I was going through my old emails and got stuck on one sent to me by a good friend. It read:

Goya believed in the stillness of life and that purity lies in tranquility. Being melancholic is a good sign according to Shakespeare it provides one with the opportunity to learn about themselves.

The belief in the stillness of life… to preach that purity lies in tranquility…I remember saying in reply that tranquility is a hypothetical concept that cannot be achieved. And here I am thinking about it again. Tranquility…to be in a state totally free from stress and emotion.

Escape from the boundaries of stress seems relatively easier, I mean if nothing works, there is always marijuana! Enough of that and you would have forgotten all the stress you ever felt. By the way I am in no way advocating its use, for anything achieved through smoke, is eventually just smoke. A temporary blimp that leads you to a greater state of whatever you were trying to escape. Anyway, escaping stress is possible, if only in the moments before you go to sleep or wake up, when you are in a state of half slumber, totally at peace with everything around you.

But how can we ever escape emotion? There is always some form of it hovering above our existence. From the raw to the most refined, we are always feeling them. Getting elated and then tumbling down to the bottom less depths of remorse and sadness, snarled with guilt. Every breath we take we feel a new emotion, so much so that it feels like emotion is life. The basic essence, the complete picture. Every reaction, no matter how matter of fact, is somehow based on some emotion. To serve…to protect…to betray…and to abandon, just ends of the same spectrum. Then how can we ever escape emotion?

Does a person lying in a 25 year coma feel emotion? I don’t know, and it would be a little difficult to ask the comatose for the answer. But me, in the here and now, and in the has and been; I have constantly felt emotion. Some variation of this jigsaw puzzle has always been at me, urging me on, tugging me along, and then crippling me and putting me aside, before even the complete blink of an eye. It amazes me how fast the brain reacts, before you can even blink an eye, you know that it’s all over. You are completely shattered. The end…and the long wait to the new beginning.

So how would Goya achieve purity, for how could he ever feel absolute tranquility. Once again it’s coming back into agreement with Shakespeare. To keep discovering one’s own self through the mechanics of melancholy. Delving deeper and deeper into the abyss leading to complete Nirvana. But that comes at a price as well. The price of slowly, steadily becoming a recluse. Achieving absolute removal from the moving and the alive…but then, nobody promised that you could buy the cake and eat it too!

There’s this little gem of a poem by Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole” that would be a good ending to this…

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.