Starting Over

The cruel reality of human existence is that we can never start over for we can never recreate the past since memory, the very essence that defines our identity and shapes our sense of self in this confounding universe, is that which is flawed. We can never recall the past as we would like it to be for memory cannot be willed into action; there is never a complete remembrance of any event. Memory is fragmented, shattered, broken, disparate, bewildering, and ... spontaneous. We will never know why memory retains 'this' and not 'that', why it seems to breathe a life of its own. But this thing, in all its incomprehensible defectiveness, is all we've got. No two persons would possess the same recollection of a shared moment. For if we could, or if we could decidedly retrieve the past in its selective entirety, we would not be human...

Our fundamentally flawed nature is the self-same reason for our misery. We desire that which our biological nature can never fulfill... and was never meant to. Our desire for happiness found in a past that is no longer, fuelled by the spontaneous fragments memory has chosen to retain, is always locked in dialectical opposition to the present reality, to desire itself. And a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Everything, in the spurious forward spin of the wheel of time, changes and will continue to do so. The act of repetition, the libidinal drive to recreate the past is already an impossibility based on a mathematical logic of time.

There is no starting over. There is only delusion in any attempt to. There is no 'going-back-to-start', no 'as-things-were-before.' For everything has changed. There are no real second chances. What is lost will forever be so for even if it returns, change would have held its place in its absence. If we could see rationally that there exists a fundamental disjuncture between our conscious desire for remaking the past and the unconscious workings of a flawed biology, we would not yearn for this elusive thing called happiness.

And happiness is the longing for repetition.

The eternal return of pain caused by that which we desire and that which can fundamentally never be acquiesced is the model exemplar of Freud's Death Drive...