Disenchantment and Enchantment

Time is a path is a clock is a loop is a void is decay is entropy is variable is anxiety.

The word “jaded” gets thrown around a lot – a cliche it has now disfigured into. It is a cliche now to experience the desensitization, the getting-used-to, and the numbing of life itself. It is neither ignominious nor glorified, and now indeed without much of the Thespian gloom that once forecasted the some kind of Übermensch-esque rebirth. One is simply jaded, and lies down. Not to somehow recover a pre-jaded state of wonderment (if such a thing even ever existed), but to cope with it. The natural succession of torpor assumes the position of a natural state altogether. One then whispers to themself, “No more!” mumbling. 

In its most basic form, living is repetitious, I think. Call it a “routine” if you will, a certain rhythm usually dictates the basic movements of one’s body to and fro. A puritanical and ascetic air abounds. You wake up, try to wake up, excrete, clean up, eat, read, finish eating, clean up, change, leave your abode, go somewhere, do something, rest, do something, go somewhere else, eat, excrete, clean up, go back to the first somewhere, do more of the first or second something, feel fatigue, finish doing the something, get up, go somewhere else, eat, excrete, clean up, return to your abode, change, do something that’s not one of the other somethings, realize it’s too late, wash up, clean up, sleep, can’t sleep, do something that doesn’t help with sleeping, somehow fall asleep. Then rinse and repeat. To become aware of it is nauseating, and by the time the awareness has set in, fatigue begins to clot within you. Even the occasional zany detours from this routine cannot undo these clots of fatigue. “Bleh.”

The things and activities we most prize can then lose their magic – disenchanted. Not by some conscious exogenous or endogenous effort, but purely by going about your days, one after the other. When everything feels indistinguishable from one another, when the only thing that compels you to rise in the mornings (or the afternoons…!) are the mechanical turns of your gears, when an overbearing, flickering sense of fatigue begins to invade every bone and ligament of yours, chewing on every cell and bit of inorganic material. It’s the “big doodoo” now. Alas, vanitas vanitatum.

Perhaps there was never any enchantment to begin with. That somehow the original wonderment we find in starting something is of purely fictitious, imagined elements. A carrot hung in front of the rabbit’s mouth - forever there and forever unreachable. Or more likely, we have destroyed it. It is not time that has corroded our very existence, as transient as it is. The complacency with which we submit not only to our own inertia, but a whole order of bodily discipline and desire externally socialized into us, is what ultimately produces that nauseating and anxious repetitive roll through the days. Voids hitherto neutral and meaningless suddenly are accorded with exclamation points and demand our attention. Worse, we gaze at the increasingly even surface of time and imbibe the platitude of “it is what it is.” We accept the deterioration of not only our own condition, but that of the others, in part because there is now a preoccupation with the self that has wantonly exterminated concerns for yourself and others. We are simultaneously uninterested and self-centered, while coping with an odorous pessimism.

It doesn’t matter if there was any enchantment or disenchantment before, nor should the possibility of re-enchantment be of much concern to us. But we should give a damn about enchanting whatever torpor we are falling into. Even the most mundane things we do ought to carry some weight of meaning. And time shouldn’t be an enemy, as cold and distant as it is. I, at least, want to try to care and somehow be brave, even if on the most trifling matters and in the most trifling ways. Life is too short for otherwise.

Also, enjoy some earthquake-causing Japanese fish demons.