Arduous pulling-oneself-together to cope with existence

Everyday treadmill of propitiating the trivial physicality pissing, shitting, hawking, coughing, throat-clearing—spitting, swallowing—

Reluctant civilization-ceremony: teeth-brushing, gargling, washing, shaving, combing—

Meanwhile: recapitulation of existential provisos, necessities, duties

Recourse to history: the hardships successes triumphs defeats humiliations satisfactions of yesterday the day before yesterday and the day before that; transmission of expectations hopes disappointments prospects anxieties coercions into today—

And thus: ordering of reality into the effable, the articulable, the verbally expressible, the grammatical, the chronological. Anything that cannot be said can no longer be part of reality, is pushed under the threshold of consciousness, pads existence with congestions of malaise, defense, anxiety, pleasure, pleasure-quests, pleasure-defense-impulses

From now on this reality seems to take place linearly, in the movement of time, steered by more or less conditioned reflexes and in tension and tension-release, kept vibrating by more or less unchecked affects: as a glimmering, glittering chaos crisscrossed by the meteorites of chance, a uniform three-hundred-sixty-five-day reiteration, in constantly changing guise

Irruption of everyday life with the urgency of necessity, of duty, of time: racing with the clock, with the quota, with the demands of the drives, of forced goals. Cowering under the volley of requests, requirements, requisitions from the other—wife child parent sibling friend neighbor colleague superior subaltern contemporary compatriot coreligionist party-comrade fellow-man hated loved feared honored despised—flight into the chaos of teeming masses, anonymity as the ultimate refuge of self-awareness, isolation in protective shells—the suit the car the office the company the union the after-work pub the club the party the creed the nation. Personality shells. Cell existence. Monad in the aggregate of monads. Maggot in the maggot-teeming of a continuous disintegration process—then suddenly unexpectedly: the randomness of event

. . . this jerk runs across the street and the light’s still yellow—crash! he’s flopped over a car hood: screeching brakes delayed reaction thud (Jesus! Did I pay my last insurance premium? . . .) Hey, watch it! Watch it yourself, you’re behind me, don’t tailgate me, I wasn’t, give me your insurance number, it’s only a slight dent, yeah but my car’s in the garage for the weekend my wife’s gone off to visit her brother-in-law, what’s wrong up front there anyway? windshield debris on the asphalt, an indolently winding trail of blood—goddamnit, the poor bastard really got it, why that’s illegal, crossing when the light’s still yellow—and the way the pedestrians mob the scene, like flies around shit . . . well, we’re in for it now, the road’ll be backed up for at least a quarter of a mile: cops signals whistles yellow lights siren squad-car ambulance: they’re shoving him in like a loaf of dough into an oven—is he dead already? And I’m going to be late to work, that’s life . . .

(And these are the folks I’m writing for.)

And yet how do they feel that they’ve experienced this life? How does it present itself to them in that other dimension, which, so to speak, races alongside reality in parallel vibrations and against reality in the amplitudes: always one step ahead of reality, a step of hope, of expectation, of preconception? Always one step behind, a step of transfiguration, of dramatization, of twisting things aright?