The Lost Passion of Age

Put away childish things, or you will be the childish thing put away

“A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Every creative endeavor is an unspoken question of being.

Every person who creates is curious about life and the mysteries it holds. Maybe they’re cynical and arrogant about it. Maybe they’re stupid. Maybe they’re unrealistic, or their perception is distorted by the abuses they’ve endured, or they’re just plain wrong. But still, every motion to create asks the question, why? And in the question ‘why’ is always a spark of hope.

A carpenter creates a chair because people want a place to sit down. But why does he desire to make the chair beautiful? Why does his hands move lovingly over the wood, imagining its rich color bringing warmth into a new space? What does that chair say about its creator, and what does the creator’s gift say to the world?

Even the simple act of creating a piece of furniture is like crawling to the lip of the unknown and trying to peer over.

It used to feel exciting. The thought of being swallowed by the glittering darkness of the thing beyond myself.

I used to be able to write sentences that bent my spine backwards, gave me goosebumps, made my eyelashes feel like werewolf fur. They made me feel like a witch.

It’s been difficult for me to be motivated to write the last few weeks. Maybe because I’m getting older, maybe because I have a 5 month old and I haven’t slept for longer than four hours in half a year, maybe because even after years of struggle and work I still have flashbacks of my childhood that leave me feeling shivery and broken. 

How can I understand the world like the greats do if I can’t even fix myself? Writers like Cormac McCarthy and Dostoevsky and Brian Allen Carr are great because they see. They can’t help but see. The world pours itself into their eyelids. Whenever I read them I can almost feel the light spasming off their fingertips.

I spend a lot of my days in a stupor of disassociation. I’ve hidden myself from myself. I sit in the eclipse of my knowledge. I hide in the dark bubble of paranoia and mistrust because it’s more comfortable than the light. I’ve made myself too weak for the light. It hurts my eyes when I turn to regard it.

When I was nineteen years old and writing The Crooked God Machine, my worst fear was losing my passion to write and thus, losing myself. I didn’t want to become one of those thousands of “writers” that gave up to work in some office with fluorescent lighting and gray carpets, to go home to needy children and a distant husband and one of those beige couches that seemed out of place no matter how you decorated. I knew that in this nightmare version of myself my coffee would always be bitter and lukewarm, and the closest I’d get to love would be a look from my husband like the look of a deer before it’s run over in the dead of night. A look of dumb shock mistaken for an excited nerve.

 I didn’t want all of my sharp edges flattened. I wanted to live life as one big spiritual experience. I never wanted to stop feeling the blood welling up underneath my nails.

But the worst part about losing yourself is that it doesn’t hurt, because death doesn’t hurt. It goes quietly into the night, and the pain is a distant memory, if there’s a memory at all.

I’ll never be nineteen years old again and looking out at the horizon of my life, in this center of a median where everything in the expanse beyond me was huge, and glittering, and brilliant. I can still remember how I felt the first time I went into a cafe in a strange city and ordered a cafe au lait. How the possibility of everything that could be made the world seem bigger than it really was.

But in the decade since I’ve scoured the earth and its corners, I've come to recognize life’s patterns, its endless chiral spirals, its mathematical certainties. The coffee in most cafes is mostly the same. Most restaurants have the same meals. People, when you get down to it, aren’t really that different from one another. Each day brings a similar routine, and even if you try to break the routine you can soon grow to be bored of your newbound freedom. Everything is carbon.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t beautiful and nice and surprising things in my life anymore. It just means they don’t matter as much as they used to. They don’t contain such awesome mysteries.

And after dealing with my trauma and the pain it’s caused for most of my adult life, I think that even if I unlock “the mystery” to curing myself, my reward will just be a normal life, with different problems, with a ravaged wasteland of broken relationships and missed opportunities. I’ll never get to be twenty years old again so I can order a cafe au lait at a coffee shop, everything foreign and wondrous, my shining eyes erased with an old pain.

When I gave birth to my daughter I gave birth to my replacement. It was the moment I became old. A true adult. I’ll never feel like a young person again. I’ll never write like a young person again. I’m not supposed to. In order to have childlike wonder I must erase my knowledge, hide wisdom from myself, be blind and ignorant, repeat the mistakes of youth over and over again. I must learn nothing. 

A person full of childlike wonder cannot become a mother, elder, wisdom-holder, sage. They become the sad village clown. The forty-five year old that still shows up to teenager’s parties with a six pack and sallow skin and eyes that refuse to be filled with new insight. Or like Madonna, who has become like an idiot fairy. She tried to cling to an image that was meant to change, and so became a mutant and distorted version of her old self.

In order to become the best version of myself, to continue on that unabiding chain of life, I have to put away childish things, or I will become the childish thing that must be put away.

I do not have to bend my face down into an eternal cold. I do not have to become a husk. But I do have to become different. I do have to recognize that all things, from the beginning of time, move through a current of blood that carries us all to our final destination into the dark.

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I recently published a new story in XRAY Lit mag. You can read Disappear Here over on their website.

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