First house that I saw, I wrote ‘house’ up on the door
And told the people who lived there they had to get out cause my reality is realer than yours- Father John Misty, “I’m Writing a Novel”
I’m sad today. Sad and angry, alternatingly, with no apparent object. Earlier this week, with the help of a friend (thanks friend, you know who you are), I uncovered something in myself I didn’t know was there, a pattern that I now think was funneling and fueling a good bit of my behaving and many if not all of my relationships. You’ll laugh, but what this pattern seemed like when I looked at it was an absolute loathing of samsara.
Samsara is a word used in Buddhist traditions, often described as the cycle of craving and suffering. I tend to think of it in a more technical, systematic sense, as describing a form of self-manipulation. A feeling that is already felt is projected into the future as a conditional goal-state, a fixed outcome, in order to slingshot the bodymind into bringing that outcome about. For example: I see a beautiful person, I feel tingly in my gut. Instead of simply feeling that and letting it flow into action or non-action, some part of me sticks that feeling to a mental image of, say, the beautiful person’s eyes meeting mine in mutual interest, and makes that the condition of my feeling as I already in fact do. (“If only that person felt the same way about me, how exciting that would be!”—I always know exactly how exciting it would be, because I’m already that excited.) This goal-state is held up against an equally fabricated concept of my present state as being unwanted, a state therefore defined as inherently or predominantly unsatisfactory.1 Listen to any love song for the view from inside.
Once I had a slightly nuanced model for this, I started seeing it absolutely everywhere, in other people and in myself. And gradually, I’m not sure when exactly, its wider presence began to take on the structure of a massive, decentralized conspiracy. Ah yes, this story went, there really is something wrong with the world, and this is it, and if only we could get people to see this pattern and how self-defeating it is then everyone could appreciate each other, and work together, and the human race might be saved from a terrifying extinction. It was definitely ironic that the only thing wrong with the world was that everyone was using the idea that something is fundamentally wrong to manipulate themselves and each other, but oh well, life is like that, and this problem, while practical, was real. Anyway there was not much time to think about it, there was work to do, the situation was urgent. I’m describing this as if it were an intellectual stance, when really it was a structuring of my feelings and perceptions: a worldview I wasn’t quite aware I’d taken on, and probably would have denied until just a few days ago.
What I began to see with my friend’s help (basically she pointed out that I seemed secretly angry about something in this territory, and had seemed so for a while) is that this concept of samsara was only filling in a category I’d been holding open for a very long time—since I was a child, maybe even a baby. As I felt down into that, first in the conversation but mainly later on my own, it became insistently apparent that I’d been trying desperately to kill this thing, this fucking samsara thing, for my entire life. When I was younger I would have framed it more as limitation, or perhaps simply stupidity. Killing the stupidity in other people, I realized, has been one of the primary ways I’ve tried to get close to them, because my working premise has been that their stupidity was the primary (maybe only) obstacle to their getting close to me. Stupidity didn’t have much to do with actual brain capacity—it was more about whether people were able to demonstrate that they had unfettered use of their capacity, that they weren’t stopping themselves short from fear of, well, being stupid. It almost always seemed to be the case that everyone around me was stopping themselves short the vast majority of the time.
Of course, I was running this same filter on myself—we always run the same filter on ourselves—and the result was that I have found myself over and over again, without ever really understanding why, trying to outrun a sense of my own limitation. This has included labels, roles, identities, competitions, public games of all kinds—anything that could draw a clear outline around my capacity. I’ve been trying to demonstrate that I’m not stupid and that I’m not even afraid of being stupid, since that would be stupid, and I definitely can’t be that. My childhood obsession with psychology, my early twenties obsession with philosophy, my late twenties obsession with Buddhism: from where I’m sitting now these look very much like one ongoing attempt to find the limits on my learning, to find convincing explanations for those limits, in order to get rid of them once and for all.
Looking back, this project has made it easy for people and entities to manipulate me in various ways. Books used it to get me to spend my youth reading them. Teachers used it to get me to do more and extra work. The New York publishing industry, which is largely propped up by this pattern and plays its role in perpetuating it, got some very cheap labor out of me in exchange for generally accredited non-stupidity badges and invitations to parties where especially non-stupid people were supposed to hang out. A university used it to get me to teach writing, again for very little money, for a couple years—the youth needed liberating and who better than me to do it! I’m not exactly complaining about these things, which I did enjoy at the time—just noting the trend.
It’s weird to look back and see how clearly other people saw the need in me. I remember a college lit professor, proud of his propensity for “stepping on toes” (which seemed to be code for sniffing out students’ insecurities) saying to the class one day, “Why is Mr. Blevins so smart?”, in a way that didn’t feel at all like a compliment. In my creative writing program I had a teacher whose only real advice to me was to stop trying so hard to be smart on the page. I had no idea how to follow his reasonable-sounding advice. When I looked closely at my desire to write fiction I always found it impossible to separate from an impulse to prove I was capable of doing it, that I was smart enough, intellectually free enough to do it well.
