Nausea (Part 1) – Storm in a Tea Cup
Now I’m a seasick sailor on a ship of noise I got my maps all backwards and my instincts poisoned In a truth blown gutter full of wasted years Like blown out speakers ringin’ in my ears.
Now, this verse is fitting for a number of reasons. For starters, Beck is coming to town. I scored some tickets a few mornings ago. Bone Marrow, myself and Laalita are going. It’s an odd trio but we’ll have a good time.
But more importantly it’s fitting because I’m still recovering from a period of illness, or maybe I should call it a bout of low spirits. For reasons I will get to later, I took up a month long staring competition with my unalterable past. I got my head stuck in that “truth blown gutter”. Then last weekend, at the height of an emotional fit, I threw a university course reader across the living room of Laalita’s flat. She was trying to console me – talking calmly from the corner with a sincere expression on her face – but there was to be no relieving me. I was being squeezed. Like a bug. I felt claustrophobic. But not due to the smallness of the room, rather I felt pinched between time – that unstoppable shrinking window.
I slumped into a bean bag and mumbled to Laalita “If I could just vomit I think I would feel better.” It was a ridiculous statement but described exactly how I felt. Then suddenly I knew something. I sprung out of the bean bag towards the bookshelf and found it: Sartre’s Nausea.
“This!” I exclaimed with the book held straight-armed out in front of me. “This is what’s wrong with me!” Laalita burst out laughing.
Nausea. I’d never read it. I knew a bit about it but more about its younger cousin. I’d been struck in the face on many street corners by Camus’ mysterious and acute Absurdity, that never hung around quite long enough to cause me any real grief. But the nausea was new to me. It was a dull twist in the stomach, like when you really know you’ve caught something. It felt adult, chronic, long term…
I kicked the course reader across the floor and sat back on the bean bag wondering if Nausea might cure my nausea. It was a childish thought. There is only one definite cure for the nausea and that is death. I’d heard good things about enlightenment, moksha, ego death, even general unconsciousness, but the word is these are temporary and hard to hold onto. They say even Buddha had his down days. So for the moment I decided my best bet was Satre’s book, and not the “Philosophy of Modern Physics” course reader lying tattered against the wall. That evil thing…it was taking up too much room in my narrow window. Too much math for my shrinking intellect. Too much black and white for my wandering mind. For a month it had been a dead end repeatedly turning me back upon myself. It was not the cause of the nausea but a definite catalyst. So give me the zero, sir. Put it on my time tab (HECS debt) while I stretch out in the 9 plus hours of extra time I have each week till the end of semester. One needs space and one needs to keep moving or one ends up catching a whiff of ones own body odour. And it’s then that you remember that you’re only organic matter and the nausea flares up.
But while the stench still lingers, and the truth still throbs raw without glory, I might sift through that gutter and see what it is I have to be sick about.
To be continued…