Disconnection

It’s a sick joke to call it an emotion, but disconnection is my least favorite feeling. Detachment, distance, and disinterest from the goings-on of the world.

My mentor teacher, a couple years older than my parents, had me over for a couple beers one afternoon. He, like me, is a Catholic who lost faith. A cluster of finches hopped about the yard, searching for food while we sat on his patio. “Look at them,” he said. “No thoughts at all, just following instinct like they’re part of huge computer program.” For a few moments, his worldview slipped into his larynx and came out in casual conversation, and it was cold. I knew the man just a little bit better, and I loved him all the more for it.

For my own part, I delight in birds. Most of the time. But when I feel disconnected, they are merely the irrelevant automatons my friend saw, and people are little more. They go through motions I cannot understand for all their predictability, and that I cannot influence. They hold no wonder. My attempts to help them, or teach them, or love them are meaningless because we all belong to the same void. This is the feeling of disconnection: nihilistic ennui.

Kafka wrote, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.” I’ve found that’s only half right for me. A book can warm the currents and make them flow rapidly, but when my sea is truly frozen, books do not break it apart. They take too much interpretation and require me to draw on emotion I do not then feel. Movies and music work best for me, preferably ones I feel strong attachment to and know well, because I’ll be on autopilot for the first while. Vertigo, American Beauty, Ikiru. The Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness works well, perhaps because it’s so overtly emotional in its swings from melancholy to nostalgia, anger, love, joy. I don’t feel like putting it on, but I do anyway because I’ve learned it helps. The swelling strings and choruses of “Tonight, Tonight” might start to work on me. By the time I get to the verses of “Muzzle” I’m usually feeling more myself again. The opening lines are anxious: “I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone.” By the second verse, the attitude has shifted: “My life has been extraordinary, blessed and cursed and won.” That’s a better feeling.

Disconnection returns periodically. I recognize it, now, and before an evening’s over I can usually show it the door.