Courage

I have written extensively about the things that I fear. I fear heights, and depths. I realize, thinking about it, that I fear them because they bring me close to limitlessness: the impossibility of sky and space, and the insanity of the deep and dark.  

The essence of my fears, then, is a chasmic space - featureless, boundariless, just nothing going on and on and on. 

This fear is my engine: I have bricolaged my entire identity around it. I need boundaries, as my BPD makes me have none, I need to be claimed, tethered, chained, as the yawning void is all around me. I need limits, definitions. (I envy Jung when he found that everything seems to be like boxes upon his return from a near-death experience.) I need boxes.

That is why I am in love with words. 

I was talking to a writer, who, being a writer the exact opposite of me - he is plagued by no battles except ones introduced by his externalities - who gave me insight so profound he missed that he gave it. He is a writer: he gets bored with the world and therefore shaves his beard or weaves stories so fantastic as to leave your heart wondering why it was that small. He catches fish with his hands, perhaps revelling that he could do so for times when words flit like silver gossamer through a hole for a net. He is at war with himself, and only himself: and as such, when he loses, he also wins. 

He was explaining how to navigate a long, empty corridor and the dread you feel walking through it:

"You've got to fill it with things."

Perhaps that is why capitalism exists, for the commodification and resultant transfiguration of dead space into a designed house. Perhaps that is why we crave familiarity: everything else unknown is truly alien, and might as well be impossible. Perhaps, even, that is why wars are fought: to fill unknowns with things known. (All war is fueled by fear, is it not?) I think I have figured out this writer's engine: it is fear. Fear that, against all evidence of his wishes to the contrary, we are indeed floating on a chimp orb, as he puts it. Barring victory over such a dead brute fact, he would write stories upon stories upon stories, willing his reality to be what he writes; needing the ruthlessness of this bland world to cannibalize nonetheless. 

Perhaps that is why we both are in love with words. We need them to straddle the tension between what can and cannot be, should not be, in all its majestic fuckery of your mind, and to the despair of your soul. We need words to hold, and to hold us, in place, when the sheer magnitude of nothingness and meaninglessness looms from everywhere.