Sanitation
It’s 3 a.m. and I’m reading your writing at first because I want to see myself through someone else’s eyes. Is everyone as obsessed with that as I am? It’s like a drug to me. I want to take and take and take. But maybe it’s just another way of un-becoming. To extract myself from my skull, to pluck my eyes from their sockets and look through someone else’s. To read myself as a character in a book. Consciousness is exhausting. Borrowing another person’s feels like a vacation. If it is one of our fundamental human desires to be in community, why are our heads such lonely places? And why do I feel more at home in others’ ideas of me than I do with my own sense of self? Is identity something you discover or something assembled from other people?
My friends think I should be single. I tell my coworker I’ve been single for three years; what is it that I’m supposed to be learning about myself? “Weren’t you just dating someone?” he asks. “Well, we were seeing each other,” I tell him. I’ve seen plenty of people in the last three years. Do I have to be celibate to absolve myself of my sins? Is there an amount of time that will cure me of my bad patterns, my foolish desires, my dread of loneliness? We’re always looking to the past for answers to the future; we like to believe we can derive the future from the past because the idea that life is scary and hard and overwhelmingly random is not a particularly pleasant notion, and probably, if we all accepted that reality, the human race would die off in a few dozen generations.
Schopenhauer says life is pain. That we are blindly driven by endless striving, swinging between wanting and boredom. That we are driven constantly to exist and consume, always wanting, only finding brief respite in achieving a goal. Although I am German as well, I guess I have inherited a slightly sunnier disposition. And yet, so much of my life is wanting and wishing, broken only by mindless busy-ness.
Schopenhauer would probably say I have nothing to learn from being single; I’ll only desire something else eventually.
Maybe that’s what frustrated Schopenhauer. He believed every fulfilled desire simply made room for another. Find love and you’ll fear losing it, or watch it grow rotten like a fruit left too long on the vine. But lose love and you’ll long for it. Heal from loneliness only to become bored with solitude. If that’s true, self-improvement isn’t an endpoint. It’s just another appetite.
If there is a universal urge to consume, is it therefore a natural human urge to conquer and to sanitize? I do not want to swim in a lake with fish and plant life. I want to swim in a sandy bottom lake and crystal clear water. I still cannot swim alone in the lake I grew up in, but in any un-murky waters I’m a regular mermaid. I want bogs without mosquitos, lakes without black flies, great grassy plains without ticks. A day in the burning hot sun without a peeling sunburn. I love nature, but I prefer it controlled.
Maybe I approach people the same way. I want intimacy without unpredictability. Love without risk. Without heartbreak. The older I get and the more I give my heart away the more wary I am. And yet I want community, always. I’d just prefer it without all the inconvenience. I want the appearance of wilderness, of chance, with none of its discomfort.
Summer, admittedly, has given me little to complain about. I like the scorching heat, the sun, the crickets and the watermelon. I even like the humidity. I prefer the summer infinitely over winter. The other day, when I was driving past the “Googly Eyed Jesus” at South Portland’s Holy Cross Church, I thought of the old pine tree they used to have covering him up. The pine was cut down in March of 2020, a bad month for us all. March is a liminal month for pines. I often wonder if plants prefer summer or winter, growth or rest. We enjoy summer because everything grows, becomes more beautiful and accessible. In winter, everything grinds to a halt. But plants don’t mourn winter. Rest is part of growth. Only humans insist every quiet season is evidence we’re falling behind.
