It is at this point that I have to admit that a vast and heavy exhaustion has settled over me. I seem to have managed to bungle my way through countless manic/depressive cycles in the past: one tries to make use of the tools available within each phase of the cycle to continue on. In phases of expansion I would delight in the myriad flashes of logical connections, putting together a sort of architecture made up of the logical extractions from sudden vivid metaphorical visions. Then contraction would set in and I would fall, a blackness setting in, deaf and blind to all of life's pleasures and comforts. I would catch glimpses of something ancient and timeless within, and then begin to attempt to express the meaning of those things (both through music and spiritual pursuit and contemplation) leading to a joy and excitement that amplified itself into another expansion, the language itself modulating to express the moods and fixations present within each stage of the cycle.
And that's life isn't it? Cycles within cycles within cycles. Sometimes I seen an entire revolution of changing seasons internally, as the seasons change gradually in nature, and the season of a great slab of human history grinds its way into a winter phase.
Now there is so much learned and so much to write, but it has proven so difficult physiologically. I try to set another spark by going out on the bike. The color floods back in momentarily, the words come, and by the time I'm back the black and the fog settle back in. I see others out possibly doing something similar in their own way: running, doing sit ups and push ups out on the grass, their faces grave, everyone out trying to jumpstart their waning energies. Trying literally to push past the descending veil. A vision of spring in one's head, trying to manifest itself when outside the frosts of an early winter are just descending. Like a laboring heart, the exertions pump life into something bleeding out and losing its color. But for how long?
Part of living through any cycle is the expectation that a new phase is just around the bend. If one grows tired of the present circumstances one can try something different if one can just hang in there a bit longer. My own cycle is settling in deep and heavy after nervous energies mounted into an electric mass of near-madness. I continue to work when I can; I try to seize those moments in which something coherent is coming together once again. I also try to manually mold my cycle with physical exercise, decent nutrition, meditation and the necessary input of ideas and the pursuit of good emotion, though sometimes much of it is reversed and I eat good-tasting but bad-for-you shit and drink and fiddle around and whatnot. But then one has to live too and I wonder how detrimental these indulgences really are. At the moment I am too tired and confused to sort through it all. A minor survival trip now, as HST put it. I'm doing what works in an ad hoc manner and sticking desperately to the expectation that I'll come out of it alright. I've stored away my ideals in a temporary compartment and seek to retrieve them in due time.
