As my parents are getting ready to sell the house where they have lived for the past twenty-three years, my father and my fiancé carry a table out to the garage which they will most likely need to get rid of. It's a table I've seen a lot in my life but has never had much of a purpose. I used it during my senior year and graduate year of college as a desk, as did my mom at different times of my life, but it has always been more of a catch-all table than a piece of furniture that has served a specific purpose. As Scott and my dad set the table down out in the garage amongst boxes of college books and my grandmother's china, my dad says, "I've always wanted this to be my kitchen table. The top of it was never nice, but I always thought the legs were beautiful and I always wanted to be able to sit at it in a kitchen somewhere. We've had it since we lived in Connecticut, but it's never been a kitchen table."
To Elti on the drive home: "I guess ... I dunno. Been thinking about how all humans crave the same few things and thus create the same art over and over in search of intense beauty and feeling... something which overcomes us in adolescence and then slowly escapes us as we grow older, in large part due to decisions we ourselves make, erroneously believing that we are working towards something that is somehow greater or better"
Bear with me.
While browsing Facebook the following Sunday morning (today), I came upon the following article posted by Marisola: https://www.vice.com/read/what-you-call-depression-i-call-the-truth-309?utm_source=vicefbus. Reading the excerpt she had chosen and then the article itself finally set me to putting more of this into words than just a text message to one of the most enlightened individuals I've had the pleasure of making contact with in my life. The comment I left her has been cannibalized for this post, because I think I need to write all of this down because it feels important in a way things haven't in years.
I have been spending more time than usual lately lamenting the state of things and clawing at the enormous task of finding a place for myself in it. I tend to think, however, that it is not about our inability to use these protective coping mechanisms described in this article, but about trying to use them in the first place. Why is isolation so terrible and painful? Why is small talk the most heartbreaking activity in the world? Because by its definition it is false. We all know the world to be huge and brutal and existentially devastating to look at, so rather than speaking to each other about it, rather than living tribally and sharing and supporting one another, we ascribe to "mutual silence" and try to distract ourselves with television or noncreative hobbies? How does this make sense? Perhaps it is not a failing of our soul's defenses that leads to depression, but the attempts we make at using them.
I don't feel I can speak to the general experiences of mankind, but for me, while adolescence was no picnic, it did come with the benefit of being surrounded by others like me, by others who were willing to be honest. As my peers and I sought for identity, we were faced with the necessity of authenticity and truth, and as such, were less alone. But as I get older, I find that the people around me (many of them the same people I knew when I was younger) are abandoning their truths in search of what they believe to be the right or more acceptable paths. I have been guilty of it myself (though I think adding guilt to this equation would complicate matters past a Facebook comment). My father never used that table for his kitchen, even though he's kept it for longer than I've been alive and still thinks about it now. It sits in the garage and he looks at it sadly. My mother spent over twenty five years missing California and when she finally went back to it, she realized that it wasn't what she was missing at all. Now she misses something else that she can't put words to. I have a friend who schedules herself so tightly that she breaks and cries herself to sleep every few months because she can't keep up with her own need to hide from the feelings of insecurity she schedules herself against. What if an inability to hide isn't the problem and instead it is the hiding itself.
The truth, for me, is that all art is basically the same art. All humanity is searching for essentially the same things. Don't we all want to feel needed, to see ourselves and our feelings reflected in the eyes of others? The beauty of the world, whether objectively real or something created by the firings of the human mind, dwells in connection, in experience, in communication and communion of spirit; until we stop trying to hide ourselves from it, chances are that we will feel trapped by our own "protective" psychological devices.
