Limbo

It is 2024 and there’s still no cure for malaise.

The black bile distillate from my blood is still the predominant humor coursing through my veins. It is astounding to me that despite five years of medical studies I still believe that there is an organic cause to the ennui I suffer. Well, duh, it is a distinct lack of neurotransmitters if you want to go there, but we don’t believe in that pseudoscience. Serotonin, norepinephrine pffft, take your orgastic-like energies and other established theories far far away. Let me explain and work my own way out of this.

A lot of this writing comes out of Limbo by Bernard Wolfe. I re-read it. I thought it would help me explain my…lack of ambition. But it doesn’t. Ironically, it infuses ambition into me by making me want to research into things and not just fall into the… I have noticed that I must grab words from thin air now while previously they would come easily to me. It doesn’t help that there’s no ‘R’ key on my keyboard. It’s a little nozzle. It is a little funny looking. I wish that it was easy for me to physically solve all psychological problems. I don’t know why my mind keeps going back to Wilhelm Reich who tried to solve physical problems with psychological solutions…wait. This feels very recursive and obtuse to read. Let’s try again. My aim is to get it out. Rip it out, if necessary, because truth be told it does feel like at this point a forceful…force uh or a jerk is needed to get it out. I hate how I keep recycling the same phrases and words.

There’s a line in Bible, and really the main premise of Limbo, that the most obvious solution to your problems is to literally severe the part that is causing the problem.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

Bernard Wolfe really read this and decided to run away with it. I hope you know that every time I must press ‘R’ it is not that smooth and easy as the other letters.

Apparently, there’s a neurosis in all of us. Something integral within the superego, which propels us towards self-non-sexual masochistic tendencies. It finds everything wrong in the external amplifies it and wants us to punish ourselves for those things. And so, we become like this magnet of injustices. I have seen or rather psychoanalyzed too many people who I have felt like keep account of all the ills and keep those records close to them waiting to use them at any opportune moment. That moment does not have to be a revenant moment where they take out all the pent-up frustration onto the aggressor(s). A lot of the times in fact those moments are just moments where they can punish themselves, adding insult to injury. I have found myself in an analogous situation many times, where I find myself keeping tabs of miseries. It’ll go on for some time and then I’ll try to remember why I am doing it. Sometimes it is to vent it out just cathartically over to someone, sometimes it is so I can use those moments of despair in an even graver moment as comparison and maybe feel better or feel like it was just coming privy to my sodden luck. Rarely it is to justify my own shitty action towards someone else. I guess you shouldn’t trust me. Maybe the rarely is the more often chosen action. I am the epitome of an unreliable narrator.

So Freudian psychology and logic dictates that there is a basis for why I feel like I deserve terrible things and why they make sense to me too. It also explains that I seek out self-sabotaging habits as an enema to such tendencies. Well, not quite an enema. But something. Sigh. The awareness of this knowledge is comforting and makes me feel better of every time I broke some pattern where I was hurling myself at breakneck speed towards points of no return in some manner. For instance, I don’t understand my whole stick with staying out of social media. Truthfully, I think there is more to that debate, so I am going to call a raincheck on that for some other time.

So, this appetite for self-suffering is not pointless. And it hinders me from living my life to the fullest, prevents me from becoming my own Übermensch. That is so neat. I love how if nothing else at least science is so helpful and makes it so convenient for you to feel good about yourself. There’s a point to be made somewhere that it could also be just a reflection of reality but that doesn’t fuel my WHATS THE WORD tendencies. It is even more quaint that just as a part of me that is constantly bombarding me with the need to punish yourself, there must be another part that is combatting it. Right? I support this hypothesis with the Newton’s Third Law, every force has an equal and opposite reaction.
Not enough?
Then I further corroborate it with the Two Wolves in You Theorem. Sometimes I really think I am funny.

I’ll take this whole business about psychological masochism one step ahead and state that this eager receptivity for self-harm is actually masked by self-pity which fortunately for my yet functional mind takes precedence and really just makes me pathetic but okay. Call it a defense mechanism if you will. The pity is harm but of a milder, more subdued and controllable nature. After all it is quite easy to hype and pump yourself out of this shed of loathing at the smallest achievement than it is to undo any other meaningful harm inflicted on the self.

