Member-only story
Religion is a tool to connect the body of the being to the being of the world. All myth, ritual, and prayer is pragmatic in its underlying will-to-vivify; connect; make-ecstatic. Eternal life doesn’t mean anything; doesn’t mean anything to anyone — what matters is the firey shock provided by the idea of eternal life. The will-to-believe is the will-to-live.
It is freezing cold; I called off from work today because I could sleep last night because I’d received some terrible news about a family member.
I’ve already wasted most of the day — and certainly most of the daylight. Every day, I feel this anxiety over wasted time — whether I’m at work or not. And I don’t need to wonder why: I’ve internalized the economic imperative to be efficient; I monitor myself — both worker and foreman.
And this internalized efficiency is crushing; by definition, it is dehumanizing. It is also so widely spread, so ubiquitous, so normalized, that it is very difficult to identify it — it doesn’t stand out; we don’t notice the hell we’ve made of our minds.
Success — a salary — in American life is a curse. Most people do not like their lives; no matter how comfortable they are. It is a scandal — a collective, historical scandal — that we don’t really interrogate our own comfortable misery. That we don’t try to change.
It is hard to enjoy my day off; hard to instantly re-humanize myself. Towards the enter of my Christmas break, I began to read and think more clearly. Back at work; my clarity instantly disappears. So I instantly take a sickday to try to regain my clarity — but the sickday just makes me anxious about being a bad employee. Like most employees, I’m on a see-saw.
Only one thing has ever really mattered to me: literature. And by literature, all I mean is a magical, vital conscious.
