Desperation

'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.'

 Henry Thoreau

'Perhaps this is how the world ends, with people shouting past each other...' 

http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

It is a matter of ineffable sadness that, a century and a half after Thoreau pointed up the silent misery in which most human beings endure the drudgery of existence, the only real change has been the noise level. Since 'rights' replaced 'wants' and 'needs' at the heart of human discourse we have suffered not in silence but in a ghastly screech, the pitch and volume of which has increased in inverse proportion to our ability to hear one another cry. The advent of blogging changed the medium and perhaps the timbre of the noise but, from even a moderate distance, it remains indistinguishable from static.

The British journalist and professional tosser Andrew Marr recently attracted ire and bemusement in equal measure from the blogosphere when he said, 'A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people.' He was only half wrong. He didn't mention that, in addition to the faults he lists, we are selfish, delusional, psychotic, fat and generally extremely average in the sack.

It is the supreme irony of blogging that, the more we write, the less we read (or listen). After a year devoting his weekends to writing the only blog I know that leaves me feeling enhanced rather than diminished after reading a piece, my friend R wrote the line quoted under Thoreau at the head of this article. 'Shouting past each other' captures better than any other phrase I know the spirit of our age. The louder we scream the more emphatically the universe gives us the finger. The more eloquently we make our case, the more our arguments are drowned in the clamour from other supplicants.

What I have been trying to write about, between the bits and pieces on plants, is my state of mind. To state it baldly, I'm a mess and I haven't the faintest idea what to do about it (do me a favour and DON'T send me your suggestions on a postcard). A few well-meaning people have suggested that I count my blessings. I've always thought that blessings, like dreams, retreat further the more you reach for them, so I view the activity of counting them with suspicion. The only unequivocal blessing that my personalities can agree upon is that we have discovered a depth and strength in several friendships that we hadn't suspected existed. Compassion has been ladled over me, like broth on a raw prawn, and it feels especially churlish, therefore, to make the following comment.

Perhaps we ought just to accept that there is no-one else out there. I realise that solipsism is the ultimately sophomoric philosophical position and that almost everyone grows out of it in childhood but, you have to admit, believing that you are the only thing that exists makes it a lot easier to understand why no-one seems to be FUCKING LISTENING. Writing a blog has certainly made it easier for me to empathise with SETI researchers (I suppose I should say 'empathise').

Making sense of the world is a notoriously tricky enterprise. We see through a glass darkly in life but I'm betting my immortal soul on the guess that the view from beyond the grave is occluded by six feet of earth. Mind you, given the state of my immortal soul, that's about as courageous a wager as putting a fiver each way on Red Rum to win the National. Socrates went to his death consoling his disciples with the thought that the 'experience' of being dead is much like the 'experience' of not having been born yet. Without wishing to alarm anyone (I'm too much of a coward) that sounds blissful.