I found a piece by an anonymous author, stuffed into a copy of Notes from Underground, lying outside a row of apartments on the sidewalk on my way to buying groceries. While I feel it is a bit overly dramatic about the state of our common experience, I thought it worth sharing with you all:
“Say what you mean instead of saying what you know is possible. That’s where we always get stuck. We’re so different from each other though like you I’m hanging on often by a thread in an endless ditch I can’t seem to dig myself out of. We continue to read and write, waiting for an epiphany to come. We work so hard it strangles our minds and by the end of the day we can hardly remember where or who we’ve been. Just a skeleton of a day, etched out in corridors with little rooms where intense stress occurred, and those passages in between with their voluminous faints and deliriums. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you since I’m only guessing, as I feel myself age. You have other kinds of battle scars, other types of issues with identity. You might have pink hair, green, a sheen of straight cornsilk, tight curls cropped or worn as spherical aura around your head. In many ways we’ll feel the same, at times, because our bodies are not all that different, though our situations may be night and day. I’ll never know who you are, but if you’re listening, there is something that has passed between us, and it doesn’t need to be love or even understanding. But something’s shared, not even thoughts, but these words around which we hang our own private thoughts. Again, I don’t even remember who I was most days and I imagine it’s the same for you. Something’s been stripped from us, and it’s a common wound we share, not even a wound, but a void, an absence. We can blame the scalpel of Capital, how it cuts through and removes chunks of our inner lives from us, but I think it goes deeper than that — deeper but not deep, right at the surface, but unseen, unheard, some unnameable factor that engenders capital sitting in us all, tying us together in a hopeless brocade so tight we can barely move. I want to speak your language in greater clarity since then I may have access to better articulation, vision, and to be able to see the thread, the weakest knot of the weave, that holds us here, and perhaps a few of us can loosen that taught binding, to escape, if even to live more or less the same life, though with a different sensibility. Perhaps it’s just a relationship to my own language that needs to change, shocked out of its habitual sleep, and maybe that’s why I continually torture and tear at it, beat at it with a disruptive drumming, listening to whatever soundings may come in order to detect the unsayable, unspeakable, among the things it tries to say and represent. Because now and then you sense something present in your life you’ll never be able to give a name to, something without texture or shape, and that sensing makes all the difference.”