Aporia

Jace Cooke, whose tumblelog is excellent. Although I might propose possible remedies for the loss of his “tingling, retching unease,” most of them involving media of various forms (and with various limitations), all are superfluous: without invoking eternal return, I think it likely that we’ll all experience these feelings again and again in our lives, without needing to preserve what will return too soon with shocking force.

Heartbreak, shame, and anguish are such integral parts of life that we shouldn’t worry about the success of our anesthetizing capacity for internal abstraction; a fresh and excruciating administering of pain is just around the corner!

But Cooke here formulates the dilemma of the sufferer: one needn’t be a Buddhist to see how pain substantiates the self, and anyone who has been lovelorn knows that one doesn’t want to lose the pain; one clings to it, sometimes as proof of the love, sometimes as evidence of one’s moral superiority, sometimes because some passionate feeling must replace devotion and infatuation, and it might as well be misery.

Cursive Buildings advised that one should not enjoy melancholy, advice I appreciated and admired, but like Cooke I worry that the flight from despair by way of a “knack for unfeeling” is not quite the transcendence, the ”letting go” required, but something else: a form of cowed shrinking, a fearful reluctance to feel, a deadening and slackening and hiding and abandoning.