Day

This is the kind of day that makes me want to post Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish in its entirety. The kind of day that drives home the feeling of thrownness. (Thrownness: none of us chose to be born; none of us chose where to be born or whom to be born to or what we would look like or who we would meet. We will no0t choose when we die or who we die with or who goes with us. We will not choose where transience leaves us off, where we end up, and, by implication, what we believe, what we like, what we value, what we know, what we deny. We are thrown into everything.) One could imagine it a shitty day in every respect of the word: upon waking I was hit with a wall of greyness and overcast and maddening raindrops in the middle of winter. I tried to be productive and a good little worker bee, but all I left behind was an almost-done paper and a few literary abortions. The walk to where I do phone counselling was terrible, playing up every manner of irritability, turning the umbrella inside-out and outside-in again. The shift itself was tough, parading every kind of broken person in front of me. Intellectually, I have grasped my utter powerlessness to help except by imperceptible nudging over a long time; but the emotional brain is slower to learn, so now I carry confidential tales of suffering with me, despite my best efforts to leave what happened where it happened. Then home; then a desire to write something but the inability to get more than three sentences off the ground; the inability to banter with cohabitants; the inability to get any work done; the e-mail server down, cutting off my lifeline to the world of not-here; the resonating phrase of practical Buddhism: "meditation does not help us escape the problems of the world, but accept them and understand them ever more intensely"; the feeling of proto-anxiety attacks as I try to surf the internet cutting off all my attention; I read about them. And then I had to read this? This makes this comic even more brilliant, but it is not what I needed. Where was the catharsis? I was blindsided; it's been a long time since tears even began to well up in these eyes. I don't think you can appreciate the full impact of this unless you had my kind of day, or a comparably shitty one. But I am describing it inadequately.

Oh, to hell with it: here's Kaddish. Ginsberg made me believe in redemption in a schizophrenic world; he made me a hopeless romantic at heart. But never optimistic. I cannot indulge myself that. But I can look for my center.

Consider: "Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, "What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?" Bodhidharma said, "Empty, without holiness." The emperor said, "Who is facing me?" Bodhidharma replied, "I don't know.""