Pierre

Crawling, Waking, Crawling

Consider this: the majority of my day, I am in front of a computer screen.  It’s a sad fact that A) I hadn’t thought about, as you likely haven’t and B) I haven’t wanted to admit to myself, for a long time.  The majority of that time is spent on the internet, updating the news websites that I must read and the social “networks” to which I belong.  I know what is happening in the Middle East and have kept up on the complex, multi-layered puzzle that is human rights in China.  Don’t even get me started on my obsession with the presidential election.  The truth is that I intravenously inject the never-ending stream of information into my bloodstream, skipping the filter of my brain.

I check the updates of the more than 700 “friends” I have.  Even if it is for three seconds to see if I have some kind of notification, I will check during class.  I don’t know why I check on my computer because my phone buzzes each time I get a notification on Facebook or Twitter—but I check, anyway.  

I read achingly beautiful poetry seeded by both my own friends and publishers I have never heard of.  I look at hundreds of pictures everyday, of beautiful women and undeniably cool things, of book quotations and unimaginable libraries of books for decoration.  I can’t stop looking at the beauty, reproduced in code and over 256 million colors on my screen, created by the complex system of 1s and 0s, of codefied signals on and off that control my life but which nobody, nobody understands.

I read the 140 character updates of people I don’t even know and people who I do know but haven’t ever had a meaningful, soul-reaching conversation with.  When last did I even have a meaningful, soul-reaching conversation?  Because to be honest, I used to have those.  They would be on the trail, or laying awake next to someone, or laying awake in the same room as a friend at 2 o’ clock in the morning.  They would be in the drunken moments walking back when I look up at the sky and all I can see is the Truth in the moon and the stars and the somehow divinely created cosmological beauty that is oppressing my daytime, unconscious self and peaking at me through the oak tree’s leaves as I amble back to my bed to wake up and check the news.

This is depressing, I know.  It’s taken tacitly that this is how I live.  I can’t speak for you, but I can speak for the legions of people like me, whose days have little meaning beyond the gratification I get when someone reblogs me or favorites my tweet or likes my status; because in the end, it’s like all I am searching for is the power to be liked.

But it’s not just depressing.  There is hope in the beauty of sitting in front of a screen RIGHT now, because all I have open is a text editor and my fingers are racing to get all of this conscious thought down, and my fingers are snapping to the hum-drum sounds of my mind as it is finally whirring to life again.  And the irony here is that in these rare moments of clarity, of past-midnight philosophical wanderings and cross-drafts through my quiet room, I am using this machine.  Writing with a pen cannot keep up with the dictates of my mind and the snapping of my fingers and the racing of my eyes around the room.  I am in flow right now, and I love it and I hope for these moments all the time.  The irony is that I plan on posting this, maybe on Tumblr or on my blog for people to read and to make them think about the same things and I allow myself to do that because sometimes I have, in the muddied stream I inject, come across truths that have changed my life forever.  I’m not so arrogant to think I can do that for one single person but maybe posting it in a state of half consciousness and half lucidity help me, the most important person in my selfish universe. 

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech once where he talked about the “capital T Truth.”  It’s the idea that no matter who you are, you are worshipping something.  I (maybe) identify as atheist — hell I don’t even know, because have I really, actually sat myself down and thought about that? — but that doesn’t even matter.  Because the Truth that I know to myself, deep down and only conveyable in words on the screen because I am afraid to say them, is that I am addicted to searching for something.  I search and search in news and books and social networking and classes.  I can’t stop searching, crawling. 

But why do I search when I know something inside of me that works, something that makes the world really close in on me until I feel the vignetted corners of my mind focus on just one thing?  In moments of flow and not-giving-a-fuck about the stream of words coming through my fingertips and how they barely relate to the cosmos or to the conventions of good fiction or memoir writing, I have it, I have what I am searching for.  But for 99 percent of my life, I can’t appreciate it because of all this noise, all this white deafening noise coming through and making me walk through this world unconsciously searching, like a zombie or a blind beast, hungry and killing but never actually satisfied until I stop, frozen to the ground and time and all dimensions, and think.