I must say it’s terribly hard to dredge up any enthusiasm for today or even this week at work, but I don’t feel depressed. Not yet at least.
The weather has been so undecided these last few weeks, a little sun, but mostly pregnant clouds breaking water over our heads several times a day. It’s also quite warm and clammy as if we are in a limbo land between seasons and there is little in terms of beauty to redeem it. The altercations between hot bursts of sunshine, gusts of wind, thunderstorms, hail and rain have had consequences upon the apple blossoms and lilac blossoms and the spring blooms. The petals spent hardly any time adorning the trees and have been cast to the ground where they are eclipsed by the dandelions and the lengthening grass. Worst of all is the relentless grey. It’s just dull, damp and clammy – hardly conducive to any kind of literary or poetic inspiration.
I need to be more determined and focussed to achieve what I want. Every day I wake up (office day anyway) and I wish that something would happen so I wouldn’t have to go back to work. Not that its sooo dreadful, but just the interminable hours of boredom until 5.30, which seems as far away as Mexico at 7.30 am. (In fact I could probably get to Mexico and have downed a couple of tequilas in that time!) If I continue waiting for fate to intervene, as I suspect many have before me and will continue to do after me, I may just still be waiting when I’m 70 riddled with heart disease, cancer or some such disease, acquired through a combination of my unhealthy lifestyle of my youth and the bitter black roots of disappointment entwined around a closed cold heart.
I know what I want most out of life; at least I think I do. I want to be immortalised by my writing. My writing will be my babies. And even possibly my writing will settle me enough to have babies. This isn’t high on my agenda. I can’t see how I can have children when I don’t know what to teach them about the future because I don’t what is true. If my parents are right then I would be raising children simply for a horrible and early death at Armageddon. If they aren’t right is the world such a place that I would want to introduce new blood into it? Primarily though I think unless I change very very much over the next few years I am too selfish to give the time and love and attention a child needs, and I think I can probably fulfil any maternal aspirations that come up through other people’s children – one’s that I can return to the parents when I’ve had enough!
So my writing will be my offspring, the thing I leave behind, the thing that will console me when I die – that I have left something by which I can be remembered and the better it is the longer I will be remembered. Is this narcissistic, or just the natural desire of each thinking member of our species? I think a bit of both in my case. Its almost as if I’ve come to the understanding that we spend our whole lives trying to come to terms with our death.
Coming to terms with death:
1) Some of us do this by living every moment at a quickened pace so we can say we live life to the full, adrenalin junkies, professional sportsmen, those who partake in dangerous activities for the kick but so that if they die it will be living fast that did it – not the slow bus to old age and retirement.
2) The majority of people come to terms with their mortality by procreating – the most natural way of all. By leaving our children and grandchildren behind we will be remembered by at least two or three generations after us – if our family is a successful happy one of course and our blood line, our genes will be a testament to our existence and the place we held in the continuance of the human species. This is probably the easiest way, but not the most satisfying. After all the first hand memories won’t go beyond great grandchildren and I know hardly anything about my grandparents and nothing about their parents. And to me, having and raising a child, isn’t the pinnacle of achievement – although I know to do so well is something to be proud of. It almost feels like giving up – I cannot succeed further on my own, therefore I will produce another generation and succeed through them.
3) Some of us spend our whole lives concentrating on careers, possibly to the detriment of a happy family, building a security for our retirement. And yet sometimes we work so hard and have so little fun and joy in our lives when we are young and fit and able to enjoy it, and the habit of work becomes so ingrained that when we do retire we don’t know what to do with the time, the freedom. And did we make time to make true friends and time to love? I heard a statistic on the radio the other day that people die sooner if they retire than if they carry on working because people tend to live longer , if uninterrupted by disease, if they have a job to continue to be finished.*
4) Then there are others who don’t think about it all, undereducated and simply live each day as it comes with little thought for the future.
5) Others have thought about the fact one day they will no longer exist and found the thought so terrifying they live almost entirely for the moment – the moment of blissful ignorance induced by drugs or drink or sex. I’ve done this since I was 16. But that is only a moment and sometimes it works the other way – the distraction technique of choice can also outline with hideous clarity, not only the fact you are going to die, but also that your life was completely worthless. And at that moment you think you would be better dying sooner than later, that your life would be worth more curtailed than prolonged.
6) There are those that dedicate their lives to others instead of dwelling morosely on their own demise. They accept their mortality and while there may be some form of life after death, they do not depend upon it. They live altruistically and often die as martyrs, but true martyrs are rare.
7) Another large faction, possibly the largest, avoid the fear of their mortality by utterly denying it. Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, all religion, if I’m not mistaken, base their life around the belief that they will enter another spiritual life after this one. Therefore they will never die, just enter a new form of consciousness or another life and rather than despairing all their lives, they endeavour to adhere to their religion’s rules, which will allow them whichever form of continued existence their belief system preaches. I’ve already tried this and the major drawback is that I don’t want to go to heaven or even paradise.
8) And then there are those, who are neither true altruists, nor narcissists, not martyrs, not fanatics, not religious, not ostriches, not hedonists, not career-captives, not mindless machines, not baby factories and not addicts or adrenalin junkies. To varying degrees they may have been all of these things or still are but they come to terms with death not solely by any of the above, but by leaving something behind.
9) I just want my life to have a beginning (a bit confused, filled with varying trials and addictions and personal shames), a middle (a transforming period of happiness, love and success where I can be proud more than ashamed) and an end (a satisfying conclusion, where my life wasn’t pointless and where I left something behind of myself and those I left behind could speak of me with humour and warmth).
*Actually I’ve suddenly realised, in the same way it can take me up to a day or two to get a joke that much of what I am saying, but with less eloquency and intelligence, is what Michel Houllebeq was saying about the human condition in Atomised.
I wrote this in May 2004, whilst I still wasnt sure if the truth was the truth. And whilst so much has changed since then, so much is still the same. And i do think even more so now, that I do not believe in an afterlife at all, that life is all about coming to terms with our own deaths.