JAI GURU BARTELBY: THE METAPHYSICS OF MALAISE

Blame it on the plague: this thickening malaise that is my only tracking system for it. I feel I am a correspondence to and coordinate of its deepening reality. Nothing more. Except to say that there is nothing more despiriting than living day to day and each one of them feeling more unable and disinclined to live.

Don’t be fooled by the reflexive will to stay alive. Put this breathing apparatus on a ventilator. Inject it full of drugs or placebos. I’m still too afraid to stop you and too proud to stop living. But like all living organisms, my continuance is autonomic, an instinct perfected over billions of years on this air bubble we call Earth. Like those animate with purpose, I struggle for breath, sometimes as if a pillow has been placed over or pressed against my face. But resisting death is not the same as not wanting to die. The will is instinctive and understandable as such. But in my case I fear the life-force is only a mechanical and not a metaphysical affirmation. It’s just immunological prowess. On behalf of the species to which I belong, I want to extend my sincerest congratulations and condolences to evolution.

What am I getting at?

Every day, I feel myself a son of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the clerk who prefers not to perform any duties required, or tasks requested, of him. He ends in a prison courtyard waiting for nothing but an end of days like the one he has been living each waking hour for as long as he can remember.