There's a Peace Inside of Me

It's like my heaven calling.

V and I spent an evening drinking and exploring our artistic sides. One of my favorite things about my wife -- and there are too many to explore in one post, one blog, one lifetime -- is that she has a creative spark that delves into the lives of others and tries to pull free a thread of meaning. It's an artistic drive that I wish I had, which I've strived to have, this entire time. We agreed that maybe together we could find art, though the nature of art is so fragile that when we finally sit down together to create, maybe it won't be there. Maybe the combination of our forces is a nullification of force.

In pigment, all the colors together make black. In light, all the colors together make white. Are we pigment, or light? Does it matter whether we make black together or white? Is it just enough wine for me to care? Does it matter?

We've been exploring, lately, together, human frailty. There's a universal un-drive, a feeling amongst everyone, that it's sometimes better to ditch out and start over. Who hasn't had that sensation that it might be nice to just quit it all and stop working, stop trying, stop failing? What peace there must be in not needing a job or a drive and just lay around, being, all day.

My mom is finally snapping out of her depression. Since her back surgery, she, as a sixty-something who hasn't had to work for three decades, has expressed this very same (depressing) desire to peace out and just lay in a hospital bed in a room by herself, with nurses and medications to whisk away her every need so she could just relax away all pain or care. She has, in a sense, wished for death, though I no longer think she's truly suicidal; she only expresses this internal un-drive for listless being that lays dormant in all of us. 

Now, most of us have responsibilities -- be they financial or familial or moral -- and we naturally turn away from the un-ness of a lazed and dazed stay in a mythical white hospital of respite, a heaven if you will. But she is in a unique position, with children grown and financial need washed away by years of American accumulation, to holistically express this desire. She has earned, in some sense, a blank white heaven. Today, on the phone, she told me that there's a bright light, maybe, that she could go towards without regret. Okay. Must be nice.

I would like to quit it all. I would like to find this mattress of solitude. Who wouldn't. Who wouldn't leave behind tears and struggle to be waited on hand-and-foot and brain-fuzzed to the point of blank ecstasy? It's the same allure as escapist drugs, the painkillers and smack and whatnot that whisk away so many lives. But there's a social pressure built in each of us that such an un-desire is wrong. There's a responsibility to feel the pain, feel the tears, feel the struggle. Why?

Tonight, after two bottles of wine and an epic home-based karaoke session of music appreciation, we landed in the arms of hard prog-rock, with its sweeping fat chords like fists, with its angry decibels that punch back against silence: be scared; be furious; be alive. But I saw the most satiated minds of a previous generation destroyed by pills, starving themselves, madness, brink of hysteria. I get the need to howl. I don't even like beat poetry, and I get the need to howl. But to what end? So that our noise reaches other ears?

For a lot of people, religion answers the questions we ask about the point of life, even as it offers the platitudes about the peace of death. I'm caught somewhere in between. If life can't offer peace, truly, then what makes it better than death, other than the fact that death offers unknown un-sensations?

Pretty deep for a Friday, perhaps. It can just become exhausting to offer up reason after reason for living to a mom who has reason after reason for not. It's sickening. I'm sick of contemplating her death, and I'm sick of contemplating my life. I'm hoping for a revelation, whether it be in a dream or in a waking thought, that will give me clarity about the purpose of all this exhilarating noise. 

All I know is I couldn't live without laughter and warmth, so I spend my time manufacturing as much laughter and warmth as possible. But that's odd in the face of un-drive, which dictates that an absence of laughter and warmth would yield the same net result with no effort. This is why I find emptiness in pop-Buddhist philosophy and its koans. Could that be a religion to abnegate life? Could nirvana be a goal when its pursuit is the result of dispursuing?

I would like to end this post with something like the meaning of life, but I can't. Nobody can. What a dilemma. What a weirdness. What a world.