Beguiling the world with simple songs

This morning I planned to get on the blog and write about sadness but for some reason the feeling that I had then has mitigated itself to some degree. That overwhelming and tonic sense of sorrow has been replaced by a disinterest - rather than by any sort of happiness - and I feel that I am not feeling as much of anything now as I was this morning. I am to a certain degree desensitised, whereas before I had a positive feeling of sadness that was stronger than any other feeling or sensation.

Sadness is of course usually brought on by a sense of loss. Usually we say that we are sad because we miss something, something has gone from our lives that was important to us, something is absent. But my sense of sadness is more like a sense that the whole world is inside me and I am using this thing as a filter to understand sensory inputs. It is more of an existential sense of lack, this sadness that I feel. I feel this loss more deeply than I can say.

When I am sad like that I want to weep but tears do not come. I am hard as a rock, rigid with sadness. The sadness envelopes and encompasses me. I am at the centre of a circle of sadness so complete that nothing else is visible outside it. Occasionally ideas and influences enter the charmed circle but they are soon subsumed by it, they fall prey to it, like roadkill. I drive my car through the world and I engulf vast oceans of feelings from everywhere and everything is turned into sadness in my wake.

Being hard as a rock and consumed by sadness you tend to see everything through a single, immeasurable lens that turns everything into your own image. You see yourself out there. And in fact yesterday evening I started to have bad thoughts, paranoid delusions. I thought that he had told her to say something to me, and then my thoughts went off on their own track, consuming everything in their path like an insatiable beast from hell, trundling through the landscape and turning everything into evil, and my soul was consumed by this evil. Luckily I was able to convince myself that my friends would not talk about me in this way and that I was imagining things. I have this kind of insight into my disease, and while it was unpleasant for a while I managed to overcome the feeling.

The sadness lingered this morning, though, following the episode of the night before. I walked through the world entirely convinced that there was no hope and that I would be condemned forever to eternal sorrow, like a stone statue in a graveyard. A graveyard filled with the tombstones of people I know. Each of them inscribed with a recognisable name. I might as well have been walking through such a place, looking around me at all these memories of things past.

It sounds extreme but I think that we all become rigid with sadness sometimes. We offset the effects of this existential state by playing music to dispel the aura of doom, replace it with something useful and instrumental in the world, like a positive emotion. I think that we strive to comfort ourselves for the sense of endless night by assuaging our senses with these sorts of stimuli. It is normal. We are all blessed by the facility to confuse the evil in the world by simple incantations we sing in the shower or while driving a car through traffic. We are all magicians who borrow spells from the angels, those who came before us and who beguiled the universe with their simple songs.