In My Backyard At Night
time is a flat circle.
I’m writing this while I monitor a hole that my dog is working on. It’s one of her best yet; very deep, wide enough for her whole body, but it’s in no danger of collapsing in on itself. It’s the proximity to the neighbor’s fence that’s bugging me. The fence is old and flimsy, and my dog has already Kool-Aid Man’d right through the other side in pursuit of a cat. Plus, it’s covered with the freaky little multi-fingered handprints of raccoons. But I’d rather let her work out this instinct than try to squash it. I feel like as a society we’ve lost the plot on dogs. They’re animals. They want to get dirty and dig holes and hunt living things and follow scents. Our yard is always chaotic, and the reason why is simple: it’s not our yard, it’s her yard. We got it for her. We figured it’s the least we could do.
Her regular huffing and sniffing has turned to frantic, wild-eyed panting. I think I need to fill up the hole. I’ve been distracted, inhaling the scent of fresh, rich soil and listening to a distant radio play a song I can’t identify. Every time I’m certain it’s Fleetwood Mac, someone starts singing in Spanish. Dusk is rapidly turning to full night around me. Penny, the dog whose movements we’ve been monitoring in a way only a mildly stoned person can, is in Hunting Mode now. In this mode, she is maniacally giddy, like a five-year-old who just inhaled twenty pixie sticks. Her pupils are like dimes, her eyes are open as wide as they’ll go. She’s grinning savagely, all instinctual bliss and glistening, sharp canines. I grab a shovel and start filling the hole while she continues to dig at a more frantic pace. I put the same dirt back in that she just dug out. We go on like this for a few seconds, her digging, me refilling. She shoots me a look of confused betrayal. I keep filling. She gets the message and wanders off. I’d like to think I might have dodged a bullet here. She fought a possum last week and I can’t handle any other spitting, pointy-toothed critters for a bit. Did you know possums will emit a pungent, skunk-like odor when threatened? I learned that the hard way.
I reach into the pocket of my jacket and grab my new weed vape. I don’t buy the flavored ones, so the taste profile here is the muddy, sweetish taste of marijuana mixed with a pine tree car air freshener. It’s terribly ugly, bulky and covered in hastily applied weed leaf stickers. I tell myself that perhaps this DIY look indicates that this is some artisanal, small-batch shit. I got this because they were out of the ones with the chic burnt sienna 1970’s branding that I usually get. The one in my hand looks like the label was slapped on by someone with their eyes closed, but I must say, it’s hitting. I recently brought smoking weed back into my life after a nine year hiatus. It’s helped me a lot. As a culture, have we abandoned weed? Once upon a time, weed was all we had. We’ve gotten greedy with our senses. Everyone wants to taste colors. We’ve overcomplicated our pleasure, or we’ve “optimized” it, lacing that chemical with this chemical and snorting it here and swallowing it there, all for the highest high that’s ever highed until you wanna get that high again and you can’t, you never will, and you might drive yourself insane trying. Weed isn’t gonna sneak out of your bed in the morning, leaving you feeling hollow with a pounding, dehydration-induced migraine. Weed will let you sleep in comfortably. Weed will make you breakfast. Well, cereal. Weed can definitely make you a bowl of cereal. If you want anything more complicated than that, go ask Adderall. I think she’s still up from the night before.
So I smoke my weed and I eat my Trader Joe’s knock-off Fruit Loops and watch my dog patrol the yard at night. It’s the simple things. I like to stand here and close my eyes and listen. Sometimes I can hear the sea lions down at the beach. Other times it’s just the wind through the eucalyptus trees. The crescent moon floats above the enormous, regal palm tree that stands guard the next block over. For some reason it reminds me of an elephant king; this tree is colossal, wise. It’s been here way longer than I have and it will be here long after I’m gone. We have a perfect view of it from our yard. The moon seems to orbit around it’s giant leaves.
I hear our ancient water heater kick on and turn around to my little house. It’s a beachy cottage style, built in 1929. The string lights dangling over the back patio frame the kitchen window like an Edward Hopper painting, our avocado green cabinets glowing around my boyfriend while he does the dishes. He’s scrubbing a pan; the windows are starting to steam. I wait for him to catch my eye and give him a silly little wave; a dopey smile and a pale hand signaling to him in the dark. He smiles and mouths exaggeratedly, “I love you” at the kitchen window. I’m very lucky.
