Dispatches from The Equilibrium
A new aura for an old god
Joel Biroco | April 22, 2024 | Archive
It is hard to get rid of our nothingness, there is nothing left but to accept it. It is then too cumbersome to have enthusiasm for anything else. One is slowly winding down, even the trivial instances of daily life too much of an imposition, like Astavakra’s ‘master idler’ to whom even opening and closing the eyelids was just too much effort and thereby an affliction, yet happiness belongs to that one because hardly drawn any deeper into the world. It takes a while to see the idolatry involved in giving credence to any of the multiform things that instantly fill one’s field of view. It may just be a humble chair, but then one sees it is dusty, it needs dusting, it has demands just standing where it has always stood, better that they go ignored. We are made the victim of everything we see if we give it the least attention. But then thoughts start up and begin to plague us, as if we have made a grave mistake in ignoring the world, the mind’s world, let it be said, no wonder it takes it as a personal slight and browbeats us with it, as if you cannot live here if you are just going to let it fall into ruin. Fine then! I won’t live here! But any choice involved in that again too much effort, one hopes perhaps that the whole lot of it falls to ruin sooner rather than later. Yet on sunny days one pulls up a few weeds, tending to a bad back later as a result of it. Still, such spontaneous work less tainted by effort than deciding to do something. Few can understand our aversion, so them too one strikes out of one’s life. Never satisfied by being alone but not as bad as company. Our days and nights become unlivable, as if a punishment for believing the illusion of being born. Not that one does believe it, more the appalling sense of: Why still here? Murderers are more jolly. One is more like a god tired of being one. The more powerful one is, the more costly the recognition of one’s insignificance. And yet, freeing also, from those big ideas. One has just lost sight of what to wallow in that would be appropriate at this stage of the game. Everything is undesirable. One is one’s own foul creature, one doesn’t need to imagine worse fates, they are all present for inspection. They haunt our otherwise easy forgetfulness, but never as anything sensible, just vague shivers down the spine when ruminating on what so devours us that we can never attain any full conviction in, little more than an offset for having it easy in the grand rejection of everything. Like a conjuror who has forgotten his tricks, we don’t know how to make this disappear before our very eyes. Is it because we don’t know what to replace it with? Why is an absence not good enough? It’s an absence already, anyone can see that. How can it possibly degenerate into something existing? It is not that the days are really a bewilderment, more a diluted nostalgia for something that never was but we gave more credence back then when it seemed we were enjoying life, though doubtless weren’t, one more thing forgotten in this parade of final acts that never amount to anything, like an animal sitting forgotten about in the shadow very nearly growing to like it, never to emerge again. But something will draw us out, it always does. A new aura for an old god, I’ve seen it many times, we never deprive our special gods for too long before granting them new powers to test out, tempting them back into the game against their better judgment, like a maniac is never too daunted to come forth.