I have not seen that movie, but I am happy know of it because my life has been reduced to a series of hollow intellectual activities, and escapism is much closer to feeling real than I ever feel in my waking life. Why does any one of us do what we do? Dostoievski said that there is no meaning in anything--that searching for meaningfulness is an illness.
It is all the same anyway, just different codes for the nostalgia we feel for what remains unnamed. Your man dancing at the bus stop was a language for something you perceived about the world--even I could not really decode it, but I knew what it was pointing to was important and perhaps unnamable in any other tongue. You could be speaking sign language, and I could be watching, mystified, humbled by the beauty and poetry, though what you might be saying was something utterly simple, like, the water here tastes funny.
Sophie and I were walking behind Quacks the other day when she pointed to something on the ground and struggled to find the word for it--a box? I offered. No, she rejected emphatically. I thought harder. A crate, I said. She was visibly relieved--Yes, that’s it, a crate. Why is it that we feel such satisfaction with the precise word, the impossible exactitude of naming a thing?
Today I was walking and came across the syllables of another language--a litter of jasmine flowers strewn across the ground, with no jasmine bushes in sight. Then a walking cane, abandoned in the grass, then a few feet farther on a bicycle lock with no bicycle. I felt the nostalgia for what was named, I intuited somewhere inside me what these things codified, something like ineffable freedom, unlikely escape. Maybe the same phrase as a man dancing at a bus stop? No. There was no joy in these things, just randomness, release, for a while, from what had formerly held them meaningful.
Maybe I will try not thinking about meaning at all--but just being in this little skin of mine. Impossible. I am reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged right now, which seems to be a disturbing pro-capitalist treatise on exalting the human being above all else. I am confused, G, pretty damn confused. Who is Jeff Foxworthy?
