4.1 Not wanting anything versus wanting to want something

There is a difference between wanting to want something and not wanting anything. The first is the state of a person who is alienated from life, knows it, and would change it. The second is living death.

One of the most emotionally unpleasant and mind-blowing moments for me in life was on LSD. I had a vision of what it would be like to be totally apathetic.

When you are on acid you lose the proper sense of time, and everything seems to take forever. A twelve hour acid trip seems like a week. At this time I was coming down, but slowly, or at least it felt slow—so slow I began to worry (quite seriously, in that acid-addled way) that I wasn’t going to come down at all; and then I had vision of what that would be like: wandering around, unable to do anything productive; I would end up on the street—but not caring, because when you are on acid you are effectively schizoid, effectively crazy, so you don’t really care. You don’t care that you haven’t eaten anything for a week, you don’t care that you are slowly starving to death and freezing to death on those long Denver winter nights. And that was the hell of it. For one very long moment I felt what it would be truly not to care, to look at your impending death as at the headline of some tabloid you would never bother to read; to suffer a cold, lonely miserable death, but not even be particularly miserable beyond the simple physical discomfort… because you’re crazy… and nothing matters.

It’s not easy to describe, but I think it was just one touch, for just one minute, of true hell; of existential meaninglessness in the purest sense. Just that one moment was enough to effect me for years. I still recall the sound of a song playing on the stereo that I subsequently couldn’t listen to for years for the chills it gave to be reminded of the experience.

And so I think there is a difference between wanting to want something, and really not wanting anything. The difference is profound.

2004.9.24
Based on an email to Steve Clarian