(Thesis...Humanities quest for perfection creates monsters of
horror and morose imperfection.)
The Sadness
Michael Mulvihill
I slept deeply, as I slept I cried, all night long I slumbered
in this fashion as though I was heartbroken. What was the cause for
heartbreak, I didn't know. Nor could I open my eyes to escape from this
state. I believed I was leading a contented existence and had no obvious reason
for melancholia, yet this was precisely the emotion which was now vigorously
upon me and besieging me, with a sadness that had transfixed me from the moment
that I had woken up. To spite my belief that I was happy, my tears drenched my
pillow, my face completely wetted, my body was strait jacketed from a piercing
sorrow. I had neither recollection of a single dream nor a thread of the
ideations that lay within them. I hated the cluelessness that had defined, and
you could argue, defiled my current mental state.
I knew I dreamt about something unknown to me which caused me to
feel morbidly ill at ease. When I awoke the heaviness from this state did not evaporate,
instead it weighed heavily upon my chest -- refusing to exit me throughout the
day.
The arrival of a new day which previously would have given me
joy, now only rendered joylessness to my being. I was barely able to move, and
when I did move it was a huge effort to make myself to do anything. One can
easily say I was capsizing into a depressive state of existence.
A self diagnosis of depression betrayed me, for I knew I was
happy before this day. Surely I was just imagining this state of psychological
malaise. I knew I was walking on unchartered territory with sadness like
nothing I knew before. A depression without insight, how maddening could that
be? I liked to know the causes of me feeling down so that I could apply
logic to these causes and deploy an active interrogation to them. If they
were causes that I could not change, which are the usual suspects, such as the
transience and the shortness of life, well than I would do something to make
those sorrows less hurtful, my outlook would remain positive. I would
have a solution to such existential angst. If I was worried about the fact that
life comes to an end for everyone of us I would comfort myself by saying that
at the very least I am not alone, humanity has been confronting this dilemma
since whenever the human mind had developed consciousness.
If I was nervous about the fact that we do not know where we go
when we die at least I could address this issue in the quietness of my own mind
that would not be a terrible problem. I would pause, take a deep breath,
and realize that different traditions throughout human history have also
confronted this dilemma. At the end of the day my selfhood would be
transformed. I would have a plan of action. I would broaden and
widen my knowledge of God, inspired by traditions that were more personally
pious than I could ever be.
Knowing the Hassidic Jew spends six hours a day studying holy
books and praying devotedly to God, I also surely could do something to
strengthen my soul so I would not be so vulnerable to the long attested fact
that we as humans are only passengers here, and we are only alive for a blip in
time. I would develop an uplifting philosophy to overcome the view of a
human life as a meaningless existence by attempting to see our role in
eternity, I would rejoice, having found this meaning, and be glad of
this. If only I could see things from the broader picture I would be a
cured soul and my worries would flow away from me.
I believe the feeling and the state which had afflicted me left
me in shock. Usually I know what afflicts me. Usually I know the
damn, cursed thing, which causes me affliction. It was the not knowing,
the mysteriousness of the unknown that one was sad without having a morsel of
an idea why, which was driving me out of my mind.
At 12 O’ Clock in the day I dressed myself for work. My
work would not begin until 9 pm that night. How would I summon the energy
to put on my work clothes later in the day? The answer to that question I
did not know. I could only remain in my work clothes, sit beside the window,
stare at the alarm clock and wait for the time to leave my home. For
eight full hours I stayed in that chair and hardly moved. I could not for
the life of me think what had brought me to this state of being.
When I got my coat for work I felt so frozen inside. As I
walked to work I felt it was like somebody else who was walking, someone else
who was lifting one leg in front of the other. No soothing voice to say
it is not forbidden to be this sad, this alienated from yourself. To be so
alien from your being that it was like someone else had taken you over.
I was suspicious of what caused me to become the way I
had. Was the cause something outside of me that I had no control over, or
was the cause so firmly inside of me that it was stuck to me like glue, stuck
so firmly that it would never go away? The streets were deserted. I
arrived to work one minute before nine o’ clock. Normally it only takes
me fifteen minutes to walk to work. I felt ashamed of myself and only
relieved that technically speaking I was not late.
