Bookends

Life is strange.

That’s about the closest anyone has ever come to articulating the complexities of everyday existence. Sure, some folks more talented with words are able to somehow approximate the intuitive complexity of our lives with words that reverberate like echoes not quite heard, yet somehow encapsulate emotions that seem to dance shimmering between antonyms. But I’m not quite one of those people, not yet.

I just got through The Misbehavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot; this great man essentially realized that self-similar patterns form an important basis for understanding naturally-occurring phenomena and stock market behavior alike; the notion of self-similarity and congruence persisting throughout different scales of interpretation is something particularly striking, something as miraculous as the Intermediate Value Theorem popping out of metric space theory as a consequence of separability. It’s one of those things that has no reason to be true or even make sense, but somehow it does, and it’s beautiful.

Jordan Peterson would make the same argument about the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity; reconciling it with science is easy, he claims, since literalist interpretations are garbage almost by definition. Religion is the science of value judgements, while science simply inquires as to what is, without determining an optimal route through the noise. Got me thinking: does religious philosophy really provide a useful heuristic by which to conduct one’s life? Did they really figure out something that, yet again, has no reason to be true, yet somehow is, and is beautiful for it? Peterson would say so, and I hope to God (no pun intended) that he’s right. Life after college seems a little meaningless.

My depression’s coming back, my relationship is falling apart (and might already have gone beyond the point of salvaging), and so a big anchor in my life has now been cut and I’ve been set adrift. It’s hard to find something else to replace that as a guiding principle. It’s just as hard to avoid staying bitter and resentful of the pain that’s been sent my way by someone I love so much. Yes, despite all the nonsense and the emotions, I still care about her. Lord knows it’d be easier if I didn’t, but I do, and such is my burden.

One a positive note, I deadlifted by bodyweight recently. The feeling of power that comes with being able to lift heavy is quite intoxicating; a key that opens a door to let in the ocean.

The ocean serves as a bulwark of the eldritch Truth.

It’s hard to know what to do when guiding reflexes both internal and external seem to fail you all at once. Peterson mentions how the one positive conclusion he’s managed to draw from psychology is that the sense of meaning you obtain when performing a task is an orienting reflex. I hope that’s true, because it’ll give me something to strive towards.

But at the same time I’m rather scared of that idea, because I don’t find many things meaningful anymore. Things seem plastic, surface-level, tangential, irrelevant. Nothing’s touched those deep, profound parts of my heart or mind in a very long time. Time just seems to slip by, with no meaning or consequence. I’m flying to Greece this weekend, and am more excited about getting away from work than I am about visiting a new country. Which is weird, since I don’t hate my job; I actually quite enjoy it. I’m just starved for companionship I suppose. Friends seem far away, family seems to be drifting away, and here I am, sitting in my head again.

Life is strange. 

Chester.

Chester Bennington died this week. Suicide, by hanging.

This is honestly the first time that a 'celebrity' death has hit me this hard, and that's because quite frankly, Chester Bennington was no mere celebrity. Linkin Park is the band responsible for getting me into heavy music. The first ever proper rock song I heard was In the End back in 2000. I was in Malacca with my family, waiting to check into a hotel, and a song came on the radio. I was transfixed from the first piano chords; I just stood there, wide-eyed, and listened. My parents finished checking in about halfway through the song so I had to go, but for the first time, I felt urgency after listening to a piece of music. I had to know what that song was, and I had to listen to it again.

After we got back from the trip I booted up Windows Media Player and went searching through random peoples' playlists, hoping to find that song. I found it, listened to it until I could repeat every lyric, and fell asleep feeling like I had accomplished something. Then I discovered YouTube, and remember that my first thought was feeling so happy that I could watch the Points of Authority video whenever I wanted to.

My neighbor Aditya and I bonded over Linkin Park, Sum 41, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, Korn, and basically every other 'heavy' band on the radio at the time. But Linkin Park was something special; he had Meteora on cassette, and would play it every single time we got into his car to go somewhere. We must've listened to that album about 30 times before his parents got sick of it and insisted on listening to something else. Pretty sure we wore out the cassette tape too.

Meteora was, for a long, long time, my idea of a perfect record. Every single song straddled that delicious boundary between aggression and melody, and I breathed it all in. Somewhere I Belong, From the Inside, Lying From You, Figure.09, Nobody's Listening, and Session. These were my jams. My life revolved around those songs, around scenes of Chester Bennington hunching over his scrawny little body and letting out a voice that was more powerful than any I had ever imagined, straddling the chasm between chaos and beauty effortlessly.

Take everything from the inside,

And throw it all away,

Cuz I swear for the last time,

I will trust myself with you.

I will waste myself on you.

I discovered Hybrid Theory after already having fallen in love with Meteora, and I loved it as more of the same. Reanimation, however, was a different beast; I grew to love that album cerebrally; from the dark, haunting bassline of Frgt/10 to the Points of Authority remake that was somehow even heavier than the original. I remember how My December brought a lump to my throat the first time I heard it; I was sitting in my school bus heading back home, and it played on the radio; I had to run to the back of the bus and try to hold back tears.

I was even lucky enough to see them in concert, when they went on tour to support Minutes to Midnight. The standout moment of that was when they played The Little Things Give You Away, a song I hadn't heard until then. And they fuckin nailed it. Everything, from the syncopated drumbeat to Chester's effortlessly floating vocals towards the end of the song.

The inescapable solipsism of our existence is something that puzzles me at times. It's so, so easy to surround oneself with this shell that just refuses anyone in past a certain point, usually demarcating the place where one goes to wrestle with one's demons away from prying eyes. Here was a man who gave a fat little Indian boy with crippling self-esteem issues a voice and instilled a love for music that continues to this day, and yet, it seems like there was no one able to do the same for him. No matter how many people he touched, no matter how many times he went past that line and dragged them out back into the light, I guess no one could do it for him. And that's the saddest goddamn thing.

By all accounts he was a beautiful man, both inside and out. Someone who had been dealt a shit hand in life, but bore his burden (eventually) with grace, who used his demons to make art and help others rather than hurt them. I don't think many people can lay claim to that, being able to take a profoundly horrible situation and turning it into a vessel for meaning for others. It's the epitome of what it means to conduct yourself properly in the world. And sure enough, he was loved, adored. It’s just so fucking sad that at the end of the day, none of it was enough. At the end of the day, there was no one around to walk past that line, and drag him back into the light.

I sometimes think that depression has its parallels with heroin addiction, especially if the depression is intense enough. Avoiding episodes requires constant vigilance, and it sometimes feels like the only reward for that, for engaging in therapy and for committing to the recovery process is… drudgery. As dark as it sounds, a depressive episode gives one a sense of meaning if only in the moment, because some part of your brain is aware that this is a titanic struggle. That awareness lets you spectate as two sides of your personality, one ophidian and one ragged, fight like caged dogs inside your own head. Amidst all that lies the potential, at least, for meaning; after emerging from the other side, you can feel good about the fact it's over, and that you're a decently functioning human being despite the fact that something feels broken inside you.

I can understand why people choose to off themselves, or why people relapse into addiction; it's never a climax of some sequence of events, but rather an anticlimax - the culmination of a recovery process that requires intense effort and commitment, yet rewards one only with normalcy. For some people, that isn't enough, and quite understandably so. I just try not to think about it too much.

Can't help but think about how, just a few days before his suicide, Crawling sounded so cringy and edgy. Now, it sounds raw, and is honestly hard to listen to.

Rest in peace, Chester Bennington. The world is a little darker now that you're gone.

Hold on, the weight of the world will give you the strength to go.