Almost

"I am too weak to take my own life, but I am too strong to be granted madness." I have no idea where that line came from now, if it's my head or a bastardization of something I read (in all likelihood it is the second that is true. As with most things, I don't know if this is in my head or not). This line, of being just aware of how weak you are in the chaos of everything your mind or environment puts you through, while at the same time of how marginally strong you are because you are still marginally able to function, might be descriptive of what besets people with anxiety, or with a hyperawareness of life itself, or those who are unceasingly conscious of how they are alive. (Paradoxically, in being hyperaware of how one is, one forgets that one is, but that's another creature altogether.) For is it not weakness that prevents you from ending it all finally? And / But is it also not strength that you can still even think of how chaotic life is, meaning that you are at bottom still aware, sane, able to even buckle under all your shit, no matter how irrational? That awareness is what redeems the marginal sanity you have: you are too weak to die by your hand, you are too strong to be insane. This is not to say suicide is a show of strength, nor madness somehow a weakness; that kind of binary and causal logic does not apply to anything of this piece. Hence the parasitic paradoxicality in the line: the weakness one has in not taking his own life is derived like a bastard from being driven almost mad and thus in being so almost it is a not yet, and therefore is a strength; and / while at the same time the strength one has in not being mad is derived like a bastard from still being - and this is the fucker - still being, despite and because of being almost mad.

It is the relation of the almost with the strange co-habitation of the despite and because of that is dizzying. Because in all this, and amidst the universe not stopping at all even at your worst, arises the question of need. The question of - which is not a question, when the chaos of your mind / the universe hits - "Why is the universe / my head like this?" becomes a question of "What do you need to function in the universe / in your head?" There are bills to be paid, grades to be made, parents to please, friends to be with, what do you need to function? Alcohol, women, anime, whatever it is that distracts, these are ready answers. Or it might be those same things - bills, grades, parents, friends (not those that distract) - that you do need to function, because if not for them, if not for your reasons, then you won't function at all. (In those same things do you derive your sanity, in other words.)

In that last phrase is an intricate reversal of logic, so subtle we don't even notice it most of the time. There are days that you make your reasons for returning to sanity answer a "for / towards what?" and days that you make your reasons for sanity answer a "from what?" (Not for nothing is "Why?" the most difficult of questions to answer, for it asks both future and past. "Why are you here?" is answerable by both a "so that I can" and "because I was.")  The same complication arises from the word need. You need something so that; you need something because you are at first (or have become) a.

That is why what you need is almost always, and always already, what you have and what you are. You are able to function because what has made you function is also what will drive you back to sanity, i.e., almost insane but not quite. But what you don't need is almost always, and always already, what you have and what you are. You are able to function because what will make you function is also what makes you the way you are, i.e., almost insane and not yet. Again, because and despite of. Being driven to almost insanity, in cases of heartbreak, for example, is because of what your heart is and what it has become because of that heartbreak. And healing from that heartbreak is because of that wound, which in turn is at the same time because of what your heart is and that heartbreak it bore and is capable of bearing, again because of that heartbreak. There is nothing that came first: the chicken is, by a hair's breadth, the egg. The is there is always already this almost. Not quite, not yet, not, can be, is not, is because of.

The most paradoxical thing amidst this is the because and despite of,  for the sole reason that this is consciousness itself. What its object is is the universe, and it is because and despite of the universe that it is. The almost is the space between consciousness and the universe, which cannot be separate at all. The almost is a pause as long as a breath of buckling underneath all the unbearable lightness of being. Buckling. Only when you are granted madness, or when you die, will you kneel. For you are too weak to kneel, but you are too strong to kneel.


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