Maya

Dearest Ketaki,

The sea is the vast back of a glistening, glutinous, giant slug, and we are gashing its back with our little razor scooter. White, foamy spray hits us, warm and salty, an alien’s blood. My body is taut, my mind is blank, completely empty. On my temples, where there are two day old burn marks, the salt water stings cruelly. But that is the only sensation that reminds me that I am alive. The rest is blank, eyes unfocussed, mind mercifully silent.

Silenced, I think by the mightiness of the water. Just so will it be in space, among stars. Awe-inspiring and all of that, yes, but more than that, mind-killing. It is not merely because the space and the sea remind me of my insignificance, it is more than that. It is the ceaseless activity that has always been and always will be, the persevering tides, the eternally burning suns, the life, the birth and the death, forever, beyond time, beyond concept of time, life, consciousness. Beyond mind.

It is a blinding realization when it comes, a result more of the senses than of thought; all along, everyone has been wrong. It is not from the body that one must escape, but from the mind. The mind has limits, just like the body. The mind does not have access to certain places. And these places I have seen, Ketaki. Glimpsed from the edges of insanity, peeked through the membrane of the womb where we live. I have slid down the sides of the universe, tried my hand at the infinite, plumbed the depths of the unfathomable, and every time, every time Ketaki, I’ve been brought short against the slippery rock of the wall of a mind that I cannot scale. I am stuck in my womb, and who knows to what end, or for how long.

Or whether I will be born at all. Who knows at what altar this mother prays? Maybe it is a God of Wrath. Maybe her womb will never bear fruit.

The thing to do is to keep clawing at the fabric of the mind, to find a crack, or a doorknob, or a keyhole.

The insane have the key to the doorway of her womb.

I will pay more visits to the sea.

(Hush. That is where insanity lives, Ketaki, among the shells and the smooth rocks under the green water. Hush.)

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash the moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering God of contentment and would rather feel the devil burn in me than this warmth of a well heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensation seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle-classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

-Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse