emo perturbation theory

What is this thing they call sinking your roots into a place?
DO you really notice when it’s happening? If you do, are you pleased to discover it?
There is or should be a sense of foreboding as well: it will make it harder for you to leave.
It’s like that U2 album title: all that you can’t leave behind.
There are times when you have to take stock of what you can’t leave behind.
It’s a frightening thing, how many things have anchored me here.
And yet if at some point being anchored becomes counterproductive, if these
bonds become shackles, then what?

YOu can’t help but sometimes fantasize about what it would like to be free–
of course, most people would find that terribly lonely–no life at all.
And yet there is something about the idea that is appealing. Of course,
there is no reason to be free, unless you know the opposite. Therefore the only
way to appreciate freedom is to have experienced the most

Dealing with ex-lovers throws this problem into sharp relief.
There are ones still here. You feel tied to them, you feel unable to leave them
behind–some combination of guilt and the residue of former feelings.
And then there are the ones that have left. And you want to escape the memories
that you share with them and this place. Yet you cannot extricate the one from the other.
The attempt is folly. Does time heal? Or can a powerful enough analgesic approximate
whatever we mean by ‘healing’. In fact, healing is not even a good metaphor, is it?

Shanghai is full of beautiful women of every race. Of every nationality. Of every shape and size.
That’s the libidinal subtext, isn’t it. An open secret that’s so obvious that we don’t really
need to talk about and rehash it. Your eyes are always scoping things out.
And yet there is a conflict between the most elemental of desires and the more prudent voice in your head
saying “don’t bother. it’s not worth it.” What is you are looking for in other people, anyhow?
That is, when you think beyond the one night stand motivations–what is there, again. The need
to settle, the need to be rooted. The need to stem the alienation and loneliness that besieges you.
That you can’t understand. The battle seems endless. The dialectic–alienation/disalienation–interminable.
The Buddhists tell you not to forgo these emotions–don’t fight them. You let them in. Your let them
pass through like passengers at a train station. You watch them. You don’t live less–but you learn to
build a critical distance. And you thereby mitigate their destructive potential.

And yet somewhere in the heart, there is also the need to love and to root oneself. You can, I believe,
root yourself in the face and body of another human being. I gather, from all that’s been said and done
over the course of civilization, that this is the way that it’s supposed to be. Home is where he/she is.
And yet you can sometimes end up in the throbbing crowd of beautiful and mysterious people, and instead of
getting drunk and throwing yourself around and hoping you, the errant dart, find your mark–it’s as if everyone is
behind a veil and you feel that this state of being thrown into the world, a world of desiring daseins like yourself is not
enough–they will always be objectified. They will always be separate and apart. And you were preordained to be lonely
and that it will, like some congenital disease that you never chose and can’t really blame yourself for, follow you to the grave.

If you still love her, ask her if she’ll have you back and beg forgiveness.
If you still love her, throw caution to the wind, go to her and leave this behind.
If you cannot love anyone, if you are afraid, if you are paralyzed by real injuries and imagined slights,
then hell is all the attractive and single tipsy people dancing at a swank club.
We know that dancing is a kind of foreplay. We know that the music is designed to get the hormones going.
If it weren’t we could listen to choral music and Bach at clubs.
But you cannot be part of this game. You cannot be part of any game.

YOu want to go somewhere where life is more real. Where relationships and social structures–and therefore
the structure of the self, the experience of self–is conditioned differently. You want to choose
another way of being. YOu want to pick and choose among the best of civilizational values and create
some kind of individual and idiosyncratic utopia.

Pie in the sky, sure. But say what you will, the human being desires its wholeness. The drive is elemental.
It *is* the elan vital. There your vital impulses will be not be blocked. You will have overcome your neuroses.
The wellspring flows; you are able to love again. And love in a way that you could not even imagine now, because
that kind of love would be all the more pure for having been spared from the pollution of the current civilization.
Love is the thing that cleanses, right? That is what Jesus meant, isn’t it?

And yet you’ve had your heart cleaved in two. And have done the same to another. Tonight, you scan through your memory logs
for sign of a prelapsarian moment–unsullied by anything–and to your dismay, you cannot find it. The inescapable conclusion: it never existed.
What love of yours has never been marred? And what of it? All love is and must be marred. Love is only made real by its imperfection. Perfect love–well
we all know that only possible form of perfect love would be that which came from the perfect Being.

So you learn to live with yourself. Accept yourself as fallen. Can you find love again?
Can you stop fooling people? Can you stop using people? Is your loneliness no longer a fact but a crutch
that you use to help justify your fears? If life is too short then one must drink deeply of it–but more than this–one has
to know where and how–the manner in which one is best suited to drink. This place, this moment in history–was not of my choosing.
But one must believe there is a place where one belongs better. Where things fall into place. Where love and work and friendship and family fall into place.
Where one lives instead of merely staving off the fear of death like a pathetic, cowering and cornered animal in a cage.
There is some place where you fit in. You imagine a short, fitful period of adjusting. But it comes with a certain existential alacrity, because
you know this is where you belong, and this is where you were meant to be. And at least that part of your journey is over and settled.

But whatever can be said about social structure, etc. they are not that important. These are superstructures after all, and love is the core.
You will no longer have you emotions wasted and your words flung back at you by someone who cannot understand your love.
“She is not ready for you”–that’s hardly a conjecture. It’s a self-consolation. She does not want it. Commitment antibodies are rejecting your
entreaties. Implore her no more.
The other her–you look at her face and feel love surging inside you. But it’s not quite strong enough. It’s like a wave that never quite gathered
much momentum. She desires nothing more than your love, and you are too selfish to give it. Is it because you are afraid? Or are you so selfish
that you could never give of yourself in the most fulsome sense of ‘giving’–what if, in other words,
you are too far gone, hopelessly corrupted, cynical, rotten–selfish–to the core?
Is there anywhere left to go? Is there anything left to do?