Today I sat down. I thought about a certain definition of reality: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away."
The broader epistemological consequences of this definition will be collapsed into the personal dimensions of the crisis of my life.
I've been up. I've been down. At one time I had a keen awareness of the transience of these states, and I was either crippled or relieved by the knowledge that up would come down and down would rise up. At another time, I held the grave conviction that such states would last me the rest of my life.
These states came to pass, as always they did.
Once I was in flight, like a stone sailing through the air, knowing in the back of my mind that I could not soar above the earth and all my problems forever. I knew that a stone's fate was to fall when thrown.
And once I had fallen - fallen into what the ancient Germanics called "der hölle", or "hell", or "hole" - and lain there, alone and cold and with death creeping on me, I felt entombed by my fate.
These states came to pass, as always they did.
So the only thing that remained constant - was real - was the mutability of existence and perception.
Yesterday, while lying on the floor in the middle of the night, I observed within myself something strange. As I was slowly released from the grips of another depressive episode, I felt a strange yearning to return to the same low down place I was in. I wanted my sorrows back, even as the imprints they left on my psyche faded. What would cause someone to go looking for pain which he had just been relieved of? My guess is that there's a kind of certitude that comes with being at the bottom of the hole, a certainty in one's own fate and the harshness of the world. Perhaps I wanted that security back.
Maybe my life has been one long fall backwards into the grave. Then what do I say about reality, and what of my shifting perceptions of reality? Maybe there is only the fall, that's the only reality there is. Any future I dreamed up for myself, whether pleasant or nightmarish, would have been a convenient fabrication. I can read this or any of my other ruminations back to myself, and sometimes they will seem cogent and other times - more often than not if I'm being honest - they won't. The way it's written, it seems to posit itself as some kind of admission of enlightenment; I'll make it clear that no such thing is taking place. These are observations, dim observations, very common sense and unlearned observations, and although I can see myself fumbling around in the dark (which is a funny statement - seeing in the dark?), I cannot take the logical steps required to gain a greater understanding. Perhaps logic cannot do anything but transform this pained and ponderous reflection of mine into a polished mirror, one in which I can see into my own agonized features with more clarity. There's no truth to be found in a mind that is teetering on disarray. I only know what I know: I am in a hole, I got in at one point, I'm not getting out any time soon.
>"What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me--into us--clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too."