COSMIC ANGST

I got really tired and then really down during the first part of this week, which meant that my ability to conjure up any kind of words for you tended to fall apart rapidly. There were, of course, some half thought-out things already in progress which pulled me out of the fire for a couple of mornings but then…

Ah, you know…

The blankness came upon me again, the emptiness, the nothing. Suddenly, after burbling quite happily on at you for a few days there was nothing to say, nothing I could think of, and a kind of empty grey mist was upon me again, the sort of thing where you have half an idea on the tip of your mind but then it vanishes into the fog and you can’t grab hold of it again. Worse still, of course, are those moments when you do manage to grab hold of it, but then you really don’t have a clue quite what to do with it now that you have.

Then, no matter how many mornings you’ve managed (with relative success) to string a few words and phrases together into a reasonably coherent whole, your mind jumps a track and you sit there, staring at a screen, wondering just how you ever managed to do it, or if you ever really did. Now you’re sitting there wondering if you’ll ever be able to put a sentence together ever again and the panicking starts, you start tapping out whatever rubbish first comes to mind, hoping against all hope that something, anything, will grow out of those meaningless phrases as they do, at least, begin to pour out of you and coalesce into some kind of genuine insight into your own tiny piece of the human condition.

So, yes, once again, I was feeling miserable, but I really felt I had no right to be. Over the course of a few days I’d seen scenes on my television of people whose entire lives had been washed away by the forces of nature, and there was I, moping around the house like the worst type of adolescent, feeling a bit sorry for myself for no real good reason that I could think of. I remember those days when I was young Master Potato Head, never an object of desire, suffering the occasional rush of unfettered emotions after trying to keep everything in check for too long.

Maybe that’s what’s happening now. Watching all that suffering unfold is triggering something else inside me, opening the dam after all those months of quietly suppressed anguish. I’d call it empathy if that didn’t seem so hollow and pathetic, because on the Richter Scale of suffering, my own barely registers in comparison to theirs, and yet, once again, the narcissist within emerges, as it inevitably will, and I find myself thinking about myself and my own troubles as if the universe revolves around me. “Don't worry” I try to tell myself, “That’s what everyone else does too...”

Didn’t they once say that there was a “Diana effect” back in 1997? Weren’t there numerous stories of people who had barely shed a tear at the death of their own parents suddenly finding themselves weeping uncontrollably and very publicly over her death, effectively weeping for the loss of someone who was a complete stranger to most of them, however familiar she might have seemed to be? Some “Daily Express” readers still do that every morning, they say.

Perhaps that’s what’s going on here, a reaction to the fear. The panic attacks that perpetually bubble just underneath the surface manifesting themselves as a strobe light of worries in the mind. Thousands of millions of thoughts all happening simultaneously so that not one of them can step up to the front, stick up its hand and say “Follow me, son. It’ll be alright”. I’d call it a ‘mindquake’ if I didn’t feel that it would be utterly crass to do so, but then I just did anyway. You watch the planet do its very best to destroy whole communities and you are totally thankful that it’s not you that it’s happening to, and then you feel guilty for thinking like that and then the unbearable gut-wrenching fear of “what if…?” reaches into your soul and the palpitations begin.

One of the reasons that life as we know it is possible on this spinning ball of rock we call home is because, in the best tradition of ‘Goldilocks’, the position of the planet is ‘just right’. The relationship with the moon is just right, the distance from the sun is just right, and the condition of the planet is just right. But then, of course, we are only here because it is all just right. If it wasn’t, we couldn’t be here.

Douglas Adams had something to say once about a puddle waking up and deciding that the hole it was in must have been made for it (although he put it far better than that…). Interestingly, or maybe very scarily, not only did the Japanese Earthquake last week shift the main island of Japan a staggering eight feet, but it managed to shift the entire Earth slightly on its axis and also moved the whole planet’s centre of mass.

There’s a rather fabulous old black & white film called “The Day the Earth Caught Fire” where the Earth is accidentally shifted on its axis due to unintentionally simultaneous nuclear explosions, and suddenly our little planet’s position in the great universal dance is not quite as ‘just right’ as it used to be. It’s a rather good (and rather forward-thinking with its take on environmental matters) British movie from the early 1960s (if you ever get the chance to see it) which is made all the more disturbing by its semi-documentary style adding a kind of heightened reality and giving the viewer a genuine sense of threat. I was reminded of it quite strongly when I read about that axis shift, although it would have to shift significantly more than it has to start to really trouble us.

Maybe, however, that explains what is happening to me and creating these odd moods. A slight change to our environment is triggering some core intuitive worries. Some kind of global feeling of ‘cosmic angst’. Maybe we humans can sense danger on an instinctive, animal level that we probably think we’ve evolved out of, and we’re worrying that our planet isn’t quite as safe for us, as made for us, as it once was. I went to the zoo once and, in a cage a good few hundred yards away, a tiger growled, and somehow, on some deep-down, fundamental, basic level, my fear and flight instincts were triggered, and, just for a moment, all that veneer of civilisation was stripped away from me and I was just a primitive mammal again.

Another thing that that shift of axis has apparently done is to make the day slightly shorter. I don’t know whether this means we’ll feel that we live slightly longer or slightly less, but it’s certainly a very odd concept. We define the passing of our lives by the rotation of the planet and its relationship with the sun. If those fundamentals started to change to any significant degree, we’d all suffer from a kind of deep-seated confusion, no matter how much we might convince ourselves to just ‘get on with it’.

I know I tend to obsess about certain subjects for a while and then drift off as my attention focuses elsewhere, and so the structure of the Earth and our relationship with it has been cropping up an awful lot in my thoughts recently, although that’s understandable I suppose, under the circumstances. Sadly, I’m sure what I like to call my ‘thinking’ will move away to more trivial matters before you know it, as the world moves on and our attention shifts away from those horrific events and the rest of us just pick up with our own little lives as if nothing significant has really changed.

But we now know better than that, don’t we? We know that everything’s connected and we’re all in this together, all sharing our leaky little blue lifeboat as it hurtles through the darkness all around it.