Part 4 - Tropics
Random Seasons 1982–1984
Reason does not move in the circle of natural life.
—SIEGFRIED KRACAUER
We have lost na?veté.
We can achieve nothing that will transcend
the fatal games of appearances.
—ALBERT CAMUS
32
This is where I falter, where I lose myself. This is where ideas of what is good and right upend, and time is dispersed, thrown down like leaves to be read. It’s difficult to say what happened. I know that my heartache was indescribable, the depth of my loneliness astonishing. I know that I worked very hard, and I never intended to hurt anyone.
I cannot describe a life dispossessed of happiness. Episodes and events stand out as happy, though that happiness was the sort of euphoria you feel at a party you throw for yourself, when you say how much fun you’re having, but you’re sick inside with self-loathing, wretched all the more for having come so close. What I missed was something lost. What I’d lost was my very self. Perhaps I was resilient: perhaps if called upon by God, I might have survived fire or famine. But who is so able as to endure heartbreak? Heartbreak is a puzzle apart—pieces missing, pieces mutilated. It is to be consumed by the wait, and I was.
I became someone new. She was a mystery. She was striking, like the frayed end of a live wire. She was reckless, because in order to drown, you need to hang by the degenerate edge of the sea. I remember her, pleading into the faces of friends, but for nothing. Who did they see when it was not herself that she showed? What was it they wanted when her lack outweighed her capacity, her desperation exceeded her gifts, her competence eluded her? If she was loved, it was because it’s easier to be lovable than to be honest. If she loved in return, and it’s not impossible that she did, it was a thin sort of love, emaciated and apt to vary, a love that would not alter his design or fracture his standing. Often I regretted the confusion I caused.
Of course there were angels—there are always angels—people with the soul capacity to see beyond your mask, who come forward to say something meaningful to the purity in you. But no one possessed the power or the will to move me from my circle of sorrow.
If there are rules for finding your way through darkness, I tried to follow them. I tried to behave my way out of pain. I gave away the little I had, unencumbered by a desire for reciprocation. I had no reason to lie, no agenda to keep me from listening. My small assurances were trusted, and it gave me a numb sort of gladness that those closest to me valued my attention. And yet that attentiveness was not without flaw; it was limited and erratic, governed by arbitrary factors such as dreams and the seasons, cars and passing shadows. I would be moved suddenly to sadness and detached from the requirements of time. A color or noise, a texture or smell. A reflection or a trivial wind, or sunlight receding menially against a building. Sometimes I would get almost to where I was going, only to turn home again. Back home, wherever it was that home happened to be, I would sit in the gentle coma of my affliction, thinking of Rourke.
This is not easy. This is when my youth escapes me, when I age, with everything shutting down. These are years without accident or incident, when the end of each day is determined before it begins—when there is no possibility of seeing him.
There are people you hear about, laborers who knead the guts of the earth for poor reward, people too indigent, too cowed by cold and hunger and lightlessness to object to the conditions of their existence. They drink themselves to sleep, and why not? Certain conditions are not meant to be tolerated, certain states are so deprived of tenderness that you discover the meaning of hell. Hell is only loneliness, a place without play for the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is presence?