Experiencing disquiet
Sitting at Blue Tokai I noted down these thoughts, as well as I could, one after another.
It's too hard to concentrate on this lovely passage, that I have read three times over. I am just too distracted.
People on the table over, talking about super foods is infinitely more interesting. People take that shit seriously. I wish I had half a conviction like that for anything. I believe not in the potency of life much less those of super foods.
I lost my faith in meds recently too, a med that was working for weeks prior suddenly became ineffective. What is left after you lose faith in modern medicine? I am this close to getting a crystal locket, if it's all a play of dice then I might as well get something good looking. I lie, I don't like precious stones.
I lied earlier too, it was my own idiocy that caused the meds to not work, but the thing is I didn't tell my doctor that, and he just said this happens, live with it. Maybe he saw the stupidity in my eyes when we first met, and now this is how he treats me. Maybe he told me to live with stupidity and not non working meds.
Even stupid people need healthcare and hope.
I know these thoughts of the emotion ache bitterly in the soul. Our inability to conceive of anything they could correspond to, the impossibility of finding a substitute for what they embrace in our imagination – all of this weighs like a harsh sentence handed down no one knows where, or by whom, or why.
Now it's the fifth time I have read it. I get why this book is titled ' the book of disquiet'. I feel the title currently, everything is being drowned out by my head. My thoughts are taking over everything, I am try hard to delineate the thoughts, one word after another. Somewhere in there is the mind of the ones who came before language. Who decided the thoughts were to line up one after another?
Slight digression- after quoting the text from book I feel lighter, I realize one reason why people quote others, the burden of thought is shared. The burden of words is lessened. To quote is to co-own. Even when you contest what's written, it's an acknowledgement of your understanding of another's words. Even more so, it's that there is a shared space of thought and knowledge, where not only do we intersect but we coexist during the time of the paragraph. Shared farm of futures and past.
Back- The pre knowledge bit of my brain doesn’t feel reptilian. It might be, but it’s because of language that we have slightly domesticated all those corners. We have not discovered everything, but that we feel that we have discovered enough means we will know how to interpret that which comes after. Our current knowledge has already mapped out what we will ever know. Our interpretations will always be in this context.
The linearity of our understood experience flattens everything. Of course we know we can experience many things at once, but once we are told or forced to share, it’s all in a single line. All explanations are so.
Even when we experience much at once, the singurality of ourselves can hardly be argued with. I feel like one, living it one moment at a time. Yet the density of my thoughts feels like it could be enough for at least two people.
The discord of being, with the knowledge of shared humanity, of aforementioned shared spaces of thoughts bring out these unlived spaces in the living quarters of our minds. The guest room is always occupied, the door to their room always open and we can hear them murmur.
Or it could that one 'me' lives in the house while the many others 'me' are living vagrantly at my friend’s. Another 'me' is labouring all day, in an unknown part of town, only to come in at night, with no words, only fatigue and waft of sweat.
I do not experience things linearly. But my processing is so, at least, like I said, when I convey it.
Is it simply that I have one single mouth and my mind adjusts to it with one single line of output?
What if we had two mouths, and could talk twice over what we experienced? What if all our senses which receive could speak back?
This seems like territory for sci-fi, but like much frontier sci-fi, any definite depiction will be embued with the sadness that it has to all be encompassed into our very limited senses and structure.
What has to come to our world, has to follow it’s physics. If it doesn’t, we will not even know it exists. From Green headed aliens to the demons from hell. Even Gods for that matter take human like incarnations, someone knew our limited scope and prescribed (as opposed to describing) the boundaries of what we were to receive.
We are forever here, in shared spaces, and only in these shared spaces do we communicate.
The precision of language is directly antithetical to the vagueness of being, things and experiences. We are always trying to find words, always at a lack of better words. They are the tips of our tongues, but are lost when the air passes through our larynx, gliding over the tongue, destroying any sign of those words, for the words are frail and only have so much meaning in them which also dissipates when we read the dictionary.
When I speak, the dense thoughts stretch out like a rubber band. They untangle, yes, but there is also a strain to maintain the stretch, the strain only increases as I speak more, till my thoughts snap to incomprehensibility. The further one speaks, the more self referential one gets, the more one stretches the more the state of rest is called into being, but thinned out, less and less readable. Of course one can snap back to the dense state, having the memory of the stretch in it’s shapes, or one can snap off into being completely ineligible, or partially so.
The more one civilizes, the more one walks away from what 'is', more of the thing itself is inscribed than anything predating it. I am not one to say that that this is bad, or that the savages are better. It's just that a Savage is not one who doesn’t know or one who is closer to nature, but one whose tribe’s language has been forgotten. Savage is in relation to the so called civilised.
The civilized one refers, quotes, in effect creates a space, shared by some, a space of understanding, a guide to the outside and to oneself.
Our language will always stretch our experiences, strain them into particular specific shapes, but it will then also re inform our experiences, which will be slightly more like language, ever so more.
All of me and my disquiet minds, would at least be relieved of the dual state of things, if my thoughts stretch more, even to snap. I just hope this will not be the loss of experience but a gain of language.
