
