67: Shroud – Concealing

This is how things are for me. Is there no va­lidity to this experience? Even the madman suffers the reality of his own experience. Even the world of the psychotic is a world that is lived in, no mat­ter how hopeless its capacity to nourish and sustain, to deliver up a meaning that makes going on a possibility. I am not sure if what is at issue is the Nature of the Real or an Inability to Make Con­tact with the Real. When those who, like me, feel compelled by the irresistible logic of empirical idealism cannot find anything real that subsists beyond the experience we have of what-we-may-think-is-real, what can we do in this despairing not-world whose moment by moment unfolding is nothing but the laying down of traps?

I have been lucky, when I know that others have not, for however heavily the bleakness that weighs down this side of the balance, I have rev­elled in the good fortune of having more than enough interesting things to place on the other side. Just as distractions perhaps, just as a substi­tute for the sun that does not really shine outside the cave that has no outside. It is for that no less a precious thing, and here is my one hope, that in­teresting things never lose their appeal, though, there is in that hope a terrible dread that matters cannot stand so forever. And then what? Lack of certainty, or at least lack of hope for a certain robustness to that certainty, feeds such a primitive fear of some nameless abomination. Please, more distractions to cover it up! Please, more distractions that reach right to the edges and tuck around like a proper shroud.