I sit in front of this word processor on a beautiful Friday morning. Quiet, uncluttered -- a perfect time to write. And yet I'm fidgeting, antsy, unable to really come up with a decent thought or sentence. Why? Here I have all the conditions I've said I want for my own contentment, and I'm not content.
I have a job that pays well and is interesting -- and I'm bored. I have a decent stereo set and money to buy music -- and either I want something louder, bigger, with more bells and whistles, or I'm ready to chuck the whole array because much of the music I've collected plays flat and clichéd. And I'm sitting here writing all this, doing what I profess to love to do -- and I want the page to fill up faster so I can get away from the desk and still say I've fulfilled my writing obligation for the day. Why? When's the contentment supposed to show up?
If constants of temperament exist in human nature, one must be that given sufficient means to satisfy most important wants, those means will not suffice. The more we satisfy ourselves, the more our selves crave satisfaction, thus setting up a restless round of desire. I have nothing against this desire -- I think its drive is often the only thing that ensures anything of important magnitude gets done. (And since another part of human nature is slothfulness, this restlessness keeps the blood from settling in the veins for too long.)
But just when you think you might be happy, that is, when what you want and what you have mesh, there comes sneaking in this attitude, this voice which says "Life is short and don't settle for anything, don't settle at all. If you think you have everything you want, then you're only fooling yourself. You never have everything you want, and if you think you do, you simply just don't know yourself well enough." So that long stretches of time to read and write eventually sour. It gets too quiet, too long-winded, and the original impulse that drove you to sit your ass down and feed the mind suddenly turns on you and makes you want to go to jump in the car and go to Boston to eat Vietnamese food.
I don't know what to do in situations like these. Most of the time I force myself to sit and finish the writing I said I was going to finish, fight against the impulse partly because giving in to it matches exactly what I want to do. (The puritan disciplines aren't all bad). But then my mind purposely comes up blank, as if to remind me who's really in charge, and I struggle to come up with words that make sense and are worth saving. On those kinds of days I can get a lot done, even if I have to throw it away later. In fact, I tell myself that I'm going to throw it away anyway so that I don't get attached to what I'll write. In this way I hope to outfox the impulse. If the impulse thinks I care, it'll make me go blank; so I'll blank out before it does, and sometimes it leaves me alone.
But there are times when it won't leave me alone. I sit and nothing comes and it's clear that if I don't give into it I won't get any inspiration to continue. I have everything I want -- and it tells me I don't, and I believe it (though I don't have the foggiest notion of what it is I don't have that I want). So I can spend the rest of the day in an agitated state wondering without any clue what it would be that would satisfy me. The impulse has won for that day and I have to chalk it up to experience.
But when I have time to think about it (and when it is gone for some reason), I know where the impulse comes from, why it trips me up and keeps my waters churned. Another name for the impulse is just living itself. We are organisms dedicated to our own pleasure. But one of the effects of culture is to deaden that natural impulse so that we can get along without killing one another. (Freud was right when he outlined the mechanisms of repression -- it's the one action that allows us to co-exist without extensive warfare.) It's what Reich called "character armor." But the impulse to maximize one's own pleasure never dies, and in fact is amplified by the repression, just as steam is amplified in a pressure cooker by capturing and compacting it. And the reason the impulse never dies is that if it dies, we die. Without that impulse, without that possibility of something shaking up the settled and the routine, we lose all ability to strive, explore, challenge, and learn.
But it's not just for pleasure, for delight. We are creatures in a constant process of dying. We know it, we refuse to know it, and we know it all the harder for such lack of recognition. The impulse toward perversity, the impulse that shakes us up just when we think we're content enough, is a way of reminding us that we won't be around forever and that if we want to get on in this world we'd better not sit too long in one place. We are perverse because to be "unperverse" is a lie and a denial. We wish to satisfy all our cravings because we won't be around forever to keep on satisfying them, and if for a moment we think we can rest in whatever luxury we find ourselves, we simply delude ourselves. And if we do rest, reach that nirvana which is the extinction of the impulse, then we have attained what we want by a partial suicide, by a partial disinheritance of our own natures.
There is no way to win this game, no way to satisfy what makes Sammy run. Happiness is like those rest stops on the highway where you can relieve yourself, maybe make a phonecall, stretch, take a nap -- for a moment stop the wild career down the road. But eventually we all get back into the cars, start the trip again, rusting as we go, always on the look out.
(September 1995)