Delta Force

I found this in one of my old notebooks. Although the entries do not have dates -- very uncharacteristic of me -- I know that it was written early in 1991:

If I speak to the you I know, I err, equating past and present. But if I acknowledge change, that you are not now who you were when I really knew you, I surrender all hope of privileged conversation: we become two people who have just met, pastless, pointlessly engaged in attempts at mutual understanding.

While I now regard the conclusion I reach in this fragment as unnecessarily bleak, the problem it confronts is one that is always in my mind at the moment. How can we be free of the past without falling into the bondage of a life without history?

Divergence and Dessication

I'm simultaneously energized and depleted. That sense I've had in recent months that I had lost access to the safety of my middle ground has only grown stronger. And I'm wondering whether I first perceived that state of affairs in the thrall of a premonition. Did I feel this coming?

Now that it's definitely here, I find myself wondering how to proceed. Sublimation might be a good idea. But I've forsworn that approach in favor of openness. What that means, I suppose, is that I'm going to have to find a way to propel everything in the same direction. Life can be the provocation for theorizing. Theory can be my manual for living.

It wouldn't be the first time I've been in that space. The last time I was extraordinarily productive and had a lot of fun along the way. Maybe I'll manage to repeat that trajectory. The problem this time around is that I lack the means of releasing stress that I deployed fifteen years ago. I also don't see myself having a four-day "weekend" these days.

For now, all I can do is pay attention to the present, like those Americanized guides to Zen advise. Yesterday my mind was wafting exuberantly in the winds of change. Today I feel dried out, as if I were being tossed about like that bag in American Beauty, mindless and inert. Eventually the wind gives you chapped lips, no matter how mind-blowing it seemed at first.