It is almost impossible to describe; a transition that takes place so slowly and insidiously that one grasps at it in vain. It is a vapor that imperceptibly encroaches upon your life; not something present in the world outside, not something observable in things, but in the very way in which you view the world. It is a mist that creeps into your eyes, and into your mind so that your very analysis is confused by it. It steals up on you so slowly, step by step; a process of many years. The transition is almost over with me, and all I have is faint glimpses. I cannot pierce through the haze, but I do remember, oh so vaguely, instances, flashing instances when I was shocked at my new world of grey. I stood there in the mist and noticed, really noticed, that things had changed. Moments later the novelty was gone and habituation blunted any insights that might have arisen. Yes, habituation, that bitch, that fat cow of a bitch. Always dragging one’s life back to the baseline, and if it cannot drag you back to a mean, it makes your situation a mean. You rise or fall to peaks of great emotion, of insight, of perception, and habituation is always there to lay its blanket of mundanity over everything new. In vain do you climb the mountain, for habituation simply drags the land upwards to you. Where once you stood on a grand peak, overlooking the world, seeing it from a new perspective, now everything appears as it once did. Evolution, yes of course it was evolution. How useful one would be standing on mountain tops; one would surely starve in such a state. Who can think of food or sex when standing on such a glorious pick, or delving, as it were, into the heart of the earth. Normality, mundanity, insipidity; these are the conditions in which the human beast is able to thrive, and this is where habituation drags one with infuriating predictability. I lie down in a fit of tears, my body shaking from immense tragedy, my heart pierced clean through. The world is unbearable, it is horrible; it is impossible to endure this for one minute longer. And when I rise, the thought of fried eggs and toast has usurped this emotion, this excitement.
But enough of habituation, she is a bitch after all, and one should not devote such time to a bitch. I was speaking of the mist, the haze that steals upon you, and this haze can be no other than the disillusionment of ageing. That slow, horrible process where the eyes of a child are torn out ever so gently and replaced by the eyes of a man; a fair trade indeed! Now what is there to say about this; I see the world very differently now, not as a result of education or maturity or anything like that. I believe this process is inevitable and inescapable, and neither maturity nor education are. People talk of how one loses curiosity, the thrill and newness of the world are lost on us boring wind bags, but this is not the whole story, or rather, this is hardly the story at all. This story is about trust and order. It is about the faith that one has, not in a God, but in the universe. The relaxed stance one takes towards the operation of the universe, the assumption that things are orderly. This comes about in the way things happen to you as a child. Everything seems so grounded, the world operates in the hands of something, that just makes everything go. When one gets in a car, one simply arrives at a destination. Letters are sent places, objects are manufactured, people are married, children are born; these things simply happen. It is not a faith in adults, but in the underlying order and direction which everything seems to be a part of. This is not some simple naivete or ignorance, the child knows that people die, things are stolen, there are disasters and tragedies in the world. But all of this is a part of it, a part of the beautiful order of things. Now the change that takes place is the understanding of the impetus behind everything, the motives for which things get done. Slowly you realize that the world has been thrown together in the shoddiest way, that things simply happen. People have just one up in places, doing things. You can tell all the stories you want, but what the child eventually sees is the contingency, the last-minute thrown-togetherness of the way things happen. What you see is that things could have turned out differently. Any number of different ways, and this rips the carpet out from under the necessary. I can remember one day when I was about 16 years old, I came down the stairs of my house when no one was home. I walked into the living room and I looked around me and everything seemed so unfamiliar. It had all just happened, these arrangements, this stuff. The fact that I lived there, that I had been living there, seemed preposterous. I thought of my name for some reason, and said it aloud. Michael, I said to myself and it sounded so strange. Had I been named this my entire life? It was just thrown on me, like this rug here and this table, and the fact that we lived here…all of it just thrown on arbitrarily. Sure you can say I was named after my father, or that I was named after the archangel. But really, it was a thought that simply came up, arbitrarily, stupidly, and it could not have come up. That is the key really. Contingency, and the fucked up basis on which this contingency rests. As you burrow into people’s lives and see the horrifying imperfection, the caprice involved in the whole affair. It’s not that things turned out badly or that he is sad. He is senator or a pianist and if you read their resume or bio, it tells a story, a necessary story. Always impassioned by such and such, influenced early by so and so, always showed a precocious ability for such and such…oh but the reality is that it all simply happened, a hodgepodge whirlwind that you have draped with a story. But we see the movement, yes you cannot hide what is underneath. What was that flicker there, and what is that noise? You cannot hide it from us, you cannot hide the arbitrary!
It’s impossible though, this has been such a failure. I have taken those flashing moments, sipped them in the crudest, darkest oil, placed them in a pit of mud and allowed pigs to walk over them for a full week. And here they are for your viewing pleasure, but more so they are for me, and that is why it is sad. In the end I guess it does come down to habituation, and that bitch lies heavily on my back. You see, there are new things in your life, always new things. A new pair of shoes, a new opinion, a new CD, a new house, a new idea, a new haircut, a new wife, a new identity…everything that is your life was at one time new, of course. And so each of these things presents itself to you in its shining attire; it may be good or bad, desired or undesired, but it is new. And these things incorporate themselves into your life, to say it in other words, habituation tramples them to the point of being so insipid that you no longer notice them. For instance, what kind of alarm clock do you have, or what kind of sheets will you be sleeping on tonight? These things have worked themselves into your life. So everything passes through, receives the stamp of habituation, but the problem is that that is your life. All of these worn things, opinions, friendships; this is your life. And so when you stand up straight and shake of that bitch, you look at this vast expanse of grey and flattened things and you are horrified. When did that become a part of my life? Nothing can possibly be so familiar as to merit getting used to. Even yourself, your hands, look at them. How strange. When did these become flattened…oh so long ago! How insane and radical everything is. What a product of wild and arbitrary wills is everything. How this book got here for instances, what insanity, what contingency! Ahh but the bitch lies on me now, and I grow very tired of this; perhaps I won’t even read it in the morning.
