The New Abnormal
The Royal Road to Remaining Idle
I’m angry so I begin again. To shed light on my rage and make it subside. It is lighter now, it’s not that intense and self-destructive. Maybe I’m getting old, or I’ve really learned a trick or two. There’s so little to say when you speak from within the normal, when you’re comfortable and merely mortal. A new calm and a crystal ocean, tranquil, boring and bland. I take a perverse pleasure in silence. The voids in discourse. I speak only when I am expected to remain silent. And when they ask me who I am, I flip and become something else.
What can be more transgressive, than doing nothing and getting away with it? Putting food on one’s table, enjoying life and having the time to think; all by having done nothing and without any privilege to account for it. To remain silent and untouchable; without guilt. True to oneself. Having no concern for the state of the world, the state of the State, and to live without a trace. To take pleasure in oneself is the royal road to infinity, but also a sentence to infamy. A man once said; heaven is just the mind of man contemplating God, but God is just a pleasurable feeling of nothing in particular. A love directed towards no one in particular. Just the reversal of anxiety, anxiety being a fear of nothing in particular; heaven remains dormant inside the feeling of anxiety. It’s just a trick, an athletic maneuver to reverse suffering and unlock permanent euphoria.
Just like an intense relationship, that feels only like dull pain, is often a matter of cracking the code and reversing it into a higher form of play. Energy is pure potential, it’s convertible, it can be mastered without obsessive surveillance. But lovers often get scared as they see the challenge, afraid the misery will last forever; fearing that no light resides behind the doors that are only closed.
And when the crystal cracks, I feel just like a cowardly lover, my ivory tower smashed to pieces and me — just a lonely man alone with his delusions. The stories he invented to hide his flaws, his hypocrisies, hubris and cowardice. Is there a pattern to my life? Yes, I refuse to play the game. But what if the game is all there is? And my life — a waste.
For better or worse, I will not be tested. And the moment I am, I will fail in advance, or perhaps I will pass and refuse the reward; it’s all the same. “I can, but I won’t”, because love cannot be tested, it has little concern for our petty visions of who remains true and who doesn’t. It points to something higher, beyond discourse and life. And if it doesn’t? Then “love” is just another job. And I have enough work to do as it is. It’s no easy job to remain without vocation, it’s constant work and endless toil to know exactly how one should act in order to remain completely idle and useless.
