In quintessential triviality for years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

my friend and i had a conversation about who would be more satisfied with their life. would the artist, creating his work day in and out for little or nothing, be more satisfied? or would the person, happy in their complacency, watching tv day in and out, be more satisfied? i would say neither would be more satisfied; in fact they would probably be just as satisfied as the other. or perhaps the latter would be more satisfied, as they would not struggle. and lately i have realized by your tellings and by my own slow waking that all we have are expectations, formed by socialization, that are usually unmet, in traction with innate desires to simply live in actuality. we have expectations of what is love and what is satisfaction. is love the fiery flame in the eyes, the heady wind keeping us floating off perpetually over the poppies? of course not. it is a mutual understanding, and it is as about exciting as the spark of every morning's dew. it is a nonchalant, settling, microcosmic pool, and it happens every single day.  It is beautiful and it is utterly necessary to life.  Yet it is not uncommon.  And we want something else.  And Louise holds her hand full of rain tempting you to defy it.  _{(Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna")}

Louise is an ordinary name for an ordinary girl, and rain is ordinary water, falls, is still.  Or is there a difference between this kind of love, this stable, predictable flood, and the blood-red love that burns as a fire and vanishes?  Or is one real and the other unreal?  Or if both are real, are we left wanting, asking, Is that all there is to a fire? (_{Michael Smith, "Is that all there is?")}  And if it is only a vision, can the vision become so real to us that it becomes us?  If I dream I have you, I have you. (_{John Donne, "The Dream"})  Can this deepen so much that to you become a stranger to even yourself? you become a third entity, a stand-in, a mannequin, separate...alone.  Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place. (_{Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna")}  In other words, can we become anything other than our constant desires?

Is it simply the conflict created, a dichotomy of self, returning to socialized expectation, of what we need versus what we want, or is it a case of what is there and what is not?  Whether or not it exists, that fire-branding love will always be that exotic haunt, that phantom call we thought we heard, and perhaps forgot.  It is that call we are seeking desperately to recall, buried somewhere in the vaults of our memory, and wish, innately, for someone else to hear it in sync.  It is what I meant when I prayed along with this song that I wanted you to hear me sing, to sit beside me, and simply exist there, next to me, belonging.  It is what Dylan means by his Arabian drums.  I think you heard and understood.

When Ruthie says come see her
In her honky-tonk lagoon,
Where I can watch her waltz for free
'Neath her Panamanian moon.
An' I say, "Aw come on now,
You must know about my debutante."
An' she says, "Your debutante just knows what you need
But I know what you want."
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again?
_{(Bob Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again")}

Can this really be the end?  Is that all there is to a fire?  Must I be stuck in washboard Mobile and wanting the steel guitar Memphis? Must I need my white-dressed debutante while I want a dancing dark Chicana?

We have expectations of enduring love, of conquering love, a love that always rises at the horizon, a silver warrior love that defeats all sadness and solitude.  This is a socialized expectation.  it is a frame set in our mind.  innately i desire intimate understanding and the requited company of a person with my same desires.  but the understanding ends at the inevitability that all things are not perpetual, or paradoxically, not inevitable.  that is the seat of desire in itself, that things are not perpetual.  i have said before that the most important word in that song is the word "again" and it is true.  the want comes again and again.  it is perpetuus itself.

Yet is it a case of survival versus transcendence?  Is it a case of feeding the want again and again for survival, or curing yourself of the "addiction"?  It could be argued either way, for to survive I need the common, still water, but to transcend I need a rising, yet disappearing flame.  I know I drink because I need to, yet I smoke because I want to.  I need the water, and I will clutch the canteen 'til my dying day.  I need stable love like a tick needs blood.  Do I feed, selfishly, without regard for my true desire, or the pain it deals my host, feeding only because I need it, and it is there, and succulent?  "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him." _{(Bob Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again")}  If one did not feed from what they needed they would be starving. 

Or is it rather that we simply want what we need to survive?  For survival is simply being, and to simply be, we may want the coexistence of a person who knows, and is, and that is all that may be in actuality, no fire, no light.  It is only seems exotic because of the expectations that have framed the idea; it only seems beyond us because such pairings are not usual in society because no one simply is, they do, they produce.  In order to sustain a working system, are pairings of love made in need of sustaining one another, as husband sustains wife, and vice versa, as mechanical as a gear, productive in roles, even emotional ones?  Or is love knowing and even being one another, as you become the desire for the other one?

I believe in a world without society,  in a world where perhaps people wandered like animals, that burning, self-annihilating love would not be so foreign.  We would not all be struggling with the expectations, for love and other things, money, work, and social role, that block us from simply existing together.

