spirit
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it. - Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th century philosopher
There are times when I feel like a ghost wandering through the physical world. It is a curious detachment of my mind from tactile surroundings. I become absorbed in thought and quite suddenly it consciously occurs to me that I have become disengaged - a spirit who sees everything around him but remains unseen. I don't exist. I become a spectre, a phantom... an observer. Still in present tense, I more acutely feel the life of the city effloresce around me, but for those ephemeral moments I don't feel like I am a part of it.
On the city street, in a crowded bar or restaurant, in the cramped cattle car subway, there is uneasy physical contact with the nearest strangers, but my mind is unfettered and independent of the environment. It's all esoteric and abtract.
And why this weirdness, you might inquire...
Sometimes it is an emotional catharsis - an event or circumstance that has summarily altered me in some manner - that has brought on the feeling. It doesn't have to be anything as dramatic as an epiphany, though that has occurred a couple of times. An epiphany can be life-changing and carries far more exigency than simply spacing out on the train and briefly losing touch with the tangible.
Perhaps it is an expurgation of emotion that results in a temporary removal of my mind from the world. Maybe I could just attribute it to fatigue and be done with it.
But "it" is a facet of who I am, and it's happened on numerous occasions in my adult life. Call it ethereal or rarefied or tenuous. I can describe it as a juncture where I reach a recondite form of transitory enlightenment. Not that the experience makes me any wiser, but it does take me away from the physical realm long enough to enjoy a certain understanding of the indiscriminate sequences of life - and to grasp a pattern and a purpose. I am here and I live among this structured chaos - random events and encounters prodded and fomented by emotion and necessity and logic and desire. My emotion. My desire. My lack of logic. The necessity to fill gaps of emptiness.
A Thursday night in June, the prolonged heat wave passed, cool air on bare skin, I feel as I have always felt.
There are times when I feel like a ghost wandering through the physical world. It is a curious detachment of my mind from tactile surroundings. I become absorbed in thought and quite suddenly it consciously occurs to me that I have become disengaged - a spirit who sees everything around him but remains unseen. I don't exist. I become a spectre, a phantom... an observer. Still in present tense, I more acutely feel the life of the city effloresce around me, but for those ephemeral moments I don't feel like I am a part of it.
On the city street, in a crowded bar or restaurant, in the cramped cattle car subway, there is uneasy physical contact with the nearest strangers, but my mind is unfettered and independent of the environment. It's all esoteric and abtract.
And why this weirdness, you might inquire...
Sometimes it is an emotional catharsis - an event or circumstance that has summarily altered me in some manner - that has brought on the feeling. It doesn't have to be anything as dramatic as an epiphany, though that has occurred a couple of times. An epiphany can be life-changing and carries far more exigency than simply spacing out on the train and briefly losing touch with the tangible.
Perhaps it is an expurgation of emotion that results in a temporary removal of my mind from the world. Maybe I could just attribute it to fatigue and be done with it.
But "it" is a facet of who I am, and it's happened on numerous occasions in my adult life. Call it ethereal or rarefied or tenuous. I can describe it as a juncture where I reach a recondite form of transitory enlightenment. Not that the experience makes me any wiser, but it does take me away from the physical realm long enough to enjoy a certain understanding of the indiscriminate sequences of life - and to grasp a pattern and a purpose. I am here and I live among this structured chaos - random events and encounters prodded and fomented by emotion and necessity and logic and desire. My emotion. My desire. My lack of logic. The necessity to fill gaps of emptiness.
A Thursday night in June, the prolonged heat wave passed, cool air on bare skin, I feel as I have always felt.
posted by Walls Falling at 9:42 PM
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