The older one becomes the less in the moment one feels, as if there was a specific time and place where life happened followed by an ever widening spiral of forlorn existence. Or not forlorn necessarily, perhaps untroubled but still looking back out of curiosity or foolish habit. I don’t imagine anyone escapes this imbalance entirely, but I should of course heed universalizing my own sentiments. I just think to some greater or lesser extent we all feel this magnetic pull of nostalgia, and with me it is lesser, but there, there enough to make me write about it.
The mid-life crisis, if not merely an invention of psychologists and advertisers, is the collapse of the forlorn inwards, backwards, towards the thought-fragment and umbilical-emotions associated with the genus of our life, chasing phantoms like a modern Heathcliff. It weighs on all of us who are in our thirties and forties as a threshold of sorts between right and wrong, sane and insane… do not become that person, or do become that person in all the ways that transgressions can be desired. Either way I think we all feel the pull and the stakes of action, or inaction for that matter. Despite the over-saturation of the ‘mid-life’ crisis’ concept there is something unspoken about this, about the middling experience of longing that carries over a long period of time but which never boils over. I want to document it here for myself, between bouts of amnesia.
I miss my old friends. I mean every single person I had ‘the talk’ with (or ‘the understanding’ with is perhaps a better way of phrasing it). But why miss it when it can be reproduced in the here and now? I have no idea what ‘friendship’ is. I know Montaigne had a lot to say about it and the sort of friendship he described really did not pertain to anything I understood through my life. I have acquaintances if that is the case, and other people have friends. But that is not true, I had friends, and have friends, but never consistently, not in the absolute sense of Montaigne, but, as the tired metaphor goes, like two ships passing in the night, or, better, like subatomic particles which reside sometimes in our universe and sometimes in an alternate one.
Move on, move on. This ebb and flow can really do a person in if they are not above the weather at times, and there was a time in my life where I knew nothing but that ebb and flow ad nauseum, so I speak from experience. Interesting that I would bring that up.
I miss writing like this for myself and a select few in emails and on my original blog, before the world expanded. This is URGENCY scrambled into sentences, this is stepping to the threshold of understanding but not nearly understanding (that 0.01% before is everything, you know). I do not know how to write myself back but this is evidence that I am trying.
In the end it is not what is said but how and why it is attempted, the mitigating circumstances through which the will is consecrated: the lovely stammering of meaning. I miss that too.
this is me taking the um back and running with it.