How to live without wanting

Despair or enlightenment? You be the judge.

The phrase, phase state change, came to me as I made this sketch. I must have heard it somewhere before, but I had to look it up. This is what it means:

A phase state change (or phase transition) is the physical process where matter shifts between solid, liquid, gas, or plasma states. Usually the change occurs when adding or removing heat at a particular temperature, known as the melting point or the boiling point of the substance.

Could it be that I am reaching a boiling or melting point? Am I becoming plasma?

My entire life has been shaped around the question of HOW TO LIVE. And the answer to this question and all it’s corollaries such as how to paint, who to love, what to do, would become clear if I could know WHO I AM.

I mean, I know this is so self-absorbed and dumb. But I didn’t get the kind of mirroring a person needs to develop a sense of self. I was a cog in a machine. And a complaining one, so the only thing I knew for sure about myself was that I don’t want. How does a person who doesn’t want, live? Like this.

Samuel Beckett perfectly captures my inner dialog as I wake and face the day:

I don’t know: perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don’t know, that’s all words), never wake (all words, there’s nothing else).

You must go on, that’s all I know.

They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

You must go on.

I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

From, The Unnamable.

_________________________

And then, right after writing this, I scroll upon this. This is the “must” in the I must go on.