Fuming in the dark

Here I am, at the "epicenter of instability in the world", caught in the liminal space between old day and new, the sun set and shadows cast across the hotel room. Why does it feel like I'm marooned on some far flung polar fringe, when in reality I'm smack dab in the middle of the global superpower's capital city?

The clock is about to strike twelve, and in a funny way the clock is ticking down on (and has been for a long while) my life. But that's just hyperbole, isn't it? Nothing ever happens. The old day passes into the new, the sun always rises and never ceases to set, the present drowns in the past, becomes another trophy in the past's long march backwards, gathering spaces in the annals and recesses of memory, until it consumes all, until it eats everything propped up to resist it.

How's that for bombastic language? Unnecessary, I'd think. And to the extent it reflects my views on time, rather uninteresting. For who hasn't felt like this, and who hasn't said or thought these things? I am just now reading a Walker Percy novel, my second in five years, titled Lancelot. It tells the story of a man nearing or at middle age, who discovers an adultery, and not merely any adultery, but an adultery that produced the daughter he believed was his. This discovery catalyzes something like a religious awakening in him, and for the first time in a long time he becomes aware that he has been merely wiling away his life and times, and that by conforming to his set-stupor he has submerged himself into a kind of unconsciousness, completely unaware of time's passing, and this stupor has stoked in him a kind of aimlessness, a lack of conviction, an inability to set a goal, to know "what to do".

Evidently he changes his views, for while this awakening is surely an inspiration, something catastrophic occurs (I have not yet finished the novel, so I do not know what the nature of this disaster is) that changes his views on time. Locked up (voluntarily, perhaps) at an institution of some sort, he confesses to his nameless visitor an altogether different view of time:

You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason why I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent, or terrible or doom-struck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.

He goes on to compare himself to a tape head, to see the past as an encroachment of banality on the present, and the devourer of future possibility. In doing so, it robs one of a way out, and condemns them to a life of stagnation. Maybe Lancelot's awakening was true and sincere, albeit brief, and whatever tragedy occurred at least left him with this newfound knowledge without possibility to act on it. The pure possibility grasped in the present was ripped away not by time's banality, but by whatever bad fortune struck him down and killed his wife. Frankly, I do not yet understand Lancelot, am unable to get a good grasp on his true motives, what he really believes (perhaps because he truly does not believe in anything, perhaps because he is truly a madman). Do I believe in the banality of time? Do I believe that the encroachment of this banality is the source of the acute sense of anxiety that befalls one (me) when the thought of its passage strikes? I believe in its banality, I suppose, but not the rapacious all-consuming quality he ascribes to it. After all, the Biblical discussion of banality is supposed to be liberating. The futility of all action. I have quoted it before. "Nothing new under the sun". What is the problem with that? This has all happened before, and what has happened before will determine what happens again.

But it is true (and it is really this that is more important than anything), that what Lancelot undergoes is a strictly theological experience. He awakens to the reality that the life he leads is something less than reality, or at least reality as it ought to be - in an ideal sense, in that sense that means happiness, contentment, peace, tranquility, ataraxia. He is much like Percy's more famous protagonist, Binx Bolling, whose own struggle to find that "something else" electrified me those five years ago. Who doesn't feel terribly hollow? Who doesn't feel fulfilled? Bolling muses that that something else might be God. Lancelot awakens to a world in which the ought does not quite conform to the is. He would much prefer to deal in absolutes, believes even that he once did (love is infinite, love is absolute), but confronts the disquieting fact that the world (we) appears to have moved on from such simple binaries, has adopted the psychiatric language of "madness" and speaks often only of "troubled" individuals. There is no room for God here. No room for lost causes. Maybe there is room for sin. But the jury, as of page 176, is still out.

There is that question I always ask myself, when considering Percy and his characters. Am I awake? How would I know it if I was? There is always that sense of something just out of reach. One revelation, one epiphany, one striking moment of absolute clarity to rip me straight from the doldrums and onto a higher plane of understanding. It has never come. Time marches forward. It is all banal. The cancellation of possibility is horrendous, a horrific consideration that haunts me awake and asleep. But what we are concerned with here is habit. Temporal reinforcement tightens its stranglehold, squeezes the neck, throttles you. Leaving the "well worn path of my life" is not easy. But I have come to learn that it is that interior state, that psychological barrier, that is hardest to break through. Once you have triumphed over yourself, everything falls into place. It is a problem of time (an incidental one), but not the problem of time.

Still, extenuating circumstances have precluded me from acting and I do not believe I will have enough time to act before I am off to start my "new life" in our nation's storied capital. So the destabilization paradoxically intensifies with this newfound willingness to change. The old not yet dead, the new waiting to be born and all that. I am indeed caught in a liminal space and my frustrations have only grown with this progress. I do feel like a tape head, the worm eating away at future possibilities. How much easier it would be to simply find God! But reading about the dating lives of Catholic integralists on Twitter makes me want to raze the Vatican. Despite the feeling that things are slipping away from them, they have somewhere they can go, somewhere they belong, a community they can live, laugh and love with (maybe, maybe, maybe, this is the impression I get. One can still, after all, go to Church, if nothing else). I'm much too craven to take such a step. Think of all the possibilities that might be canceled!