as if she was looking for it. Nausea rose within me. I had to flee. I turned on my heels and ran out. I kept going not knowing where I was heading. I ran as if running could erase her from my memory, obliterate her from my history, deny her very existence. I ran until my legs gave out and then I collapsed onto the wet ground. I let my face touch the earth. I wanted to dig a hole and disappear.
The evening sun was fading when I finally got back to the camp. There was no sign on the calm evening sky of the turbulent upheavals of the afternoon cloudburst. But my inner turbulence had not eased. I had a sinking feel deep in my chest as if I was drowning in a sea of hopelessness and despair. I cursed my ill fortune and lack of personal control. I was working myself up into a frenzy and knew I had to regain control. I sat outside in a rigid squat posture, facing the sunset. I tried breathing slowly and calmly. Time to take stock. I had been on the island for a matter of days and already my life was chaos. I had come seeking enlightenment and was finding darkness. Perhaps the island was not the place for me. I had fled the city and the urban life to expressly find the space to contemplate on the more important things in life. I had not suspected that life would throw these dramas at me, to distract from the greater agenda of finding reason. I had ignored that you cannot escape real objectivity. Anyone denying objectivity could place themselves in my shoes at that moment and feel the nausea of the very real events that had happened that very afternoon. They had not happened in a parallel universe or in another dimension. They were real events in my life and if I had the opportunity to escape them I would with the greatest haste.
I thought of the lofty thoughts on existence I had perused that very morning. How inconsequential it all seemed, now that I was mired in a dirty drama. Man is driven by the daily drama and not by intellectual dialectic. The impact of the intellect on everyday life is minuscule. There are great dramas unfolding every second throughout the living world. At this very moment, there are millions of animals with their teeth in the throats of other animals who are squealing in utter terror. That is a reality - objective or otherwise and to deny it is philosophical rubbish. I can no more deny my own present internal pain. Philosophy is of no use when you are suffering. Suffering is the ball and chain of the living. There is not one living organism that goes through life without suffering.
Yet does the cosmos need suffering? Of what value is my present nausea to my existence in the cosmos. When science looks at the grander scale of things, it seeks out symmetry and there finds hidden a general law. Is there a hidden symmetry of suffering and joy? Human history suggests that it is totally anti-symmetric. The store of human misery far outweighs the far rarer joys. Why should there be this imbalance? What are the underlying conservation laws. Could I postulate that we feel joy in direct proportion to pain. If that were so we would be as often happy as sad. This is not what life tells us. The human condition is one of continual misery. So there is a weight applied to any return of happiness we are lucky enough to experience in life. Maybe happiness and pain are mutually independent. But if they were, they should in probability occur in equal measure. The fact that they don't suggests another correspondence principle is in operation. The origins of unhappiness are different and independent to those of joy. Unhappiness may follow a law similar to the second law of thermodynamics where the net store of unhappiness in the living world must always increase, just like entropy always increases. Maybe unhappiness is living entropy. That things break apart and die is natural to the material world. The mental world tries to have cohesion. This is achieved by education, cultural advancement, the arts, music - all of which require massive energy and resource inputs just as in local entropy reduction in the material world. In fact living organisms are like machines that extract low entropy from their environment. Humans are more elaborate in that they extract it from the environment and also from each other in the form of historic knowledge. When the human is lowering his net store of entropy or the same thing, increasing order - when he is creating, building up - he is happy. He sets up cultural norms, religions, political philosophies, that all lead to a greater sense of happiness. When there are attacks on these norms the human feels pain, as in wars, persecutions and revolutions. At the more personal level, the human sets up his own local norms out of which his happiness flows. His family, his work or his social life all bring a sense of happiness. He must work to create all these local environments and if he lets up or fails in any way, happiness suffers. If his family breaks up there is pain all round. If he loses his job or is ostracised from the community, there is pain. Happiness like pain is largely the outcome of the individuals efforts to maintain a low entropy environment - one of good order not chaos. The efforts made to maintain this state are those largely associated with moral effort. The ability to be able to put off current pleasures for greater future good, is the main weapon of the moral person. The child who loves to play computer games at the expense of learning to play a musical instrument, is in effect laying the seeds of future unhappiness. The child who sticks it out on the piano or guitar can look forward to a life time of elevation from playing and enjoying music.
If this afternoon I had been able to resist the instant gratification of freely offered intimacy, I would not be feeling like this now. That is a stark realisation. Pain is the loss of the happiness state that is the ordered state of all living organisms. The two are complementary but not necessarily equal. The more of one you have, the less of the other you feel. Happiness does not come as a given but like low entropy must be extracted with effort from the environment. The more we put in the more we get out. The hedonist can never be happy because he puts nothing in, when satisfaction is freely available.
But bad health can strike arbitrarily and happiness is duly affected. Ill health is another example of increasing entropy. The body as an organism needs energy to maintain the order of its systems. Good health consists of the body taking in the precise form of energy required by the various systems to maintain function. Too much or the wrong kind can lead to breakdown of the system with an attendant increase in entropy. Cancer is the typical example for entropy increase bringing unhealth with its uncontrolled increase in cell production. Health is good balance of all the systems of the entire organism and again is largely dependent on the ability of the organism to control ingestion of the correct energy types. So when ill-health occurs it is mostly lifestyle associated and can, like happiness, be related to a sense of moral control.
I thought of the afternoon and the revulsion I felt after the intimacy. I felt all the worse because the fault lay wholly with me. As far as I could make out, Molly was unbalanced mentally. She was not responsible for her actions being mentally unstable. Insanity is just another form of ill-health but its origins don't neatly fit in with lifestyle as does physical health. It is more likely to be genetically based and thus more of a lottery than ordinary health events. The person born with mental ill-health could be conceived as living with the legacy of past generations. There is a sense of karma here but only over long periods of evolutionary time. Our actions can affect the happiness of future generations. If I choose to marry my first cousin, the impact may only occur many generations hence. We do suffer for the sins of our parents. There was substance to the concept of Roman Catholic original sin. There may even be substance to the concept of sin - the breaking of a law that will lead to unhappiness.
Reasoning like this did nothing to allay my distaste and nausea at the events of the afternoon. There was also the fear of what might happen as a result. I had unlocked a chain of events over which I had no control and that was likely to rebound on me in many unforeseen and dangerous ways. I had at the back of my mind a rising sense of fear and foreboding.
The sun had gone down and I felt a chill come over me. I retreated into the tent and closed the flap. Inside I felt cosier, protected from the vicissitudes of an uncertain world. I cuddled up in my sleeping bag and the warmth was calming. My mind was still churning over with regret and self recrimination but at leas
t my physical state was comforting. I can control the environment of my body but have little or no control over my mind. It seems to be able to set the agenda of its own accord. Who is in control here? There seems to be two wills in the one body. The conscious one, that I identify with me, is the one struggling to forget the unsavoury and upsetting experience. There is another will that refuses to take direction from the real me. It acts as if it has to keep throwing up the issues that I want to suppress. I say to myself that I am going to think of pleasant things and within moments the bad one presents the undesirable before my mind. My mind is the mere playground of these two disparate forces. What is the agenda of the non-me will? Why does it insist on making me uncomfortable and ill at ease? It too should be working for the entire organism that is me - to make the physical and psychological environment as comfortable as possible.
I know that time eventually allows the non-me to settle down and the unwelcome thoughts fade into insignificance. Time in a sense heals