The days pass by

Late the other night - or, more exactly, early the other morning - as I was lying in bed wondering why I wasn’t asleep, the line “The days pass by, too quickly it seems” popped into my head. It seemed like it had to be something I’d heard somewhere, a line from a poem or a song or something. I couldn’t figure out where.

I did an online search and found a few examples of others who had used the phrase or something similar (most substituted “time passes” for “the days pass”) but nothing to indicate the source. I still think there must be one because the structure “too quickly it seems” just doesn’t sound like the way someone would ordinarily talk. The closest I’ve come has been a line from Tom Paxton’s “The Marvelous Toy,” which goes “the years have gone by too quickly, it seems.” I suppose that could be where I got it from, but I don’t know - the feel is wrong. In the song, the words are at most a little nostalgic and really not even that. But the way the line played in my head, it was genuinely melancholy with a real sense of loss. So I’m still not sure.

That keeps running through my thoughts as I contemplate the fact that I haven’t written anything here for over a week and a half. Time lost, words lost. It’s hard to explain exactly why. It’s not that I’ve been away somewhere or that I’ve just been completely out of it - I’ve been right here and I’ve kept on reading some of my usual blogs. I’ve even posted comments on some. (I’m actually considering putting some of them up here as a cheap way of getting some posts done. We’ll see if that happens.)

Part of the reason, I have to say, is found in another phrase - but the source of this one I know, because it’s mine. (Well, sort of. I’ve heard others use it but I know I used it before I heard it from anyone else, so even if I didn’t originate it, I still made it up for myself.)

“The world is too much with me.”

The world is too much with me. It describes those times when I become aware. Truly aware. Aware of the level of pain in the world around me, aware of the suffering, the loss, the despair, the desperation, the bloodshed, the mindless hatreds persisting for generations over differences that in the long run of history don’t even rise to the level of petty. Aware that somewhere in the world, right at this very moment, an agent of the United States is torturing a prisoner, a woman in Peru is covered with bruises from a beating by her husband, a child is dying from hunger in Eritrea, a man is being denied medical care and imprisoned in China for advocating human rights, an Afghan family is sitting in a refugee camp in Pakistan, wondering where they will go when the camp closes in two weeks, a Bedouin family in a ramshackle shanty town in the Negev with neither running water nor electricity is fearing their home will be demolished by the same Israeli authorities that forced them off their land in the first place - and everywhere, everywhere, the tears of mourners except where there are no tears left to cry.

Most of the time I intellectualize. I know the numbers, the policies, and the politics; I rant and rave and denounce and decry. But I intellectualize. The ranting is moral, the denunciations are logical, but still there is an emotional distance and both the anger and the hope that lies behind it are driven less by passion than by principle.

Hope? Yes, hope. As I wrote some years ago,

[e]ven many professional grouches (like me) are actually unregenerate romantics whose sharp words are honed on the inexplicable, indefensible, yet utterly unshakable conviction that things not only can be but must be better than they are.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I am aware and that "unshakable" conviction gets shaken. The experience is something like the almost-cliché one of looking at a clear night sky and feeling how small you are compared to the universe. Except without the panache and without the awe. Just with the overwhelming. The feeling is not inspiring. It’s debilitating.

I hope I offend no one by relating it to a description of autism. I have heard it suggested that autism can be understood as a breakdown of the brain’s ability to filter sensory input, so the child is overwhelmed with information, unable to determine what information reaching the brain is more worthy of attention than any another information.

We filter all the time, we couldn’t get by if we didn’t. For example, what is your left little toe feeling right now? If you pay attention, you can sense it, feel it in your sock or your slipper or against the rug or whatever- but until you paid attention to it, you were unaware of it. But that sensory input, those nerve impulses, were reaching your brain the whole time. Your brain just knew they were unimportant and so you ignored them at the level of awareness. It's the same as the experience I imagine almost every one of us has had of being startled by a noise - only to realize that it was actually because the furnace or the refrigerator turned off, had stopped making a noise. The sound had reached our ears which alerted our brain to it the entire time but we dismissed it from conscious awareness until a sudden change indicated something that might require our attention.

How would you, how would any of us, function if we were trying to consciously deal with every bit of sensory input our brain is receiving at any given moment - everything seen, everything heard, everything felt, smelled, tasted? We couldn’t. We'd be overwhelmed. And we well might, as autistic children often do, focus almost obsessively on some object or some simple activity in a desperate attempt to establish some order, some sense of control.

It’s something - a little something - like that for me. And I withdraw to and focus on computer games, Sci-fi channel, and books on some aspect of science. To things that don’t involve dealing with the “real,” present, on-going, events-unfolding, world.

Understand, this is not a feeling that there is only suffering, pain, and death in this life. It is not some sort of hip existential angst about the dark hand of fate. Even at such times I know there is beauty, happiness, even joy; that people fall in love, make love, are loved; that children play and laugh; that friends embrace; that there is learning, growth, discovery; that at this very instant, someone, somewhere, is being amazed by a leaf or a star or the antics of an animal or what they see through a microscope.

So it is not exactly despair in the usually understood sense of the term, although it’s somewhat akin to it. It is, rather and again, an overwhelming, a debilitating, sense, a sense of the sheer enormity of the task before us. The sheer weight of so much needs to be done. It just doesn’t seem possible to do it. That is, it’s not despair in the sense that it seems there is nothing good but it is a sort of hopelessness in the sense of it seeming impossible to have an adequate response to what there is that is bad. And from that bad emerge the cries for help, the calls for justice, the demands to do something, and every cry, every call, every demand, seems as worthy of respect and response as every other. The result is that I feel paralyzed, exhausted, and doing things like writing this blog seem so idiotically pointless that I just don’t have the energy to do it.

Thus my silence.

Which is doubly unfortunate because in a reinforcing cycle it undermines my ability to do here what I want to do.

During another low period, just about three years ago, I quoted something from the very first issue of the print version of Lotus, which came out for a couple of years in the early 1990s.

Some [folks] are good at petitioning. I'm not. Some are good at fundraising. I'm not. I lack both the focused concentration necessary for large-scale organizing and the patience for phone-banking. The list of my inadequacies is embarrassingly long.

My strength happens to be words. Advocacy. Writing. Giving speeches. And like that. So doing this is, simply, something I think I can contribute. My dream for Lotus is that it can be a voice of conscience and a tool in an on-going movement, something of use to the many who keep on keepin' on, something of value to those whose skills in other areas so greatly exceeds mine. Something that helps.

That also was and is the idea of this. To be something that helps. But to do that it has to be read and to be read it has to have some content to read. And when I hit a low period I don’t post so people don’t read so fewer people come by which is discouraging so it’s even harder to find the energy to post, so.... I have to admit that I’m enough of an egoist that it would have made a real difference if over these last, what, 12 days? if someone had emailed me or left a comment along the lines of “Hey, where ya been?” That my absence had been noted, even regretted.

Now I’m starting to whine, which I despise, so I’ll stop except to say that something I am not at all good at is promoting myself. If anyone has any suggestions (beyond reciprocal links and commenting on other blogs), I’d love to hear some.

Oh, and to say just one more thing: What got me going to write this was the realization that today, today, today, today of all days, this day, how dare I on this day say that I am “too tired” to write a damn blog?