PRELIMINARY REMARKS IN AGREEMENT WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AS TO WHY REDUCING THIS OR THAT TO IRONY CAN BE PROBLEMATIC

The Diary of Sean O'Connor: A Literary Diary of Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Prosimetra re: Contemplations, Daydreams and Notes

(I.e., on some essences of my optimism)

*Tuesday, March 2, 2021— Tuesday, March 30th, 2021*

For whatever hope turns out to be worth--

(how eerie; as I think of it now, on a playlist in shuffle mode, an instrumental piece called “Hope,” begins to play! I make believe it’s some sort of “good sign” even though, to quote Dostoevsky’s unnamed “underground man” anti-hero protagonist from his novel Notes From Underground: “I’m sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am”[1])…

--the kind of hope I’m referring to, (and not for rhetoric’s and sophistry’s fluffy sake; I refuse to let my thoughts and their language come and go in vain!) feels like the actual core of the soul and with a mystical seeming power (in the sense that it’s beyond humanity’s capacity to explain this sort of thing), serving as the charges of prayers; oh, and may it please, (I’m addressing you, sacred physics, fate, mysterious creativity of the universe) tear down depression’s and anxiety’s mean walls and grant us humans a long, long, long time (such that it really feels like eternity) to indulge in thriving, maximalizing, blooming/blossoming, becoming like butterflies seemingly smiling in their miraculous wings—both functional and aesthetically beautiful—and to invest tantrically/yogically in making love, receptive to inspiration and philanthropically committed to paying it forward—somewhat of a loaded thought there, I know! That’s how some thoughts are. Loaded like storm clouds. Loaded with hope that is intense in its elements of distinctly and exceptionally meaningful desire just like transpiring shots of green as springtime starts warming everything up!

Awareness of time’s science and art is expanded like good poetry that I could never and would never write but have and will always deeply appreciate…. musical, spiritual, dramatic--milestones in between deaths and births.[2]

Inevitable imperfection yet ever necessary gratitude. Lucky just to be alive, I mean! And though I sometimes wish I was born in Western Europe and lived in say Sweden (ha, because some of the hottest sex scenes I ever saw on TV were on a Swedish show), actually, New Jersey, USA is quite an amazing place if you find the right parts—north but West of all the cities and exceptionally urban suburbs, where the open space of forested hills and mountains do not have to compete with crowded schools of buildings (schools as in schools of fish!) for your eyes’ attention (which is wonderful for me because I have esophoria) —well, I you’d find it amazing if you’re like I am and take an aesthetic approach to geographic preferences and take a spiritual approach to aesthetics).

To live in the Somerset Hills of New Jersey, or to be just about anywhere close to the Somerset Hills (like a little further north into Denville and Roxbury township), no joke, induces a lot of pleasure, like a lot of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin—I suspect. That’s even part of my anxiety. I love it so much that it simply overwhelms me! I walk outside and it’s genuinely hard for me to believe. As someone who has been close to homelessness a few times, and who always used to want out of New Jersey (with hateful passion in those days), the pleasant “shock” or spiritual orgasm (I’m not just trying to inject sex into this essay; but the nature of orgasm as the storm of ecstasy and pleasure is the closest analogy I can think of….) feels at times, “too good to be true.” The same is the case with being married to Ashley O’Connor and living with our dog Yago. I absolutely mean it when I say see no difference, I grant no difference, between winning a generous lottery ticket/getting the slot-machine jackpot and living where I live with whom I live! Thus, I cling to it rather tightly. I sometimes feel nearly suicidal then when I’ve had too much to drink not because I think drinking is bad but because I fucking want to keep what I have and keep it for a long fucking time! Nothing matters more to me. I’d say “not even money” except I have come to appreciate that it must be remembered what money actually is! It is resources, value, time, productivity, and service! Money by fact is one of the foundations of society and culture. TRADE! EXCHANGE! THIS VALUE FOR THAT VALUE, ET CETERA!

