Water All The Way Up

Here's how I reason about pain in moments of disappointment.

I was meant to go to Australia. I'd been looking forward to this trip for months. But now it looks like I won't get to go there after all. Due to a combination of personal incompetence, bad luck, and the Australian government's blatant operation of a visa system, in spite of their claims to the contrary. (The Romanian Government complained to the EU about this but no cigar.)

It was bad. Is bad. I woke up, saw their email, sent the documents, called my friend, and as soon as the administrative distraction was no longer present, I sat there, as the saying goes. thunderstruck. I sat there, feeling like a heavy rusty work wrench had just been casually pushed through my forehead and wedged inside my chest like a tombstone. I sat there, at the end of a week in which the visa thing had been the least of my troubles, feeling like I'd just received a cancer diagnosis. Disoriented, angry, vexed, and sad beyond comprehension. A huddle of negative emotion, as if my brain couldn't quite decide which pain receptors to reach out to first.

I got up, took a few steps around my room and sat back down. Got up, sat down. Got up, sat down. Then lay down, wrapping myself in my duvet, waiting for some sort of letup I suppose. Then got up again. Confusion. I took another few steps and my eyes rested on my shower towel. Still, no coherent thought agreed to present itself to me. So I walked to the hallway. And then stopped again. Walked to the shower, stopped. Opened the door to the shower cabin and stood starring. Pain in varied forms was the only discernible emotion. I felt ill. Get in the shower, said a voice, you're cold. My own rational thinking, coming to me as if from above. Pain pain pain, I thought vaguely, pain pain pain. I turned the water on. Pain pain intolerable pain pain. Pain pain pain. Pain like a kick in a slowly healing gunshot wound. Pain like a bad movie. Pain recalling every hardship, every disappointment, every fear and moment of horror, every sadness and vexation, every ego damage I'd ever experienced and could still recall.

Then, out of habit, I thought this: mustn't narrow frame. That's my preferred method for handling seriously bad news. Don't narrow frame. Not everything outside this context is damaged. There's stuff outside this one trip to Australia. Things are bad here, but they are not bad everywhere. A neat mental habit, if you can teach yourself it. Perspective. A drab cliche if you cannot conjure the associated emotion, or a life-affirming soul gift from the fucking gods.

Don't narrow frame. I thought of Time longitudinally. One of the small benefits of age is that you can imagine Time in long- as well as cross- section. I thought of elsewhere and elsewhen. Will this matter in 6 months? a year? 5 years?

But then something happened. Pain.

The pain was physically in my body, here and now. The pain was permeating and very real. And none of my elsewhere/elsewhen thoughts were helping very much. The body independent from the mind. I felt the disconnection distinctly: like trying to push a balloon upwards by a long limp ineffective thread. My wide framing wasn't working.

And that's when the penny rolled of the margin. Something I knew, of course, but never knew feelingly. It's stupid but kind of important to get this. You can't leave your body. You can't crawl outside your skin, is the real prick of the problem. No matter how bad the game is going, you can't just switch it off and go have tea. Any which way I moved, I continued to be inside Living. No out. That was it. No out. I could walk from one room to another, from one country to another, from one job to another, from one aspiration to the next. But no matter how far, how different, I'd always be inside. Living. Nowhere to come up for air, you see. Because there's no above water. It's water all the way up.

Really. Water all the way up.

I see.

So that was it, all those years. That sadness. That forever sadness. That sadness I was heaving around with me like a heavy suitcase wherever I went. That rootless, disembodied sadness, sadness eating, sadness speaking, sadness lodged behind my sternum like a knot. That sadness. That's what that was all about. It wasn't about whatever happened. Failed attempts, disappointments, heartaches, no no. I was narrow framing all along. That sadness was really about this. Water all the way up.

Water all the way up. The supreme mother of all problems.

The thought rather cheered me up. Blessed intellectualization. I'd pulled it off after all, the perspective trick. Big Problem had put Little Problem in its proper place.

I came out of the shower, got dressed, and walked to a coffee shop.

The pain was still kicking, but now I had a better avenue for thought. Without being too reductive, making your body stop hurting is not that different from fixing a motorcycle. Or indeed a bug in a computer app. The thing that gets you stuck is always not enough information. The thing that gets you unstuck is thinking things through. And coffee. And food.

Clue One. This thought made me feel better: Oh well, I thought. Such is life. I'll go to Singapore. Or Mexico. Or even the US. There's other places with desert. I'll go to Flagstaff. I'll buy a bike.

Clue Two. This thought made me feel worse: But I won't see Alex. I won't see Darwin. I won't drive to Uluru for days and days through the baking desert and I won't meet Pat.

Oh I know what this is.

One: disappointment. Well OK, disappointment hurts. But it also comes and goes.

Two: this interim and unmitigated horror of water all the way up. This desert between two pursuits of desire, when you have nothing to chase and therefore no chase to distract you from the thought of your unpausable existence. This waterless desert between losing one chase and starting another; between failing to secure one wish and that moment of hope when your imagination conjures for you a new desire. In this desert, you think: I don't want another cookie, I wanted that cookie; I'll never want another cookie again. It's this that makes the body hurting unbearable. Q.v. DFW: "No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering". I'll never want another cookie again. No distant goal will ever again distract me from It. And, horror of all horrors, there's water all the way up.

Well well.

How long now? Another 60 years?

I suddenly imagined waiting for a train in a rural train station in Siberia. Waiting for weeks on end. In the intolerable cold. No one else there. And no books.

This you see is the very heart of the problem. 60 years and water all the way up. You know those days when you feel lousy for no particular reason no matter what you do? Well, this is the reason. Call it the Tragedy of Existence.

I finished my second cup of coffee and thought about my day. An errand or two. Friends, alcohol. Books. Waiting to be told I can't fly to Sydney. The heartlessness of bureaucracies. The heartlessness of bad luck. Was I missing anything?

Well, you know, yes. Freedom, friendship, and thought.

The day is overcast but clear. No rain. I can walk. Happy thought from Clue One kicking around somewhere. Plenty of other places. Longitudinal Time. And a new desire with the associated plan and hope will eventually occur to me. There's no out, sure, but inside of here there's any number of ways of being. And I'll imagine one, eventually, I'm sure. Once I've been bored enough.

It's just the way of empty train stations underwater.