Hmm.
I’m going to post about something but not post about it, really. Directly, I mean.
In other words, I will mention something, but use it as a vehicle to go into detail about something else I thought about. Once. Previously.
Fuck. What am I trying to say.
OK.
Sofia posted a bloggish kinda chain post/email thing…a series of questions you answer in a post on your blog. And in turn you link to another blog. I think that’s how it works. The kinda crap we’re all fond of. I sure am. Anyways, the post, “meme,” links to a questionnaire on another blog fittingly called “The Proust Questionnaire.”
You’ll find a long list of questions well-suited to a drinking game. The first question did something…
It triggered a thought, a memory…
Triggered.
I love that word when it describes mental phenomena.
A thought is triggered.
Mr. Quintero, what “triggered” that thought?
And what thought was triggered?
And why.
Why, motherfucker!
Tell us.
OK.
Well perhaps I should first state the question.
Question #1.
As far as I got because I don’t have the patience to answer or even read the entire list in detail. I’m a skimmer. I mean, does anyone remotely connected to me care what my favorite bird is. (I don’t have one, I actually despise birds).
So question, the first.
Triggered. Elicited a remembrance of mental misery past.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Yup, that’s it.
Lowest depth of misery.
That is saying a lot.
Misery is bottomless.
Even in your worst state of misery, I would still venture to guess you were nowhere near as low as most Earthly inhabitants, past and present, have ever experienced. We don’t have it so bad. Not at all. Our toilets flush (we HAVE toilets), our meals are refrigerated. When we want to eat, we pull them out and, in the span of a few short minutes, cook them with high-energy waves. We are insulated from the inclement weather outside.
It’s not perfect, but we have it OK. Misery…is relative.
I thought of a theoretical state of misery.
I have no idea if it exists, nor do I want to know. Or find out just yet.
But I had a what-if thought once.
What if…
In the infinitesimal flicker of a moment before you die, the minutest microscopic point of time right before you take your last breath and the final traces of life seep from your body, just before your brain closes shop for the last time. What if in that atomic-sized sliver of time, so narrow that it’s unrecognizable as reality, in that last living millionth of a second your body will ever grace the surface of this planet…
What if, in that moment you experience a chilling and ethereal distance from your own life, your own history and your own prized existence.
In that moment, all you have known, everyone you have known and loved dearly, all of it, loses complete personal value and importance, for a millionth of a mental second before your mind checks out.
What if all you lived for, all you would sacrificed your life for, just does not matter. Does not matter in a tremendously impersonal and detached manner.
All you have loved and lived for, in that span of microseconds, becomes no more important or significant than a random leaf scuttling across the road or a cloud floating across the sky. In that moment, all memories become utterly equal. Empty. Neutral. Absent of meaning.
Is that not the lowest form of misery?
Misery is bottomless, you can free fall dropping but if you want to try to go back up, it’s a damn long climb. David is the rainy season also encouraging you to write these kinds of posts?
My husband lived in subsaharan Africa for over a year. No running water. He had to get water from a well like everyone else. No modern plumbing, so like women squat to pee. No central air (and it’s hot!). Their food has worms in it, so de-wormers are sold everywhere. Think people there are miserable?
He told me they live rather happy lives in their small communities. They aren’t depressed. They are close to family. They treat people kindly. Yeah there are problems just like everywhere else, but it’s not the same kind of soul-level, deep, dark misery that you seem to experience.
It’s funny how deathly afraid of death we all are. It’s a part of life, a part of being alive. I don’t know what more to say about that because I’m just as in the dark as most people about what happens at the moment of death, but I don’t think that is the lowest depth of misery.
Paul, my personality is rainy :)
Yeah that was all conjectural, Hope. Hypothetical.
I was definitely trying to convey the opinion that misery is very relative. I don’t think it would be hard to imagine some people might be miserable living even my life. Yet, I’m quite happy and not miserable. Some very poor and simple Latin American cultures/societies nevertheless report high levels of happiness despite living what many in the “civilized” world would see as an unbearable life.
This post was merely a notion, obviously completely untested, of a transformation people (perhaps) go through at the moment of death.
I tend to air out the most esoteric brain exercises on Phoenixism.
Living your pathetic life-NAH! You, happy?! HA!HA!HA!HA!HA! OK, back up off the floor. I will throw THIS at ya. The fact that you are a Godless heathen means that you believe at the end of the day, your life IS meaningless. I do not think that is the case. I really believe that God put all of us here for a reason. I try every day to understand that. I do not think that when I go into the wall, or the ground depending on our finances, my life will have been meaningless or miserable.
Ah you religious people! I guess that means the urn is out of the question, isn’t it Mark?
The strict Catholic way is against cremation…we need our bodies when heaven returns to earth or some malarkey like that. Is that why cremation is out of the question for you?
Of course, no urn! I guess I am with the Roman Catholics on this one. Of course it is God and he will know who we are, burned or not. But I want to make sure and side on caution.
Rain Man!
Unless the reaper finds you in a burning pile of wreckage…no option then, I think maybe Mark has a point. Your life and writings seem to have a dark persona at times. You believe that nothing happens when you are laid to rest so you had better get your ass away from the keyboard and live the only life you have David. It seems Mark has a point that you have no higher power to inspire you to live the life you have here on Earth, so what will happen to your rotting carcus? Will you lie there and be nibbled at by worms for eternity? Me, I will be the the Spirit World with all my relatives and loved ones. I will live again as a spirit. I can return to the Earth as another being but my spirit will remain the same. Having a higher power gives me hope and something to look forward to beyond the world of the living. To each his own…
That’s what religion is. Erring on the side of caution. And living your life like that!
I am going to absorb this comment into a post I’ll publish on Monday, Lana.
The idea of rationality in a godless world.
Find motivation in the absence of a goal.