None of this is an entirely new insight about myself, I should say. A few years ago when I was trying to draft a coming-of-age novel, I conceived of it at various points as being basically about this, about a boy growing up in Georgia and going to public school who closes himself off repeatedly from the good things he wants—friendship, connection, sex, motion—because he’s so intent on proving that he’s too smart for any of them. The ideal title for this novel would have been The Idiot, but I was aware that that was already taken by at least two other novels, one of which seemed to riff on a similar theme.
So yes, I was aware, but mainly in the form of narrative: a therapeutic story I could try to balance against; a fiction, not yet a felt knowing. I think one reason I didn’t finish writing that novel grew out of the very pattern I was describing—that to do so would have exposed my limitations, would have opened me to the accusation of stupidity. This fear was so obvious to me in all my drafts, in the way they repeatedly evaded direct feeling in favor of rushed Beckett-style linguistic experiments, that I found them increasingly painful to look at and eventually found myself looking for something better to do.
Because, again, that was what I was hating, as far as I can tell—for people to flinch away from what was right in front of them, out of some learned sense that seeing it would put them at risk. I wasn’t entirely aware that I was hating this, in part because I had never thought to question whether it was possible to have any other attitude towards it, much less to question whether the basic concepts in that picture had any real use value in my relationships. Do people decide to flinch? Do people decide to be limited? What would be the value in believing so? It must have seemed safer at one point than accepting that I had no control. “Decision” gave me a lever, even if a very small one. If people could decide whether or not to be limited, then maybe by understanding the limitation, modeling it, and presenting them with a different option, I could get them to choose differently. Maybe then, the fantasy went, they would choose to give me what I wanted. (This basic fantasy is the engine of every penal system.)
I’m sad because I see how I’ve been bringing this (perhaps sometimes useful) mindset into all my relationships, romantic and otherwise, and I’ve been becoming aware for the first time of how terribly it’s tended to distort them. I think I’ve been subtly believing that people when they flinched were flinching away from me, and have been trying to fix their flinching or talk or teach them out of it, when likely they were flinching at least some of that time from my intention to prove something that had nothing to do with them, or from my insistence that there was something in their flinching that had to be corrected or overcome. As I’ve learned again and again, hatred of the pattern is always the pattern, just re-instantiated at a different level of the system. It was my own stupidity I was hating, and therefore it was my own stupidity I was enacting. Did you know that in Latin, stupidus meant to “be stunned, amazed, confounded”? A person who can’t be stupid is a person who can’t be astonished to the point of speechlessness, a person who will ignore mystery and seek to replace it in every case with a labeled drawing that makes more sense.
I wish I’d seen my hatred of samsara before I drove my most recent relationship into the ground with it, as it now seems I did. But I also feel oddly disinclined, at least right now, to condemn myself for what happened there, or anywhere—a sign, maybe, that my hatred of samsara has loosened, at least far enough that I can let myself suffer this loss in peace.
I do wish I could describe to you the strange place I find myself in, which isn’t quite like any suffering I’ve known. The situation is reminding me of a dream I used to have as a kid—a recurring nightmare. I was in a desert bazaar full of demented Alice-in-Wonderland-style characters, and I was trying to get home to my parents but, like Alice, I didn’t know the way. I understood in this dream that I was dreaming, and that my home was somewhere outside of the dream, and so I had to first explain to these characters what a dream was and that we were in one. They seemed interested enough, but I could never find the words that could make them understand how unreal their reality was—they were so unbelievably stupid!—and so I would always end up having to solve the problem myself, by squeezing shut my eyelids and willing myself to wake up. Even when I did find “home” in the dream—I remember once crawling through the window of an adobe building and arriving in my bedroom—there was always some sinister offness in the slant of the light, and my parents when they turned toward me were not my real parents, and I would again have to squeeze shut my eyelids to wake myself up.
It’s all there, right? The need to explain my way out, the drive to end an impossible journey. And two and a half decades later, it isn’t like I’ve squeezed shut my eyelids again as much as like the evasive background reality of that dream has finally found me. There was never any getting home, because I had never left home. I was asleep in my bed, and this dream that said otherwise was in me, not I in it. All those playful figures already-at-home in the shared dreaming, oblivious to escape, were reflecting a sense of peace I was continually pushing away as I tried again and again to make them the instruments of my escaping, of my returning, of my arriving. Some part of me thought I had to. Some part of me thought that was what the dream was about.
I wonder if we can be in the same dream now, you strange creatures and I. At least right now that seems more possible, seems really like the only way things could be, though I don’t have much say in whether or when certain delusions might resurface. Tonight I just have this weird feeling like the project of my life has been completed, not at all in the way I expected, and apparently by somebody else. There’s a silence in the air, in my chest, in my breathing. For the first time in many years I genuinely don’t know what’s next.
Image Credit: Dragan Sekaric Shex, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Sanskrit word for this sense of unease is duḥkha, though I should note that my interpretation may not match more canonical ones.