A Human Strategy #542 One cloud short of nine

542

One cloud short of nine is not the bliss that only one step out of hell can know.

Repetition cloys on even the best conditions and bores us to the point that we only claim the rarest of fortunate events truly happy.  And even these happiest moments, when they do not intoxicate us to the point that we soon look back on them as cases of catastrophilia, later suffer in their succeeding contrast with the day-to-day.  When we balance the books of nature, we pencil happiness in red. 

Our most frequent suffering however is not relative to misfortune, but to inadequate use.  Life is very often unbearable because we have been weakened by not having heavy burdens — giving us “good reason” to throw off even the lightest!

True misfortune, on the other hand, arrives with a rarity more or less equal to that of truly good fortune.  We are left in the balance with the repetitive.  We lash out at the greater part of life for the unendurable boredom of its own frequency, as if even the grandest hope would lack the right to the superlative if it were not enduring and then be the very trap of its own enduring.   

However if we should read the whole script for behavior, we would find nothing missing.  Anything truly happy must surpass the threshold of the day-to-day with its infrequency, making the day-to-day necessary, just as a background is necessary to its foreground.  The creative impulse arrives precisely from the unendurability of this boredom.  Nothing is happier for us; nothing, more necessary, and therefore, there is no better condition ... being then, perfect.

Extreme suffering need not be an exception to happiness.  One often “laughs again” in proportion, not to the injury, but to the duration of the memory of it.  We are inured to the memory to the point of finally permitting other thoughts into consciousness.  As a moral event, of course, the levity of a present happiness must be conceptually irrelevant to the grave injury once endured, else we would convict ourselves of “inhuman” conduct.  The intensity between two sequential points are separated into two “irreconcilable” concepts by a mental blink.  That is how the graver one became a moral issue, without which the mechanism for happiness would malfunction.  It is the intensity of the emotions however that are successfully smuggled from bad regions to good, precisely because the mind has no interest in their relation — not even to the point of calling them “irrelevant,” for that would put them together in the same chamber of consciousness.   

 It is indeed inhuman to carry an extreme humanism into all human events, not to mention how cruel it is to force upon one’s relations an honesty as universal as it is unflinching. And even to ourselves, it is still impious in extreme grief and does dampen somewhat our happier sensations when we bring along such a full awareness.  But we cannot help ourselves.  Nothing leaves us happy that has the slightest hint of inauthenticity and nothing authentic can blink.   A lower voltage passes through us, just below the threshold of self-deceit and loss of control.  Too much power is loss of power, if ego requires control.  Too much ego is loss of control again, if the indulgence in rank exceeds in clarity the power that makes it.  Our bouts are milder now, and there is some alleviation in knowing that suffering does not neutralize our happy moments; it makes them possible.