I’m mesmerized by swirling whirling desperate need for connections that all life seeks. These past few weeks with almost all my connections to life severed I can’t help but see them everywhere. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to see anything.
Sitting in Che’s on 4th Ave last Sunday writing, furious with thought and scratching, tearing at the notebook, I was on fire and completely divorced from that reality of sitting in a bar by myself. My only purpose was to have a couple of Newcastles and work through a story idea that has been popping in and out of my head for a year now. It was blocked and recent events have given me a new perspective on that block and I was sure I had it figured out. I was there for work and that allowed me to see that craving for connection everyone else around me had, that I have all the time too, just not at that moment because I was preoccupied with my own mind, preoccupied with a different universe that I was constructing.
People are desperate not just for love which is nice. It’s just plain old connecting to other people that drives us out of our homes and into the streets to look for love and connection and hope for a chat or two with someone that might know something about how to live in this befuddling world.
The funny thing isn’t that people, that human beings in their myriad ways and forms all enacting the same pattern, the same exact longing, are doing this. It’s that every bit of life on the planet goes out of its way to connect.
This seems sad to me for some reason. I think it’s the need for it. The absolute fucking need to connect to succeed in life and the fact that no matter what everything fucking withers and dies. Life without connection is meaningless since the point of life is to connect, to make more life, to grasp the universe better, to make it make some sort of sense.
Bacteria tell themselves kinds of stories about the petry dish and humans tell themselves stories about the office and the family and the bars and the nation and the church. They touch, they pass along some information, some chemicals, some words, they hum with excitement and hope for more.
We hope for understanding of everything and it never really comes. We try to fit some stories and some words around this madness and it never much happens. You go insane if you ignore the need and you go insane if you persue it too much. Fucking is the essence of life, it is a passing of information in the form of DNA, and connection is the essence of fucking. Just sitting around a table chatting with a friend is, in some meta perspective way, a form of fucking.
That’s what made that snapshot moment in Che’s so powerful. Disconnected from everyone and everything at that moment because of my own meditative totally inward directed consciousness, all those people’s needs for connecting were obvious. I could almost imagine waves of hopeful connection emanating from all the people sitting around me.
The lonely guys at the bar nursing single beers and hoping that something wonderful might just happen in the next moment. That a woman or anyone at all will try to connect with them or that their desperation will be apparent to another desperate soul and the desperation will draw them together. Couples sit and talk and exude connection to each other. They do this outside to be meta connected to societies and groups, and through societies, everything.
Because it’s not just individuals connecting to others and passing along some sticky DNA and the occassional stain on the couch or the ceiling. It’s everything connecting to everything. People connecting their groups, groups connecting to other groups, bacteria connecting to their colonies, colonies pushing against each other trying to crush each other, everything touching each and every other thing and working in some grand way to figure the universe out.
This is crazy and mystical and I know that but it’s an interesting way of looking at the mess of life anyway.
Once you start to think you invent stories to blind yourself from the reality of your meaninglessness of information gathering, of information passing, of connection. The stories enhance the need to connect and the need to connect enhances the stories we tell ourselves.
I think we blind ourselves to this by focusing on the loss that is inherent in life. People live, people die, people depart, people connect. This happens all the time and it is necessary for life to be alive (Do bacteria feel a kind of loss if you pull them away from their colony? Mammals go insane if you isolate them). And it’s probably necessary that it hurts so fucking much most of the time too. The pain and the anguish drive us. Happiness is our goal and our dream and happiness is in someways a kind of death. It’s the end of striving. You can’t strive, churn information, or desire if you’re happy. Happy is an end and that’s maddening. Bliss is death. Good is bad and right is wrong.
It’s the fucking yin-yang symbol chasing itself over and over throughout eternity. It’s the goddamn Tao.
This understanding…assuming I am indeed correct and I’m sure I am although I have nothing other than instinct and feeling to demonstrate my instinct and being the science trained guy I am I know this pretension of knowledge is complete bullshit in that context…this understanding is useless. It’s just there and kind of fun to think about, a thought experiment.
You can’t do anything with it because to be fully alive you have to keep trying to connect and to keep connections, to feel their horrible loss, to feel their wondrous start, to be part of the game where all life interacts with all other life trying to live in a bit of the universe, trying to stay alive in the universe too, to figure out that bit of the universe and to make more life that will do the same thing only differently as it gains more information and replicates and gains more information and replicates out into infinity.
Man, that is so fucking cool.
I don’t like it though. It’s too hard. It’s too painful too. And it never really ends until you die and you’re eaten by something. It’s the tragedy inherent in being alive and this is the Buddhist desire to end all suffering. This is the Christian need for bliss in heaven after death. This is all the religions everywhere trying to make sense of all this shit we go through for no other reason than to make a connection and to pass something along that makes something more than any one little bit of DNA strand could ever be.
And all it really is, all this churning yearning destructive construction really is, is information exploding into understanding. We are the universe trying to understand itself.
[note: I haven't taken any psychedelics. I'm just hopped up on coffee and introspection. Kind of crazy too with the need to understand this asurdity flowing through us all.]
[note to that note: Bill Hicks has a very funny bit ending in almost the same line but he got there through psychedelics and I always take the long arduous way to get anywhere so it took me 37 years to get to a place that I should have been at when I was 14 years old. Great. Just fucking great.]
The funny thing about all this crap, all these musings, is that I’m so abysmal at connecting to people. If anyone ever thought that the very purpose of the universe wasn’t to understand itself and then get the joke in one big cataclysmic gaffaw they’d have to be crazy because there is nothing more obvious than the inherent humor in this universe. Just looking at everything, it has to be one big fucking universe encompassing joke. The wheel of humor grinding everything and everyone into grist. Comedy extraordinaire.