I’ve been listening to a podcast about Nietzsche. It’s both incredibly soothing and interesting. It’s just one philosophy dude pontificating and explaining, reading from various relevant texts. His voice sounds exactly like Harry Crane from Mad Men and I do in fact hate it, but not enough to stop listening. Maybe it humanizes him for me. I can feel some concepts zooming straight over my head, but that’s okay. I can always listen again. Sometimes I turn it on knowing I’ll only half listen, thinking that it’s like playing Beethoven for a baby in-utero, that the knowledge might just seep in without me realizing. I fight my anxiety-fuled, scarcity-mindset urge to save this podcast until I’m clear-headed and have the proper time and focus to take notes on it. But that’s unnecessary. I’m thirty. Why am I assigning myself homework. Just breathe and listen. Take another hit. This episode is #26: Eternal Return Part 2 and it will take a closer look at Zarathustra and eternal return’s implications. The impulse to grab a pen and my journal is strong, but I refrain. I keep my feet planted to the earth; I look at the stars, listening. Spake Now, Zarathustra: A Book For All And None is the novel where Nietzsche worked out eternal recurrence. The protagonist, Zarathustra, is at first horrified by the concept. The idea of living all moments, including his worst, on an endless loop, for eternity.
Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try.
But eventually, Zarathustra comes around. He learns to see eternal recurrence as an acceptance and celebration of all aspects of life; the euphoric, the unbearable, the mundane. He sees it as a facet of strength and a part of “the will to power,” the fundamental drive to create and overcome. He says,
“All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored;
if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said,
'You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!'
then you wanted all back ...
For all joy wants—eternity."
I glance around in the dark, a philosopher’s words from 1883 already fading into my brain’s tissues. My dog looks at me expectantly from her spot across the yard and I nod my head toward the back door. She trots inside ahead of me, Boyfriend opening it for her and telling her what a good girl she is. I close the door behind us and kiss his tanned, silver stubbled cheek. I wrap my arms around his neck, feeling the warmth from the day’s sun still on his skin. “You’re always in such a good mood when you’ve been doing Nietzsche stuff,” he says. Forgive me for oversimplifying, but if the concept of eternal recurrence dictates that we live this one life, exactly as is, repeatedly, I insist we make the absolute best of it. Kiss me again.
I’m not sure why I’ve always liked eternal return. I’ve always wanted something to at least entertain a belief in; not necessarily something to believe but something to think about, a possible candidate for what comes next. Nietzsche was decidedly an anti-religious philosopher, but eternal return feels so close to religion, or at least the concept of an afterlife. I’ve often seen devoutly religious people and wondered, “What is it that they can access that I can’t? Is it real or just a hope? Does the hope make it real? Would I be happier if I just chose a religion and went for it? Could simply participating result in spiritual comfort?” No religion has called out to me. But eternal return? I can work with that; theoretically, mentally, spiritually. I can respect repetition for the sake of deeper knowledge, deeper understanding.
I think so much of whether you identify with eternal recurrence has to do with your relationship to pain. Have you felt it? Are you scared of it? Do you believe there is something inherently noble in suffering? Do you believe that by suffering you are then reweighing the cosmic scales in your favor, that because of the pain that you endured you are now actually even more entitled to joy?
There is something noble about suffering. It’s not right and it’s not fair; shouldn’t we be condemning suffering instead of glorifying it? But the urge to lionize suffering has been with us for thousands of years because otherwise it’s all for fucking nothing. All the pain and shame and sobs and screams, for nothing? No, thank you. I will reference the void, the abyss, but lately, I’d like to stay at least ten yards away from the edge. So yes, there is something to suffering, or better yet, there’s something to the perspective you gain. Because that’s what we really mean when we respect pain, right? When we valorize the people who have suffered? We think they must be more wise, more level-headed, more evolved than we are, and a lot of the time, they are. Perspective is everything. Pain is an effective teacher. She’s taught me almost everything I know.
I love eternal return because I’ve experienced times of such blinding, levitating, glittering happiness and the prospect of feeling that exact flavor of joy again is too tempting to pass up. My mouth waters at the thought of doing it all another time, even though I wouldn’t be aware that it’s all happened before. The idea of getting to feel it all again, to do it all again: the chance to be seven-years old, exploring tide pools, fearlessly jumping off jagged rocks into the ocean; the chance to have another four dozen sleepovers with my dead best friend. I’d get to relive those brutally hot summers at The Warped Tour. I could hold my now sixty pound dog as a tiny puppy.
I want to replay falling in love, how I knew right from the start, how we never doubted our connection. I think back on my life through the lens of eternal return and it’s all too much: my soulmate’s face, laughing with my sister. Sometimes, tears prick the backs of my eyes when I really think about what it took to keep myself going, to keep myself alive, knowing I’ve arrived at happiness now. I think of my raw, young heart that had not yet known complete grief. I think of my hungry, agile brain that will get to experience reading East Of Eden and The Stand for the first time. Despite it all, the list of things that I want to experience on an infinite loop is longer than the list of things I only want to go through once.
I can’t change anything. Nothing will be different. The movie will play out just the same. I’ll be in a coma, again. She will hang herself in her bathroom, again. My heart will break, again, in a million tiny ways that I’ve forgotten about. And it’ll hurt. Oh god, it’s gonna fucking hurt. But it hurts because it matters! It hurts because it should! It hurts because it has to.
I’ve never chosen joy. I didn’t know that it’s something you get to choose.
Now, I know that you can.
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I’m oversimplifying, but: two ways to look at eternal recurrence.
True Detective. Midnight Mass.
