Panan

The sense of urgency in Panan’s readings pounded at his temples: Capote, Carlyle, Fitzgerald, Nietzsche, Lorca, Deleuze, Baldwin, Wright, Benjamin. The list went on and on and he didn’t know why he read them, only that he was searching for something, an answer that he hoped was secretly locked away within the pages. He saw the meaningless repetition, the depression, the murder, the destruction but also the exuberance, the births, those peaks in life of realizing the power of human spirit, the deep breaths, comforting snuggles, and most of all, the smiles. He felt the joy of a quiet, frigid morning with a hot cup of coffee but knew from those covering the stories from the ground the deprivation it caused to the coffee bean farmers, paid far below a sustainable wage. He tried not to think of these things but the contradictions seemed to compound in a mess-hall of joy and consequence: long showers and droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa, delectible chocolate from the backs of underpaid cocoa bean farmers, the very paper he was writing on and crippling deforestation.

In the States, he existed in a pendulum-state between lucidity and oblivion. Most of the time he was too damn tired to care and imagined other people shared his exhaustion. Panan’s immediate concerns would outweigh those of thousands of miles away in places far off with people he did not know. He wondered how people could speak of a global community when so many (including himself) weren’t even communicating with their nearest neighbors; as if making the pool of people bigger would suddenly make us all get along and talk to one another. He longed to have an opinion, be able to make a stand and forget the big picture where no one was right and no one was wrong. He searched for an answer to living, to a silent, creeping truth that we are here to make peace with ourselves, with others, to discover some type of harmony and dispense with discord. To most of all find understanding, limit judgment, work through compassion. What he found were limitless answers to a limitless question, snippets of realized light shining through the hard copy of pulp and typography and like a swallow he began to gather and weave together these disparate lights, create a nest within the streets, along the sidewalks, in the tallest of the high-rise buildings and in the sub-sub basements of the never-gone. He tried vigorously to weave together vicissitudes of the hard sciences with traces of religion, smatterings of the arts with long-winding chords of the social sciences,  vibrant pounding subtleties of classical music with the bone-rattling and stomach-bending films of Tarantino. He worked constantly, unending in the vast, ever-expanding tundra of human knowledge and it all rolled out in front of him like a sadistic puzzle, and Panan thought that if only he could put it all together, somehow all of this madness would stop, somehow people would talk to one another. But he realized that in the process of doing this, he was talking to no one, being a part of the very things that he wanted to change. He realized then the costs that come with every choice, the sacrifices that are made in choosing A over B, the inability to be in all places at once, the overwhelming feeling bearing down upon him that his choices made no difference. He reveled in existence within a box of contradictions and when it all became too much and the many sordid colors of the mindscape warped his view of the world, he learned from others to take deep breaths, sit in one place, and let it all go; let all the contradictions go, the hurt, the joy, the all that cause suffering, joy, and all the rest. And when he sat for just 5 minutes, it would all sweep away and Panan would be quieted and humbled in the face of enormity and be so very glad to be alive.