I realize all these thoughts are also simply unrealistic but if we were in fact feral animals it would not be so far-fetched.  But perhaps it is simply a case of animalia versus humanity--an animalistic id versus a human conscience. The id wants to be, to eat when hungry, to fuck when lustful, to sleep when tired, to go where we want to go, to write when we want to write, to draw what we want to draw, to simply be in the company of another.  These are all self-desires.  We fight for our own survival. There is no proving ourself to others nor recognition of others except in mutual fulfillment of company and understanding.  It is simply living without regret.  Out here in the fields I fought for my meals.  I get my back into my living.  I don't need to fight to prove I'm right. I don't need to be forgiven. (_{The Who, "Baba O'Reilly")}  There is no production or work except for self-fulfillment. In essence it is wasteland of self-indulgence.  The ultimate focus on the self and perception of wasted time is adolescence--"Teenage Wasteland."  Or is it a wasteland, for it procures the self?   One could call this selfish, unrealistic, hedonistic.  It is probably all these things, but is also animal, simple, being.  However, human conscience and its complex system of actual regard for others and mock-regard for others because it looks better to regard other' needs, or at least, to pretend to, have caused the creation of nearly arbitrary institutions that have come to govern our lives and become obstacles to fulfillment of these basic, selfish desires.  Whether this is good or not, I cannoy say definitively, but by frustrating our natural inclination, it creates a perpetual dissatisfaction and a constant struggle to replace these desires with the fulfillment of other, societal ones--creating false desires to obtain--through the consolation of money, status, or a consoling church.

But perhaps even the idea that society is a hindrance is created from society itself.  Can one still simply exist as they want in society?  Probably.  Society is not necessarily an oppressor. It was formed so that every man was not for himself.  The paragon of self-sacrifice for others, in opposition to a "savage" self-servitude, became the societal expectation and ideal.  Christ gave himself.  So should you.  Is that what true love has been defined as, giving oneself to another?  Should it not be keeping yourself for yourself, and having  partnership with someone you regard as having the same understanding, same heart, and in fact, an equal of yourself?  Is self-servitude really worse than self-sacrifice?   Or is it actually that self-servitude can, in the end, come to serve others?

I am not proposing anarchy, because if someone's desires interfere with another person's life or desire, they should not be able to be fulfilled.  And sometimes we should do things for others because they want us to, not because we want to.   But now it has become that almost all we do is because others want us to, or because we have been socialized to believe it is what is expected of us.  i have to go back to the example of the artist and the complacent.  if the artist struggles, is miserable, and society "helps" them to return to satisfaction with life through medication and therapy, is it not just making the artist happy in a way that he is expected to be, in place of actually fulfilling the desires that make him miserable?  therefore, even if the artist is miserable, he is more satisfied in misery than in sedation. he simply is as he is, and if he yearns to do what he believes is beyond what society expects--that is, art--and he does so, then he is satisfied even in misery.  yet the idea that he must reach beyond society comes from society itself, and so his satisfaction may have come from a self-deluded idea that he has transcended something.  however, even if he has reached satisfaction through delusion, is it not still satisfaction? 

yet the complacent also simply is, lazy or not, and if he aspires only to the expectations of which he knows, he is just as satisfied as the former.  yet is there anyone actually like this person, who does not want what they cannot have?  i doubt it.  no matter what course we take, we will have wished we took another.  so the person who does for themselves, and not for expectation, however unrealistic or not, is probably more satisfied. my point is that even this person's desires are molded by expectation, so expectation is mostly inescapable. yet if one can fulfill basic impulsive desires, they will be the most satisfied.

i am starting to sound like ayn rand, and i am also starting to be dissatisfied with myself, and lately i have found that i am dissatisfied with societal answers to my dissatisfaction and sadness, such as medicine and therapy, as making me only as they would expect me to be happy, and not actually making me happy.  and lately, i have felt this way about these kind of self-promoting treatises and art:

So I've been hanging out down by the train's depot.
No, I don't ride.
I just sit and watch the people there.
They remind me of wind up cars in motion.
The way they spin and turn and jockey for positions.
And I want to scream out that it is all nonsense.
All your lives one track,
can't they see it's pointless?
But just then, my knees
give under me.
My head feels weak
and suddenly
it's clear to see
it's not them but me,
who has lost my self-identity.
As I hide behind
these books I read,
while scribbling
my poetry,
like art could save a wretch like me,
with some ideal ideology
that no one can hope to achieve.
And I am never real;
it is just a sketch in me.
And everything I made is trite
and cheap
and a waste
of paint,
of tape,
of time.
_{(Bright Eyes, "Waste of Paint")}

Who am I to delegate what life is lived correctly or is the most fulfilling?
And is art even fulfilling?  Only the in the sense that it may temporarily fulfill my own expectations of self, quickly to retort itself later. 

The key to insight, in fact, is desire and misery and dissatisfaction, anyhow.
I cannot write anymore.