vertigo

yesterday I became angry, angry at myself and at the world and yet there, waiting for my friend in avenida cathedral, i could not express my fury.

i whimpered a little, a few tears, and set to work on a course of self destruction. rolled a cigarette for good measure and thought how it would be nice to get completely trolleyied with whatever was to hand.

I stepped back, eyes suddenly popping open to the inner patterns...I wanted to self destruct. ohh, the bliss. the holy bliss of changing states. Milan Kundera (with capital letters for my respect, he is a hero to me), said that vertigo is not a fear of heights, everyone has it...

imagine standing right on the edge of a huge drop. Looking down…feeling that draw….

vertigo, he says, is the yearning to fall over the edge, to be yearn into that magnetic pull, to let oneself freefall, to go right down there into the dark fury depths. The fear is the fear of oneself not being able to hold back from lurching into that “fantastic freedom”.

And when we are weak we let ourselves fall luxouriously down from where we came from. Where is it safe. Where we know the rules and how things work. Where we laugh in the face of happiness, seeing it for its unstable self, for its inability to stand upright for more than a few sparkling moments, days. We are sure that how we feel now, we can feel forever! Safe at last in wretchedness, in isolation, in fear of love! Now we can really set about bemoaning the cruelity of life…rolling in it…being safe from any personal risks…

Largada says that we were born in hell. It is where we came from, and our mission in life is to crawl ourselves out of there, to a higher place. This is reincarnation at a social and individual level…

And there I was, smoking a rollie in front of the cathedral, tittering on the edge of that free fall…ohh how I longed to glory in the depths of self agony.

I stood there seeing how we are all in a state of constant self destruction, constant mini deaths. Like strokelettes not of the brain, but of the soul. How we over indulge, drink alcohol in mass social mini deaths, put chemicals inside our bodies, how we attack ourselves mentally, how we don’t keep our bodies fit, how….

Constant mini deaths.

Then my phone rang. It was my friend two meters away, laughing saying “weren’t you looking out? I’ve been here 5 minutes or more.” I said, ditto. and put my phone skilfully into the darkest corner of my bag to enable it impossible to find again next ring tone sounding.

Actually, after I ate a little, I felt a bit better.

Talking it through I came to the conclusion that the only way out, at a first glance, from the circle of mini deaths, is meditation. Absolute peace, no action (which is not the same as not doing anything), observation of life. Which is strange really, cos in comparison to the easiness of falling, falling, falling, meditation, doing nothing, trying to allow yourself not to be just for a moment, really is a hard cookie to crack.