An Unscientific Prolegemena To Lotus Eating · 8:34pm Feb 1st, 2018
I hate leather couches.
I hate the way that they cling to your body like tape. I hate the sound and the feeling that leather gives when you rise up off it after an hour lying down. I loathe in a very deep and primarily physicality-oriented part of myself the sensation of leather molding to me and binding itself to me with the sweat it coaxes from my overheated and irritated body.
Life's small irritations are ones which we make peace with like Russia throwing Finland a hasty ceasefire; we do this because we must, not because we want to. We structure our behavior around these small bumps or we learn to forget them. We avoid certain parts of town at certain hours to skip the traffic blocks. We go to the Applebees in one town instead of the one in ours because theirs is better and they always cook the Bourbon Street Steak better there. Sometimes we have nagging anxieties we can hardly put into words, ineffable insecurities that we smooth over with ritualistic behavior we barely even notice. Some of us count the steps we make or find we must always be up the stairs in ten seconds or less. We start to align ourselves to the lines in the sidewalk or we drift towards the right in an empty hallway by force of habit. Coded into us there are so many responses to remembered sensory information that we can only keep track of by not thinking about it.
The thing about being a Lotus Eater is that you start losing all of those responses.
I've discovered that fewer people know what a Lotus Eater is than I had previously guessed. I do not know how to convey my actual feelings about this in an authentic manner, because most of the things I came up with to say in the moment as I blinked groggily at my screen at 11:31 AM between thoughts of lunch were pretentious or gloating. They implied that everyone was simply uncultured, and that was why they did not recognize the episode. I sounded like Titanium Dragon, except like, with more concrete knowledge Of Stuff. So instead I'll just tell you 'bout it.
Odysseus' early stops were all raids. Instead of just sailing into port, buying some food, and keep goin', he decides to amphibiously assault various small island towns and ruthlessly annihilate them. Well, as much of them as he can find once he's fat from their food and wine, which was the real point. There is no need to do any of this, and that is made rather abundantly clear. Odysseus is filthy rich. His ships are laid down with gold. He could buy a couple of these little podunk ports and go home a rich man still. Odysseus is a dick. I'll talk about that in another blog, about how much of a dick he is and why its important prolly.
They kinda get turned around cause sailing is Hard and storms are Bad, and end up somewhere on the North African coast. In a rare show, Odysseus is apparently too tuckered out to rape or murder even one person, which is cool because the natives are the most chill people on earth. They are the Lotus Eaters, and I would contend that they are the first of the two moral trials Odysseus faces before Ithaca, and I think that his reaction informs our understanding of what comes at Ithaca.
The Lotus Eaters eat the Lotus. They lie around, grinning at each other like fools. They do not do much else besides these things. The Lotus is food, but it is also a drug. It feeds the body and soul, and in so doing it soothes out every crease and fold in the spirit. The Lotus delivers one from evil while also binding one's fingers together and tying one's arms.
Odysseus and his men enjoy themselves, but soon find that the softness of the land prevents their leaving. They do not want to leave. Or rather, they do want to leave, but not enough.
Choice is an interplay of three things. Sign/signfier/signfied--Desire, will, action. They had the desire, but the will was absent, and so there was no way to bridge between the idea of ithaca and sailing off.
I am a Lotus Eater.
I started talking about my couch because I lay on it a lot these days.
This is my day, measured out in coffee spoons. Or it would be, if I had those. Which I dont:
I wake up at 7-8:30 groggy and coughing up my lungs.
I drive two counties over for work. 9 to 5 mindnumbing staring at screens.
Around 5 I get to leave. I deliver things in rush hour traffic to the post office or the FedEx box like at least twice a week and those days take an extra 30 minutes to get home.
Home by 6ish if I'm incredibly lucky. I am not lucky much.
Spliff rolled and lit by 6:25. Smoke alone the first time.
Lay on my couch or on the bean bag or on my bed being high for like an hour or three.
Feel the desire to do things.
Gets up.
I'm going to do this thing.
You know what would make this thing better?
Being high as fuck.
Second spliff.
Lay on couch again.
Suffice it to say that in everything but being a Lotus Eater I have been very, very unproductive.
Suffice it to say that, beside blinking at my phone's discord app and listening to a lot of Sufjan Stevens, I have done little. Not little of value, though that is also true, but little at all. I have struggled to write in bits and pieces. My therapist does the same thing that my parents did for so long--correct evrything with her magical red pen, numbing down every superlative, blunting the edges of everything I say into something small and manageable, something which has Answers, If Only You Would Pull Your Bootstraps or If Only You Could Clean Up And Find A Nice Whatever Outdated Advice Blah Blah, as if the world was how it was. Or how they thought it was, ever, at any point. As if these things made sense or had purpose or substance. As if the acquisition of anything---
Sidetracked. I do little. I am a lotus eater.
