Voicing Despair

[lhexa]

I despair in silence. I am not alone in this, but three weeks ago I managed to find words for my despair for perhaps the second time in my life, and discovered for myself the calming effect of voicing it. This calm brought me the strength to give my physics presentation, but it worried me as well, because it brought an unfamiliar mood, lacking a familiar tension. I wondered whether I needed that tension to drive myself as I am accustomed, as though my emotions were a rope I used to pull myself up, and that rope needed its knots. But today brought back a better-known mood, one which assures me that the progression of emotions on which I rely has not been broken. It assures me that I felt the calm of sleep, nothing more. Here is what I learned these past three weeks.

A person alone cannot voice his own despair, and needs trusted friends, lovers, family or peers for the task. Call that the nature of despair. A person who tries, on his own, to give his despair words will fail, and produce something plaintively incomplete. (As much as I admire Cube for his efforts to voice his worst emotions, those efforts often have such a quality. Sett, too, but to a lesser extent, because anguish differs from despair.) I've come to marvel at how easily this incompleteness can be recognized, and how often it will be met with revulsion -- though it is often a justified revulsion, caused by a need that the reader or listener knows cannot presently be met. The revulsion, in turn, encourages silence on the part of whoever despairs. The silent despair (the quiet desperation) may as well be a conspiracy, for the effect it has in promoting secretiveness and shame.

Despair, as most of you already know, is unreasonable. It does not have the irrationality of an argument with invalid logic or unsound premises, but rather the unreasonableness of an argument that goes unspoken. In despair, the breaking of silence, in the rare circumstances in which it can be accomplished, amounts to the finding or dawning of reason, and so can have just as profound an effect, and just as cathartic a one. My moment of catharsis three weeks ago came when Spotty, catalyzed by Whines, told me, "You can't live in Emerson's backyard." The statement had me crying all over again, because those are the words of my despair. I want to be Thoreau, but I can't. There is no Emerson for me. I can't find wisdom in solitude: because I have no wise company to punctuate that solitude, I end up living alone with both my cleverness and my foolishness. I have no one with whom I can discuss philosophy as an equal, and my attempts to esteem others as such equals have only brought fierce disappointment. And even when I find a place I can consider sacred, something so trivial as a police officer can drive me away. I am not wise. Worse, I do not know how to become wise.

There is a sense in which a person, alone, can nonetheless come to voice his despair, by creating another person (a character) to voice it. I managed to do so late in my second year as a philosophy major, in a period of near-total isolation. In the entry that follows you can find the characters who voiced my despair in philosophy, and the words they gave me.

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[lhexa.livejournal.com]

*nods* The trouble is learning how to live here in as meaningful a way as Thoreau lived by Walden. As it is, many of my actions have little significance, and only connect to the rest of my life in a superficial manner... whereas for Thoreau, such activities as hoeing, conversing, building, exploring and marveling were all philosophical activities.