There’s a book that riffs on L.P. Hartley’s “proverbial” line: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there,” about historiography, or something along those lines but it strikes me that our past selves, especially our past emoting selves, are also foreign, strange. Who was that, who felt so much that he had to heave* the emotions from his clattering heart, the angry guts, to the mouth, to the eye and its salty pipes? I’m interested not particularly in the ways we lose control, for that has been well-documented these many centuries, no. Rather than end the short story or pamphlet at the asylum or the cemetery, how does one return to sanity? The mad may speak of butterflies* but can you be happy in the meadows where you barely grieve your lost mind? How do you lose, cut yourself up among the wax paper that butchers use for wrapping meat, how do you keep yourself together enough to keep up the necessary functions? The functions that make it natural to clamber out of the warm blankets and into the still cold of a room recently a respectful witness to your slumber - what are the distractions that help us, the portals we can bookmark for emergency exits in a crisis? It would be ideal to feel spent, I think, at endings. Spent because we have transacted with so many, so vigorously, with the joys of risk and the enviable lightness of those who laugh away self-pity and every other woe of our awkward egos.
*see Shakespeare’s King Lear