I feel like I am going in circles, but it will make sense when I finish writing all of this and re-read it. Or such an assumption is necessary for me to believe in to finish writing this into something meaningful. I am breaking the fourth wall now.

For the need to hurt myself to morph into self-pity, it is also necessary to register that tragedies have been piled on to me. Some of my own doing, and mostly by others. Which all ties in neatly to how I started this conversation about people collecting their injustices in pokeballs and using it even outside Trainer battles. Maybe they are just filling Professor Oak’s Poke Dex. But what I really want to say is that as an adult I am much more reliably going to turn a ‘bad’ thing into a more solid memory than a good thing. There is genuine scientific research that theorize on how negative information is remembered better (Meditation Model and all that, holdthat). And then when I need to hurt myself, to feel bad, to satiate my super-ego or whatever craving some hurt, I will bring out that injustice and say ‘Aha, I deserve this. I deserve to feel bad.’ And then the pit just digs itself and the mud is shoveled out sometimes as anger, sometimes as avarice. Never anything good.

But what do do.

None of this is a solution. Bernard Wolfe would prefer to give me prefrontal lobotomy and solve all my problems. But as most of mass media has shown, such an intervention would take away most of what make me me. It would stand against his own principles of cybernetics, which I assume he must religiously believe in after writing Limbo:

The human being must always be central, not the products and objects of his skill and energy.
The object in this case being those feelings. All of them.
So,

What do do?

At some point many years ago I had hypnotized myself into believing that it was by writing that I found my outlet. It was my boulder. In this absurd existence, I would keep doing it because it was the only thing that I really wanted to do which had a point. I do think I have a new boulder or maybe many new boulders now. But I cannot just abandon what was once my only Sisyphean task uphill. Then I run into the Kierkegaardian existential crisis, of losing one of my ‘tags’. And eventually run the risk of being totally enveloped my oblivion, God forbid I somehow lose any of the boulders I have recently found for pushing uphill. What will be the Moral Equivalent of my War? How many boulders can I realistically push till I realise that I am no longer doing what I initially set out to do, and have committed philosophical suicide? That I have been involuntarily conscribed into a war of attrition where I keep trying to find distractions and calling them boulders. Whereas the boulder was never meant to be a distraction. It was meant to be the thing. ‘The’ being the operative word. Continuing the very vague and ill-fitted metaphor, maybe it is time to crush, or rather ‘shot’ the many boulders to smaller pieces and gel them into one and call it a day. (I had to do it, my playlist started playing Shots by Imagine Dragons and it just fit, please don’t judge Spotify, it is not to blame, and I am definitely not to blame for listening to Imagine Dragons in 2024).

I don’t know. Maybe it is time to sit at the brink of the gaping hole of the existential black-hole and have a think, instead of just having a think elsewhere. The black hole really puts things into perspective. Maybe this weird writing is the introspection I needed. Now, hang on a minute, isn’t this writing approaching its zenith-al end?

The truth is, I am at least glad that I managed to get this out. This tirade of pessimism and melancholy that reads like a diary entry of an edgy teenager. I would like to believe that just by writing this and wanting to believe internally that I will write more often, and not just book reviews, I have saved myself from a fate like Rimbaud. I have not surgically removed myself from writing while still alive. Or as Camus would remark of his resignation from literature – and revolt itself – in his later life, claiming that there is nothing to admire, nothing noble or even genuinely adventurous, in a man who committed a "spiritual suicide", became a "bourgeois trafficker" and consented to the materialistic order of things.

God, being called the ‘bourgeois trafficker’ sounds like the highest order of insults.

There is still potential of The Everlasting Yea in me when it comes to hoping for something for myself that isn’t rotten and fermenting. I may not make it on the list of great men, who’s biography combined Carlyle believes is the account of History as we know it, but I’d be damned if I get wasted by life and its essence and am not of use.