Non Est Hic Pt. I

[A note to the reader: What you are about to read is the first part of what I imagine is a two-part story. This is not easy reading and it ends in a dark place, but like all good stories there is a conclusion that satisfies both mind and heart. In an essay titled “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien, coined the term “eucatastrophe.” Tolkien meant by this word that all great stories have a sudden turn of events that lead from an impending catastrophe to a “happily ever after.” This narrative details the “catastrophe”: it’s a partial outline of my own story and, I believe, a roadmap to understanding the narrative within which we all are caught up in. Thus, if this essay is dark it is only because dawn is coming.]

     I recently moved to beautiful Santa Monica. This is the seventh time I have moved in the last five years and every time the experience is exhausting. Old relationships are left behind, new relationships must be formed (incidentally, this task gets harder and harder with every passing year of my life); past ritual comforts are forgotten, future ritual comforts must be discovered. New roads, new grocery stores, new jobs, new cultures/languages, new everything. We live in an age which revels in and worships the new—the new smartphone, the new song, the new trend. Youth is celebrated, old-age regarded as passé. Yet, the older I get the more I see the value in ritual, tradition, and something familiar. Moving to Santa Monica I have looked for a ritual, something to anchor me in the midst of another disorienting move. Coogie’s Cafe has become that ritual. Coogie’s is one of those cafes that only locals go to. The inside decor has a particular late 1950’s appearance and the clientele frequently look like they belong to the same age. There is nothing trendy or hip about Coogie’s, but it’s where I come every weekend morning to think, to read, and to write (as I type I sit at one of Coogie’s nondescript seats and watch the various elderly patrons shovel food around their plates). There’s nothing special about Coogie’s but it’s become my ritual and the sense of familiarity alone is worth coming here. 

     Coogie’s is a silly example, but there is something at work below my desire to find familiarity. It’s the sense of maintaining…of remaining…of familiarity; the absence of restlessness, anxiety, and disorientation. The Nobel Prize winning Albert Camus has written somewhere that our hearts long for “love without parting.” We instinctively desire a sense of familiarity whether in relationship, place or situation, that will last forever. We do not like the disorienting experience that follows the death of a loved one, the break-up of a lover, the moving away of a dear friend. With each of these we feel the restlessness, the anxiety, that all our rituals, all that we have learned to depend on and maintain is now lost. At the macro-level it’s the second law of thermodynamics—entropy. I can’t say I understand everything (or anything) in physics, but I understand the idea: the universe and everything in it is winding down, slowing down, and will someday fall apart. William Keats properly translates our predicament into more poetic verse (which I prefer): “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” That line strikes chords—deep chords—within me: “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” 

     The inevitability of “the fall” weighs too heavily on our mind. So we medicate, we pacify, we forget. Willingly we numb ourselves into an amnesia of our current and future state—“the fall.” Camus writes perceptibly in his semi-autobiographical account of the ways in which he dealt with the anxiety of “the fall.” 

“Yes, I was bursting with a longing to be immortal. I was too much in love with myself not to want the precious object of my love never to disappear. Since, in the waking state and with a little self-knowledge, one can see no reason why immortality should be conferred on a salacious monkey, one has to obtain substitutes for that immortality. Because I longed for eternal life, I went to bed with harlots and drank for nights on end. In the morning, to be sure, my mouth was filled with the bitter taste of the mortal state. But, for hours on end, I had soared in bliss… Every night I would strut at the bar, in the red light and dust of that earthly paradise, lying fantastically and drinking at length. I would wait for dawn and at last end up in the always unmade bed of my princess, who would indulge mechanically in sex and then sleep without transition. Day would come softly to throw light on this disaster and I would get up and stand motionless in a dawn of glory. Alcohol and women provided me, I admit, the only solace of which I was worthy.”

     I easily read myself into those lines. It’s as if Camus instead of writing an account of his experience had instead studied me from a distance. But Camus not only identifies my outward symptoms he diagnoses the disease: a heart longing for “the fall” not to be true. I imagine that you have the same disease, though your symptoms may or may not be different. It could be that you aspire for that career breakthrough, so you work yourself to the bone because you will only be happy when you get it. It may be that you are looking for that perfect guy/girl/marriage partner and you will only be satisfied when you find them. Money, power, success, autonomy, entertainment…the list of possible numbing agents is infinite. Yet, all of them are singular in their desire to push “the fall” far from our minds. The illusion of security is worth the price for the denial of reality.   

     It’s a dark picture. It means we are all addicts to one degree or another. We are all looking for relief and medicating with things we know can scratch the itch for a while but can’t cure the problem. They can’t cure since they are subject to “the fall” as well. It’s inevitable: “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Source: 

Camus, Albert. 1991. The Fall. 1st Vintage international ed. Vintage International. New York: Vintage Books. 

Keats, William Butler. 1989. The Second Coming. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.