Before, you might say that his life had a sensory orientation. It was thrown together, a programme of scratch and sniff, kiss and fly, touch and dream. With lulls and rests between events, there was always a restless looking forward for the next attempt. If satisfaction ever managed to trump disappointment it was fleeting or imagined. He longed to be made happy by food and drink and smokes and strokes. These were his preoccupation. But he was chasing the wind.
Wanting what others appeared to have and enjoy, and to be able to do, he was condemned to be Kerouac but never Cassidy. Before reaching any climax he would crash or throw up. He was never going to be able play so hard that his heart exploded on a railroad track.
To some extent his perfectionism preserved him. He would not try things he might not do well or at which he would fail to excel.
Like Woody Allen, he felt that life consisted of the horrible and the miserable. The horrible being the terminal cases, blind people and the crippled. The miserable was everyone else. His life was fundamentally miserable and he was grabbing at the pleasures he could to cover it up, like a throw over a mangy old sofa. Lurching from one little peak of happiness to the next, he was keeping the roots smothered.
The crux was a decision he made - the conclusion of a rational process, a weighing of evidence - or so he thought. He even postponed making the decision until a certain situation had matured – a crumbling disintegration of one of his facades. He waited till the debris had been fully assimilated and normalised. He did not want to be tempted, in retrospect, to believe he had so decided because of a failing or due to pressure of circumstances.
Also, he was rapidly approaching another watershed, the confluence of the threads of several people’s lives. In his left brain he could see the critical path ahead required the decision to be made before this arrived but far enough in advance to avoid that same temptation. To simply side step or postpone the decision would be to decide against.
Years later, he came to see that there was more of redemption than repentance in this change. There was indeed a process and a decision, but these were not his. Drawn by invisible strings there had been an inevitability not a “will he, won’t he” about what had occurred.
As a child he had loved to play with the polystyrene floats at the swimming pool. Pushing them down to the bottom at the shallow end he would see how long he could stand on one without toppling. The polystyrene float always burst to the surface eventually.
The effect of the decision was not immediately apparent. This did not concern him. He had experience of starts that were taken to be false because dramatic consequences did not follow. There were some superficial and subcutaneous things that fell off or fell away - a change of language and choice of words; the fear of doing things that seem hard and unlikely to succeed. He found a new discipline, the ability to apply himself methodically to tasks. But the habits that were deeply ingrained still smouldered and cluttered the surface.
Slowly he began to realise that he was seeing beyond the sensory to something more tangible and sure. Something he could not see or feel but of which he was more certain. The impending loss of all things sensational no longer seemed to be such a catastrophe.
Doing the right thing did not come naturally or feel comfortable. But he found he would do it and, more surprisingly, would want to do it. It seemed to be welling up from within him like bubbles of fresh air escaping from a mud pool. The paradigm had been inverted. He was living on top of a substrata of comfort and peace hidden by a patina of debris – like the dirty scree on a glacier which is flowing pure and clear at its core. The daily miseries and horrors though thick and opaque had become the fleeting and temporal things.
But with so much crap on the surface, how could he be sure that the things deep down had really changed? Because he believed the one who had made it happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment