And How Shall We Escape: Part II

Dedicated to Garion and Joanna

The only appropriate way to begin this is with a joke. The following series of events shall try to illuminate the real punchline to this joke. It is not what you think. This is the joke: Why did the chicken cross the Road? **** I stood on the deck of the WB Yeats as we approached shore, beholding the Wicklow mountains where Saint Kevin once toiled in solitude, passing the iconic chimney stacks of Dublin, and feeling blessed it was a rare sky of blue. I let the soft Irish breeze, the sprays of salt wash across my face. I watched the gulls play over the boat. I felt lighter, safer already. It was a relief to be back in Ireland. To understand the language and the culture and the people. To not feel so alien and alienated. The withdrawal effects of the pills had virtually dissipated by then and I was safe. I thought some old friends were going to meet me at Dublin port, but alas something went awry. I assume it was to do with my frantic, incoherent attempts at communication before this arrival, attempts that went misread and misunderstood, but no matter. An older retired couple just after spending their holiday in France offered to give me a lift into town–just as soon as they could get their car battery jumped. I convened with an old friend his house, was joined by more older friends. But wrecked as I was, the gravity of the prior weeks, the prior months still having its pull on me, I sank and crashed and slept like a rock that night. The first real sleep I'd had since April. ****

After some weeks in Belfast and another short journey back to France aboard WB Yeats to retrieve Lady, who had been held up due to some paperwork problems (which is another story in itself), I finally landed up in my new home in Derry. While managing the escape rooms over here, I was granted a now-vacant former hostel all to myself to live. Eight rooms plus a massive salon and backyard. All mine. In the basement-salon I found a cactus that hadn't been attended to in nearly five years. It was still alive. I reached all the way up to the skylight and if it were just a little stronger it would have smashed through the skylight and reached the sun. Also there was a life-sized wooden sculpture of Tin Tin, his traveler's backpack strapped around his arms, his binoculars slung around his neck, his faithful dog at his side. I felt an affinity there. I was elated to be gifted such a home as this. Many different rooms. Lots of hidden treasures. Lots of junk that needed ridding and lots of areas that needed a good clean. The was space for Lady to frolic and for myself to stretch out and breath. But for every ray of light that penetrated the place, there was also a dark unlit corner.

In many ways, it was an external manifestation of my own mind. **** The relief I felt upon first returning to Ireland gradually began to subside. Yes, I conquered the beast inside me. But what now? Is this it? Shall I be consigned to living in a vacated hostel forever, running an escape room? What friends I had left were getting married, one-by-one. Rising up the ranks, working fulfilling careers, establishing their own businesses, establishing their own homes and families, saving for their retirements, finding their meaning and calling.

And yet here I was, recovering from a long series of traumatic mental breakdowns, disoriented, by no means financially solvent. Here I was living in a small town, all alone, knowing no one nor even being able to reach out to know anyone, all the people my age in this town secluded as they were in the thick and meaningful establishments they wrought in their own lives–their families and children and careers and businesses. And besides, at this age, you simply do not make new friends.

I knew I needed this recovery time. But this lack of direction, of a foundation, of future prospects–the lack of answers to "what next" would not allow for much recovery. In a perverted way, they inverted the recovery. They brought the depression back, this time with a different texture, a different hue. Now it was heavy. I could feel it on my chest. Pinning my to the sofa I chose to sleep on at night in the living room every morning. Not allowing me to leave the apartment. Rendering me unable to speak above a whisper. Slowing my thoughts.

I woke up in tears in one morning. I had had a dream that night. I was talking to a college professor. He asked me what I did for a living. "I used to be like you, before my cognitive decline," I said. And he did not care. Now this depression was the crushing weight of meaningless, the void, the absurd. I felt in my heart I'd lost my ability to think, to read, to speak, to... To write. The one thing I held sacred, my writing, I feared had been lost through all these psycho-travel ordeals. What was left of me? And those ordeals–all those struggles, all that beast-taming and demon-slaying, for what ends now? To decompose wordless alone? **** One of my best friend's wedding was approaching. In fact, it was the thought of his upcoming wedding that gave me a lot of the strength I'd needed to fight back during my last breakdown, to fight those impulses, to give me a reason to live. I truly looked forward to seeing him on his wedding day. But now, now in my droopy-eyed slumber, I could not look forward to it. I was embarrassed to attend such a meaningful sacrament, such a toast to life, when I found myself caught again in the tar pit of black nothing, where the breezes were the snores of the dead, the sun was a blind eye gouged out and thrown to the rats. I knew I had to go, to be there for him, to keep my word. But I also knew it was going to be hard. **** I found my seat at the reception. To the left and in front of me were strangers speaking in Polish. To my right was a former good friend who no longer spoke my tongue, and I no longer his. Ours was a friendship forged in hedonism, and now hedonism–especially hedonism–had lost all meaning to me. What a childish game, the pursuit of transitory pleasure. I tried to speak these words to him earlier in the day, but he could not understand. He mocked it and mocked me and made his contempt known for me having receded from the pubescent pleasures of life. So I was surrounded by noise there at the table at the wedding reception. I could not join in myself. I tried drinking, drinking heavily to break my silence. But it only made me sink further and further, deeper and deeper down inside myself, my void. I was at the bottom of the ocean, without word nor breath, looking up at the carnival above. I didn't have the strength to swim there. ****

The M.C. began his performance, speaking over the sound system. He spoke Polish in a low baritone. It sounded articulate and smart and seductive. The Polish guests were regaled. But I could not guess what he was saying. He then translated to English the jokes he was delivering. For instance: 25 years from now, Asia and Garion will be going to bed together. Asia will think, "Twenty five years. Tomorrow we will be married for twenty five years. I can't believe it. I am so happy." Garion, he will be thinking, "If I'd just strangled her to death on my wedding night, I'd be getting out of prison today."