A prolegomena to further Lotus-Eating:
Dear Libidinosae,
Before you smoke the Lotus, recall what it is to be alive and to feel energy. Walk up and down stairs. Walk to your car. Drive your car around a parking lot. Remember what it is like to move. Go to Cups. Drink coffee and sit on the porch without smoking. Smell the dead winter and the ash you left last time. Listen to the cars go by and the people chattering as they cross the brick streets. Look down the road and remember walking the sidewalk. Sip the warm drink and feel the external cold and delight in the difference. Go into the city at night, and revel in Fondren.
You will not do these anymore. Ground yourself in the existence of places beyond the porch, the living room, your room. Cut your heart out with a fine scalpel and quarter it. Spread it out in the world so that you must rise up from your fog to retrieve it. You will hate doing this. Doing anything shall be intolerable. But you will do it, if you can only find the way to make yourself.
You will not be happier, but you will feel better. When you stretch you will feel the trembling muscle all up your leg and stifle a gasp of surprise. Your cat's fur will be lovely. You will not be happier, but you will not be so bleak. You will no longer dislike the cold, and you will not flee it. You will not be happier, and you will not do anything, but you will not be unhappy either.
The Lotus Eater is never unhappy. Only unsatisfied. The lotus' power is that it gives us pleasure but no bread, sister.
I've mentioned the fasting to you. The rebalancing of spirit, mind and body, is what I sometimes call it, but it's actually simpler than that. It's an exercise. Will is a muscle. I can be exhausted or injured, strained and sprained by the actions of life. It can also atrophy. That's why the fasting. It is an exercise of the muscle.
It is also an affirmation, a proving to myself that when I truly have the desire, I do still have the will.
I've fasted all my life. I do not actually remember what age I began, though I have a tiny, vague, small recollection of my parents saying fasting wasn't for little kids, when I was quite young. I think I was allowed to at age eight? Certainly I was doing so regularly by age twelve. It has been good for me in certain ways. A development of will.
Funnily enough the thing I struggle with is desire.
It's the thing about the drinking. When I am stressed and unhappy and all the world seems poised against me, and I cannot fight the fight, because literally, no, I cannot, nothing I do can change the other people whose choices have burdened me, all I can do is endure, well... I'm a happy drunk. Have a drink, be happy. It is very easy to not drink when I don't want to drink. I can quit any time, if I want to. Why would I want to? Why would I want to not be happy?
Eat, drink, and be merry.
And here I am confessing to you again. In public even, this time. You do rather inspire confession, somehow. But I think of your little trio, of desire, will, and action, and consider that a person can be deficient in any one of these things, and I conclude that it fucking sucks.
This is painfully relatable
I mean, I was going to guess that you ate people who did yoga, so that's not an unwarranted response...
If this is the life you have chosen, then so be it. If you ever want to stop, there are ways, but until then good luck to you.
4787275
the only part I chose was the part where I stayed alive tbh, the rest follows.
4787277
Then you have made a choice, namely to let the substance have power over you. To be frank what you describe sounds like existence, not life.
There is a difference.
I would rather be awake and in pain, but knowing I was in full control of myself, than contented in a daze.
Restart, my heart, see how it’s beating? I can feel too, I feel for you...
Rewind, my mind, see how it’s ticking? I can think too, I think of you...
If I remember, one translator had Odysseus's name as "Never Stint Grief and Pain". Talk about wolves ...
4787285
You’re right, I shoulda died in law school instead. A long term substance abuse problem is a lot worse than shooting your brains out with a 357 magnum
4787285 You may not mean to be doing this, but you very much come across as not having experienced what you're talking about.
Whenever I hear of Sufjan, I remember a knitting zine I own that has an interview with him written on a typewriter.
4787548
he is a good knitter boy
4787571
He’s a good everything boy.
Also holy fuck I’m such a lotus eater. Like my best song I’ve ever written is about how addiction is a facsimile friend.
4787501
I said I would rather be in pain but clean than drugged into complacent numbness, which clearly means I think you'd best commit suicide.
You've lost me.
My stance is simply this. You know you are in a bad situation, and you are not there by desire, so you have a choice to handle. Do nothing, and allow it to keep going and getting worse, or decide to seek help.
4787548
It happens I have dealt directly with drug addicts and alcoholics. I am not a doctor, but neither am I bereft of experience in total. If you feel you possess knowledge I lack, then by all means share it.