Unbearable Bearable Mental State

In the nature of things, the calmness required in moments of this discomfort is too close to being at extreme odds with myself and its little arguments (petty, I'm sure, sometimes) and its self-ideal. That once-tamed self-discipline has eluded and escaped in some entropic field and corollary laziness that I might wish to label as "not worth it" (and sometimes in the broadest and most general sense, I must admit).

And then some sort of near overwhelming entrapment in the frozen present keeps me clasped to that pinpoint existence as though dropped (lead pellet) onto the earth from on high and sunk there in solidifying, hardening clay, not some self-motile human shadow figure but a stubborn nailed into 2 x 4 grunt of a being. And a little ear-boxing ringing in my ears about the state I've landed in.

I think it's a split-second impulse too quick to seize that flew past my eyes and brain, lodged in the bowel-pit dungeon and locked me there, now the dull head-aching and pressured weightlessness sitting there. And I'm so here now that there is no budging... no future dreaming or wanting—needing to inspire a self-propellation out or a hit-yourself-drag-yourself-move-idiot to get it going.

So I sit there feeling my stomach gnawing itself closer into a tightness, the core is suffocating, but it's not pain or desire for escape, it just is, you old Zen-too-far-fool. And then I wait and time will pass and it will dissipate or explode almost willfully beyond my control.

I, watching half-interested as though it were some far-off electrical display, and out pops the living-breathing-laughing-smiling self as though the birth were a daily thing or something she could do in an hour without trying. And on again, off again without questions or names (these obsolete and useless things seem a bit silly, somehow) just waiting to do it, go through it, all over again.

In this state, it seems putrid and feeble to name these happenings, though words from the old language keep reappearing in the circuits. Like "stagnation" or "confusion" or "eccentricity," or maybe, as it has been suggested, "irritability" or "conflict" that needs to get out. But I don't think I could know, and if I don't, maybe then experts, as some of them are called, couldn't say much more than this.

And this might say nothing I'm afraid (and that figure [oscillating being] of speech might just have slipped out as something I'm trying to mean). Maybe, but I couldn't pin anything down by choice when choices stretch into infinity and are reduced to meanings of nothings, seemingly random.

And there are the thoughts like scatter-plots floating in times and spaces and fields of almost momentous self-decay: their very existence calling forth the energy that destroys them, their little lives like disposable rubber balls that drift off into the past and are no sooner forgotten.

© 2001 Koko Jaeger