Monday, June 24th, Second Meditation
Monday, June 24th, Second Meditation On Fear
What shall I say about the substance of this fear? All that day I tried to name it to myself, because I knew that if only I could put a name to it, if I could swallow it whole and cover it up inside my rational understanding, then I would be free of it.
Examine the remark that is emblematic of this fear, and see if you can understand it. "It’s better not to know what happened." That is the terrifying thought that not only are there things which are not known, but there are things which should not be known, and that everyone knows this. There are simply these voids in reality, filled with terrible things, that should not be known. That all of the world is like this — that everything solid, from the strongest and most powerful expression of beauty to the simple existence of ordinary people going about their everyday lives, is only a faĉade. Even the worst things can be known, and known conquered, fought with and consumed.
Of all the terrible fates that befall those whom Amnesty International brings to my attention every month, the one that horrifies me most is the fate of the disappeared. Torture, atrocities, sicken and outrage me more, but there is terror in the notion of disappearance. That someone should pass out of existence, and yet not to definite death, that they should remain in this limbo of being and not-being — this also is an image of this thing which possessed my mind. That there should be things in this world that are best not known, that are not only unknown but unknowable, that something should be able to fall between the cracks of everything we were capable of understanding as reality -!
Once or twice before, in early and in mid-adolescence, this very fear had seized me, and when I was much younger, fits of fear like it, set off by the oddest things. A collection of short children’s horror stories. A poem about frogs. Things that darkened the sun for me, and made it impossible for me to find anything solid in the good in the world.
When I was younger, my reaction to such things was fierce and comprehensive. I would destroy the thing that symbolized whatever it was that had brought on that terrible void, and then I would destroy all external references to it. If it were a book and in my control, I would hide it where no one but I knew about it and where even I might be expected to forget it. If I could only make it so that no one else could verify the existence of this terrible wrong thing, I could lock it away in my own mind, where it would gradually grow smaller and dissolve, safe, confined.
"No worst, there is none." Oh, there’s terror in that phrase. Of all the worst things in this world, if I could only know that there was a bottom, that beyond this there was nothing more that reality could sustain or the human soul endure — what would that knowledge be worth?
* * * * * *
There are two fundamental sources of desire, I think and have thought since freshman year, which are irreducible, although all desire can technically be described in terms of the former. These are the desire for pleasure and the desire for truth.
Also, I now realize, there are two fundmental sources of fear: the fear of pain, and the fear of the unknown.
This reminds me of Catch-22… of Clevinger vanishing into empty cloud, of Dunbar being "disappeared." They’re more frightening and worrisome than Snowden is. Snowden is just pathetic - in the sense of pathos, not the typical sense of the word (which should really be "bathetic") - whereas the other two are more fear-inducing.
October 18th, 2002 at 10:38 pmI remember once in my childhood, after an episode that frightened me badly - at least in part because it made me realize that my parents might not be able to protect me from all feared things - praying that the (now past) event might become only a dream.
October 19th, 2002 at 12:09 pmWas it from you, or from another source, that I encountered the image of a beautiful grassy meadow, sunny and innocent, with a fiery pit below, and hidden weak places or gaps through which one might fall into the fire?
October 19th, 2002 at 12:19 pmIt might have been me - I don’t know. The image is certainly one that sounds as if it could have been discovered in my younger mind!
October 19th, 2002 at 4:58 pm