[1] Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky published by Vintage Classics in in 1994; page 3

[2] Death scares me more than anything. Sometime last autumn (late October/early November 2020) I wrote a verse-essay attempting about this called “The fear of death and living life in vain”—a phrase that “came to me” one evening while walking my dog, up and down one of the hills in the park-like walking area of our spacious condominium complex (where we have lived since late June 2019; we’re leaving May 1, 2021; already sold our unit but are still in search for someplace to live; sellers are reluctant because we require a contingency clause; since we acquired our condo through Affordable Housing the law requires the contingency) in the midst of asking myself “what’s the most honest thing I can put into words?” and vetting a series of proposed roughly drafted thoughts.

as if to verbalize

the states of various places within my mind

were to give life,

so to speak, to the words,

and…make murderers of nightmarish words,

so to speak…[A]

Michel de Montaigne asks, in his essay “To philosophize is to learn how to die”:

“When there pass before our eyes examples such as these [thoughts of death], so frequent and so ordinary,

how can we rid ourselves of thoughts of death or stop imagining that death has us by the scruff of the neck?

at every moment?” (see page 95 from the book Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays; translated by

M.A. Screech, published by Penguin Books in 2003)

“It cannot be done,” he says, answering his question. He adds:

“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us…let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death… (page 96)

“…if you keep handling them and running through them you eventually tame them” (page 97).

Perhaps it can be done though! Mind over matter. Well, if I believe in mind over matter so much, then it’s time to apply it to my depression and anxiety.

In any event, thus far, Montaigne’s position that “rid[ding] ourselves of thoughts of death” “can’t be done” seems correct. In my case, thoughts of death gnaw at my mood too much. Especially in the evenings when my mind gets so…reflective on life and mortality as such…one’s life story as seen from far away with marks of the beginning and the end…. visible (to be figurative) … conceptually. What makes it worse is when you hear on the news that so and so has passed away. Or I think of older television shows and movies I’ve seen. To watch a show like I Love Lucy and know that most of those actresses and actors are long gone.

You know how when you start typing something into Google and it finishes the fragment or question for you—which is often the case because other people have Googled the same question? Believe it or not, it would seem I’m not the only one to relate I Love Lucy to time and mortality. I typed in whether or not anyone on the show is still alive. Well, on November 13th, 2013, at 5:42 PM PT Scott Collins wrote an article published by the LA Times with the headline “Shirley Mitchell: Last adult cast member of ‘I Love Lucy’ dies” (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-shirley-mitchell-last-adult-cast-member-of-i-love-lucy-dies-20131113-story.html#:~:text=Shirley%20Mitchell%20in%202007.&text=This%20post%20has%20been%20updated,%2C%E2%80%9D%20has%20died%20at%2094.) At the time of the article’s publication, Keith Thibodeaux, who played “Little Ricky” was 62. That would make him 70 now. And he’s still alive. That’s cool!

…

… On the night of Wednesday, March 26th, 2021 I had a nightmare that someone I knew (in the nightmare…but the identity of the person in the dream my mind did not disclose) had died. I hugged a several people who were among the friends and family of the person who passed away. We cried and spoke of how we really loved this person. Awful nightmare.

***

…Before or after that dream I dreamt that I was a secret agent involved in some elaborate mission (which, by the end turned into a dream that I was simply watching a James Bond movie I hadn’t seen in roughly a decade). I dreamt of other things too. Sex… sensual…from behind…; walking my dog Yago; reading personal essays by Phillip Lopate—while parambulating along a sidewalk. It’s the diversity of the subject matter that stands out to me…

[A] That is to say acknowledging mortality scares and depresses me.

I’ve chosen to cite the poem for diaristic/journalistic purposes, i.e., to cite the essence of my mind at

the time and place of having stumbled upon those words/that thought/that title.

Since I no longer love my poems but, speaking of things being done in vain, don’t want them to have been

written entirely in vain, I figure I’ll find at least supplementary and/or appendix purposes they serve to

further inform contexts