“These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.” -- Haruki Murakami.
Murakami is channeling Aldous Huxley here, but not really. I feel the same way, like whatever it is I am trying to convey becomes something I don't mean at all. I embrace absurdity all the more because of this. It used to seem to me like a way out, a way to say "I can't express what I experience in thoughts, feelings, insights, understanding, wisdom, ... or anything else."
Relational thinking, associative thinking also appeared to me as an answer. If I could make all the connections known as I perceive them then at least I would be sharing my sensory understanding of the world, no matter how wrong I may be in my perceptions. The wrongness of my interpretations of experience, the misunderstandings within my worldview could at least be accessible to others, not as knowledge, but as information.
There's no way to authentically communicate anything, each us living what Huxley called a life sentence of perpetual solitary confinement. If we weren't concerned about wars, violence, sexism, bigotry, economic inequality, status, security, and the like we would have nothing left but to look at ourselves and the world around us, including one another, and realize we are islands connected only beneath the surface of our awareness, a vague sense that we belong together without understanding why, perhaps because there is no "why" that satisfies anything meaningful to us.
That might just mean that our thoughts and feelings are misguided, that we are trying to convey something true about ourselves that really isn't true. We simply believe we understand ourselves and have something to say, but we're composites of our influences and we can't tell where we begin or end. Perhaps our deepest fear, one we cannot access adequately, is not that we'll die, but that we'll die before figuring out who we are because we can't accept that we may be simply a wind that shifts sands for a time before we're stilled forever. We're not even the shifting sands, just the mechanism that shifts the sands, something invisible, our existence absolutely transitory, utterly lacking in substance, not just individually, but as a species, the whole of humanity nothing more than a breeze that exists for a brief cosmological time before discontinuing forever.
This, in its own way, is what makes us free: free of morality, free of ethics, free of responsibility, free of meaning, free of everything but being for a time. Suddenly, sunsets make us break down and cry, feeling dirt between our fingers feels like something that's truly real, and seeing a person's eyes looking into yours becomes fuller than every arbitrary moments of commuting, saving for retirement, owning a house, or paying bills. I would trade a long life for ten minutes looking into another's eyes while he or she is completely vulnerable, emotionally raw, and completely aware of how awe-filled and terrifying being is, the salve of utter loneliness coming through ten minutes of the most intimate, sorrowful, joyful, and profound connection that can be made precisely because of the shared certainty that life will end in a matter of moments.
That connection is the only fulfilling way to live and die. I'm probably wrong, though. Then again, so is everyone else.
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