The Knight of the Dying Unlived

Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there — There, There (Radiohead)

It would be a lie to say there’s not an element of despair in the air. For those who care. About the element of despair in the air.

But, there, there, or here, there are many who feel no such thing. Right now, they carry on with their days free of new worry or the looming tag team of precarity and anxiety. There are people who protest. There are people who protest the protesters. There are people who can see neither side and people who can see both, each assured that they’ve got the true nature of things clocked. That their version of life is right, or at least right enough.

That there version of life is reality. It’s unreal, and for all our certainty or conditioned performative uncertainty about drawing informed and right conclusions, we’re all victims of imperfect information and commit to dying on valleys we’ve mistaken for hills.

Everyone must reconcile somehow their intuitive and learned understanding with the fact that this is inseparable from the programmatic input delivered by society and culture. Democracy as we know it is a concession, despite the rambling incoherence of fluffy mock-noble explications and defences. It is a framework of control meant to balance the appearance of freedom, fairness, and empowerment via suffrage with an impregnable and inscrutable protection of the established order. People are told what to think, how, and when yet remain absolutely convinced that their perspectives are pure.

This isn’t a life, this perpetual wrong. Daily forced to endure the same indignities and routines to prove our existence justifiable through the ritualised enrichment of those who have always held the wealth and power. We’re all in Oz, but the curtain is made from the cloth of an invisibility cloak and defended by guns, hunger, and platitudes which bring us to point the finger anywhere but there, there.

You see, we’re confined to our own feelings and relation to the structures around us. Just because you view someone as a friend or hold a certain affection for them does not mean that they even like you. They may not even know you care. And they can only disappoint you because the life you live isn’t real beyond your own borders. It is a life unlived, unknown and alien to everyone else. Does that mean it doesn’t matter? No. Does it make it any less valid? No. But it accounts for hiraeth and extends the concept to everything that the light touches.

People treasure reunions with old friends, or encounters with heroes and celebrities, or the experience of seeing a concert live when you’ve only heard the music in recordings for the same reasons, I would argue. In each case, there is a momentary affirmation of the reality we have held in our heads and hearts. We share past experiences or an existential plane. In the interim, this can become an abstraction. But when we sing the song that broke our heart for reminding us of our broken parts in the room with the person who sings the song that broke our heart for reminding us of our broken parts, we live and know that we’re not alone.

Because it can be so lonely, even when you are among friends and loved ones. After all, they may not count you in that number.

My mother’s was a life unlived. It would have been her birthday last week. I forgot. And when I realised that I had forgotten, I felt horrible, levelling all manner of abuse at myself. Why? Does it make any difference to her? If she’s up there (, there) looking down (is that possible before ashes are scattered?), would she want me punished by ghosts in my head? I doubt it. Not because it assuages my own guilt, but because none of the things motivating that feeling are real.

Expect nothing. Live.