The jokes continued along these lives, delving into far more morbid and grotesque topics, the reception guests getting increasingly more uncomfortable, disturbed, unsettled. There was talk of plane crashes and car accidents and other horrors. Death and tragedy, as well as purely incomprehensible babbling. Their relation to the wedding, to the sacrament of love between a bride and groom, could not be found. Because there was no relation. It was voided of all meaning. I had lost my voice, yes. And it had been given to the void. ****

I began to giggle. Then I began to laugh. And the laughter would not stop. And it was not laughter of amusement but a laughter of horror. And then MC's words were completely voided of all meaning, were just the gasps of a malfunctioning machine, a soulless machine, the Moloch of a machine we're fed to as babies. And the laughter swelled greater and it became tears and the world around me fell sleep and the guests around me looked at me as a lunatic, hearing not the wretched noises I did, and the man to the right of me, the man I once called a good friend did not notice, and I wiped my tears with a tissue and I took a shot and I...

**** Blackout. **** In writing on stoicism and its ability to offer us a view of the world that can lead to redemption, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke encourages us to strive towards towards "the view from above", that view from the top of the mountain, that eye at the top of the pyramid, that Moses, that Horus, that Christ, that Buddha. It is the only antidote to absurdity, which is "the view from nowhere". At the reception, my field of vision was crushed entirely to the view from nowhere. Vervaeke writes:

"The thing about the “view from nowhere” is it provokes cosmic absurdity and a sense of meaninglessness which is going to take away any joy in life away from you...

You know what people experience when they get to the view from nowhere? They don’t say “Wow! This is great”, they say “It’s all meaninglessness. It’s absurd”. This is called “cosmic absurdity”.

****

The next morning I awoke in my room, hungover, my heart racing, my anxiety in full swing, confused and disoriented. The last thing I could remember was laughing myself into oblivion. And here I was, still in my cheap Primark suit, in my bed with no memories thereafter. With a steel chicken in my arms. Something happened, and I didn't want to know. Where did this chicken come from and why was it in here with me? I approached the other attendees in the banquet hall eating their breakfasts. Upon beholding the state of me, they broke out in laughter. "Why is there a chicken in bed with me?", I asked. Solemnly. "You don't remember?" one of them said. "Let me tell you what happened." "Go on," I said, not actually wanting to know. I could feel the waves of shame already swelling in me. "You were passed out in your chair. Everyone was going to bed. But we couldn't wake you. Finally James poured carbonated water in your ear and you immediately woke up. I tried to walk you to your room, but you couldn't remember the number. So we went to reception to try to ask for it, but you saw this chicken hanging on the wall and had to have it. You grabbed it and wandered off, thinking you knew where you room was then. I followed you and you wandered into the other wedding that was happening at the hotel. But you were convinced it was Garion's. Holding the chicken in your arm you went up to the bride and groom and demanded to know what they did with Garion and Joanna. They said who are you talking about? This is our wedding. But you refused to believe them and accused them of having abducted Garion and Joanna and being impostors. The groom was getting very angry, trying to convince you, still holding this chicken in your arms, that he was in fact the real groom and had not abducted Garion. Eventually we figured out where your room was and you went to bed." **** I spent the rest of the day in a panic, overcome with fear and loathing. How could I not remember any of this? What was the meaning of it all? Where is the meaning? Fuck, I refuse to believe there is no meaning. There must be meaning. I sat alone on the bus ride back to Krakow, thinking only this. Once back in Krakow, I locked myself in my AirBnB and resolved myself to finding meaning before returning to Derry. A life with out a higher value upon which to set yourself is a life that cannot be lived. I had to begin digging and climbing simultaneously to find that value. ****

The search began that day still continues and will continue forevermore. And it is that search that has allowed me to be born anew. No longer is my search outward and afar, but it is now a journey inward.

I am perfectly content to say with utter confidence now that there is more to reality, this world, our lives than what we think we know. There is a transcendent reality just there waiting to be uncovered if we're daring enough to begin. There are patterns in this world far greater than we can perceive in our own limited lives. However, the world of literature and art and drama and poetry and cinema and religion and mythology blesses us with the perception arising off the continuity and accumulated insights and outsights of trillions of lives and billions of generations. It blesses us with the "eye from above", if we're only willing to look deeper. It blesses us with the ability to at least grasp at and get a glimmer of "the other side". Combined, it is a finger pointing at the moon. Showing us the way out from the pits of despair. **** Perhaps this is where The Road, this long trip I've been on has been leading me, all along. Perhaps this was the point of The Road. **** And perhaps that why then this is the most appropriate answer to the archetypical joke, "Why did the chicken cross the road?":

To get to the other side.