For the last couple of months, I’ve been studying blues on the guitar, specifically delta blues out of the deep South…blues out of poverty, disenfranchisement, rootlessness, lonesomeness in the midst of others. It’s affecting me in ways I never anticipated, resonating…
People make fun of the delta blues, because the themes are so repetitious…waking up in the morning, work, sex. But that’s the very point, consignment to a life that never changed, marking time. There is hypnotic melancholy throughout, and if my mood is right, it makes me cry. Because some days I just wake up lonesome, and stay that way all day.
Thinking on this, I remembered a seemingly trivial thing: When I was in college, I would study late into the night. And at times, I would just have to move. I’d get in my car and drive for miles in the dark, alone out on the country roads around Texas A&M, going nowhere but always moving. I’d just get restless. And I realize now that the feeling has never left me. Despite having lived in multiple states and a half-dozen countries, having traveled thousands of miles by train and plane, in a car and on foot…I still get restless.
A dozen years ago, I began walking. I literally woke up early of a morning and heard a voice say, “You need to walk.” I began almost immediately, and I’ve never stopped. Only now do I begin to understand why, and maybe to understand why I’ve never married, why I’ve always been afraid of permanence. I get restless. I get the walking blues.
This “restlessness” as you call it is ultimately about personal freedom, a major theme in existentialism. Sartre proclaims that we humans are radically free to pursue projects, but anxiety about that very freedom leads us to persuade ourselves that we MUST pursue those projects in obedience to some inner or outer necessity. In truth, our projects are contingent upon our decisions to act and thereby realize those projects by investing ourselves in them, by committing ourselves to them. Commitment to projects enables us to FEEL our freedom. Pursuing freedom for its own sake without a project is a recipe for boredom and nihilistic depression. Sartre’s novel Nausea is about a man who suffers from precisely this condition.
Thanks again for this, Michael. I’d like to call you at some point and talk directly about Sartre’s (and your) idea of “projects,” what that means exactly.
Inspired by you comment here, I read some brief background on Sartre and existentialism, and the idea of man as having no essential “essence,” and the idea of having to create a reason or justification for existing out of myriad possibilities…also the idea of that as “freedom.” I get the sense that if you don’t exercise that freedom and choose something, you can go mad–or at least neurotic–bouncing among the choices. I can guess that anyone with an attention deficit disorder (or who is easily bored) is in trouble here.
(In a lighter note, Shel Silverstein does a humorous treatment of this with his cartoon called “the dilettante.”)
I will read Nausea in the near future.
Man, you really know how to drop a burden in a guy, don’t you? This is very heavy stuff, and goes to the core of an issue I’ve dealt with all of my days, though blindly and in ignorance in my early life. I’ve generally associated it with a pathological sense of curiosity and thirst for new experiences. It only really took shape a decade ago, when I dug out and reread several poems I’d written in my twenties. I was struck by the prescience, at how my unconscious knew full well what was in store for me, but my conscious mind never saw it. Here’s an example: http://thesentienttraveler.com/priorities/
The thing is, you are not the first to tell me this, i.e., the need for a project, for commitment, though no one has framed it as elegantly as you and Sartre. And it also goes to the heart of what I am dealing with now, how best to responsibly embrace this privilege of time and freedom called “retirement.” In one sense, I did commit to a project once, my career. Thirty-three years, more like forty if you include school…
I have to stop here, at least for now, because this is a rabbit hole. I will go down it later, but thanks much for taking me to the edge. This exchange may be the reason I started this journal.
Commitment to one woman and one career definitively excludes a multitude of alternatives. In the midst of one’s freedom, with all options still available, choosing can feel insupportable, a limiting of life too painful to bear. This is especially true for those who value personal freedom above all else, who give it supremacy in the hierarchy of values. In fact, it may be anxiety about choice that reveals the full extent of one’s actual commitment to that kind of freedom. The issue of radical finitude in Space and Time is operative here: we will most assuredly age, weaken, sicken and die whatever we have chosen to pursue. And we do in fact pursue our lives with widely varying levels of energy and commitment to something. Some will say that being committed to personal freedom for its own sake is a waste of life, but I have not found it to be so. It has allowed me to pursue music and education to an extent otherwise impossible. The powerful sensibility of personal freedom is deeply fulfilling in itself, even if you use it mainly to interpret your own life in the context of the larger life swirling in frenzy all around you.