I keyed in my login digits and was registered on time in the
new contracted site, a disused stadium that the government decided must be
preserved even though it is now defunct. A silence overwhelmed me as I sat
silent in my chair. I began patrolling the building in what felt like
slow motion. I was so completely out of breath, like the air was too difficult to
drag into my lungs. Though it was cold outside it felt like I was burning
inside. My ears, my ears were overwhelmed with noise.
Then I saw people. I began to see thousands of
people emerging from the turf of the football pitch. They looked starved
and pitiful looking. Somebody, something had made them that way. At first
being of sound mind I assumed they were not real. They were what I
presumed to be my imagination or logically I could only imagine I had tripped
into psychosis, which sincerely I hoped would not be the case. The people
did not look at me. I tried to call out to them but they acted as if they
never even heard me. They did not move anywhere.
I was not afraid of them. They were not in any shape or
form a menace to me. It was like something cosmic, something outside of
my intelligence was going on. I now knew that my deeply, personal
sadness, was not just my deeply, personal sadness, that their sadness had
been integrated into my being. Whilst my sadness was a spec but
nothing more than a spec, their sadness was utterly profound. As I looked
at these suffering souls I could not help but conclude if I had all of their
sadness, all of their anguish, all of their pain, that it would be like a tank
going over me every day.
I went out to the pitch where they were all standing. They
did not come over to me. They remained still and motionless, all strength
had been removed from them, there was nothing left for human vultures that had
destroyed them to take. These were safe people and I did not need to be
protected from these people. But when I looked at the terraces I knew in
contrast I needed to be protected from the new arrivals who were skinheads,
with knives and various forms of right wing paraphernalia which was visible and
on display. I do not know if they saw what I saw or they merely saw me
standing in the middle of the pitch with a useless work radio that rarely
worked, and on this occasion was utterly defunct.
The skin heads acted as if I was not there, spraying the disused
grounds with swastikas and writing various forms of hate related speech.
Outnumbered and without any defense I stayed still and watched the intrudes
ruin the place. I felt there was nothing I could do about it. I
knelt down to pick up a glove only to be flung mercilessly to the ground by
what I now understand was a baseball bat which made contact with my skull.
It may be common talk to say I remembered nothing else and woke
up in a hospital bed. But I do remember every event after I was hit
vividly. It was like every soul that I saw came near to me and expressed
their empathy with me. As I lie paralyzed unable to talk or to walk it remained
no mystery to me. This was not a stadium. No, this was a Jewish
burial ground which was used for hundreds of years until the communists turned
it into a stadium. I know this now. I can’t ask for anything more.
Now I know who was buried when and where and even the
dates. I feel the mourning. I want to tell these people that I miss
them, even if no one else has the courtesy to say these simple words. The
sadness stays, it is not going anywhere. I was once a very active
man. Now I do not do a damn thing. The healthcare staff does try to help
me, if my story gets told rest assured I did not tell it. If my
story gets written rest assured I did not write it. If my story gets
filmed it was not me who even consented for it to be made
I lie like a mummy in the hospital bed. If I could I would
shout, I would roar, and scream and swear. A news item in the newspaper leads
with this headline. My attackers were released without charge. The papers
never mentioned that this was a hate crime, that they left the stadium full of
graffiti. I feel like I never existed. I cannot even ask the nurse
to kindly throw the paper in the bin. The paper insensitively looks at me
with this story and I feel it is spitting at me straight in the face.
In my dreams I can see every headstone and every person whose
graves have been desecrated. In my dreams I walk down roads that I have
known where they once lived and worked, long before I was born. Now I feel
their abandonment deep within my chest. These moments I feel a oneness
with the dead, the lives they lived, the songs they sung, the young adults who
they had wed, the big families they greeted into the world to replenish the
world and to make up for their loss. A news story on the TV screen informs me
that the old stadium is being given new life, not as a graveyard, but as
football stadium. The assailants have won haven’t they?
The ghosts remain sad. I remain sad. The next news
clip is about a Yidish speaking Hashidic Rabbi, before I can blink my eyes, as
I long to hear some Yiddish being spoken and some dancing, the channel is
changed. What can I control? I can control nothing. I know I
have written about sadness. This sadness was created from evil, I cannot
deny that, but evil has only come to me, I have not come to it, or become it, I
don’t really know much about it. I wish for this sadness to end. The
nurses and doctors gather around me and one asks the other.
"Will he ever walk again?"
"No"
NOTE: This work is under construction and yet to be completed.
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