as strange as it might sound, its very difficult to get used to being happy; its like discovering a necrotised muscle in the body and learning how to move and flex it. i am definitely not very good at being happy but i am definitely still ‘happy’ which is a luxury and something i dont take for granted.
does that mean i am never depressed? no. i still get depressed and wrestle with suicidal ideation and feelings of deep apathy and despair. and i think a part of living is realising these feelings will never really go away no matter how good my life might become. but it is possible to live with it. and to be happy. you can be depressed and happy. you can. and i am genuinely happy.
it is difficult not knowing where to direct my more negative emotions though,, or where to target them or blame them on... before i had several very distinct and overt reasons for my depression; to put it bluntly my life sucked. and now my life has improved, and even though we still face hardships both medical and financial and legal and social etc my life is still objectively better then it was before.
i am still gnawed by aching longings, nostalgia-tinted depressions, lonely melancholy...
but equally i am surrounded by love’s blessings and the warm radiance of belonging. i do mean it when i say i am truly happy.
and thats part of the problem...
i feel creatively.... stunted? cut-off? empty...
it’s, hard... confusing?
ive spent my whole life submerged in my own misery and despair that now i am finally above water and alive i feel strangely lost.
my art was a process of alchemising my pain into something more meaningful. maybe even something beautiful. at least that was the intention. pain into beauty; to flip the coin. but now. i feel strangely cutoff from my source of inspiration. was the struggle itself the muse. to live is to suffer. do i need that struggle? is it just stockhold syndrome? ‘when we stop struggling we stop being human.’ do i need to feel pain?
do i want to be in pain?
“once the war ends, i will no longer have any enemies to fight”
i rewatched dantalian no shoka recently, a work of art incredibly important to me & hugely influential on the ways i see the world. on each rewatch i also find something new to draw me in, to speak to me, to teach me. like a holy book there is seemingly infinite wisdom in its pages. the power of a phantom book indeed~
this time it was episode 11 that spoke to me. ah, Eilas! this time it was your turn to merge with me. to have your façade & grimoire join the swirling mass of my dantalian. you have become a part of me, or perhaps you always were.
[dantalian no shoka spoilers ahead...] eilas is a poet and british fighterpilot in the first world war. eilas and huey were comrades, companions, brothers, lovers... but elias turns traitor and joins the germans, breaking huey’s heart. why does eilas betray both huey and his country? his complete motivations are never made clear but elias is a true poet and in many ways represents the platonic ideal of what an artist should be to me. like frobisher of cloud atlas. he desires to complete his book of poetry above all else. it is his purpose, raison detre, everything. and his poetry is alchemised pain. the pain and suffering of war. eilas is depressed. suicidal. but he dives into battle and hears the screams of the dying and suffering and transmutes it into beauty, immortalises it in poetry. he has to write, he has to create. and he will sacrifice everything for his art. even it it means betraying everyone. even if it means prolonging the war.
by the end of his story, eilas is already dead. he has been dead a long time, but his desire and drive and obsession with finishing his poetry keeping him tethered to the world of the living, to the body of his fighterplane, killing, singing, suffering. but ultimately... it was all for nothing.
...
eilas never finishes his book of poetry. he fades away into the void..
...
...is that our fate? those of us doomed to never finish our phantom books?
eloi eloi, lama sabachthani
the fate of those fated to suffer.
***
i recently read queer by william s burroughs (i havent seen the new movie). it really seems that codependent parasocial yaoi is a thing that all gay people have to go through; a sort of universal fixed point in your lifespan. i liked the book altho i preferred the first half focusing on his yearning & angst around the collapse of the relationship... allerton’s apathy & annoyance at lee’s affection is very relatable having been on both sides of that experience. when they first sleep together how allerton is described as having a “curious detachment; the impersonal calm of an animal or child”. then later lees desperation at losing the love & connection with allerton “the warmth and laughter of saturday night was lost and he did not know why”. that desperate clawing & shamelessly pathetic attempts at trying to grasp at something thats impossible to protect. the sentence which stuck with me the most is “like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time.” such an accurate description of many lost & isolated lonely internet-poisoned recluses desperate for connection but avoiding any social obligation or comittment.
the second half of the book which sort of descends into lees psychedelic adventures in south america was less interesting to me altho i get its likely supposed to mirror how allerton drifts irrecoverably further away emotionally from lee while lees drug dependancy distracts & dominates him.
as despicable a person as lee is for the most part, you still cant help but really feel for his despair and desperation and obsession over allerton. like its inherently viscerally relatable i think. i am frequently drawn to these sorts of stories that capture the angst & melancholy of this particular texture of doomed love; queer, happy together, cloud atlas etc... queer in particular really captured the confusion and impotence and powerlessness of the whims of changing affections. lee’s desperate longing for things to go back to the way they were before with allerton really reminded me to a frighteningly similar degree of my own angsty writing from years ago about a similarly failed relationship:
nothing really captures the manic codependent doomed yaoi better than hello charlotte though; the strange contradiction of desperate painful longing and resignation to failure. vincent and charles really are the primordial archetype of the doomed lovers, existing as aeons outside of time. ahh, i am yet again reminded of how hello charlotte is probably the greatest work of literature of all time.
while i only truly fell in love for the first time recently, i have been through this experience of the codependent parasocial doomed romance several times on both sides of the dynamic; at times as the object of longing, other times as the one who longs. both are painful in their own way. i think i will always somewhat romanticise it. if i am ever to become deified, i think i would like to be the patron god of the longing and doomed lovers, forever watching over them in loving embrace.
