I have looked at the little wall for a couple of years in a slightly creepy way. The pathology was reflected in the looks on my sons’ faces as they stood with me at the base of the cliff, and in the way that they looked away when I finally broke long, silent stares at the thin crack in the sandstone tower. Their expressions were familiar to me from my rotations on the psychiatric wards. The nurses looked at new admissions with the same expression right before noting in the record, “Patient appears to be responding to internal stimuli”. A person with that phrase recorded in their chart inevitably received an antipsychotic medication.
But, the boundary between dream and delusion is an eggshell composed of success, and I might just be able to climb this, after months of driving back and forth, writing a script composed of all the little holds and moves, dangling on a top-rope cursing, and route-specific training. All of these things are expected. I have done all of them before, with every project that I have done, just as I have sworn off projects after all of my other projects.
I fully expect to swear off projects after this project as well, even though I have been eyeing another route at the other end of the crack-width spectrum for several years, and with the same unhealthy obsession . The rejection of projecting at the end of each project results from an incremental increase in the sanity quotient which comes from terminating the effort. To be clear, I am not saying that anyone who engages in projecting is banking up mental health; quite the opposite.
To start considering a route on the edge of one’s ability, one first must feel a little bored and unmoored. One must ask oneself, “What am I doing with all this? Where am I at? What else is there?” before the darker ambitions can take over. The desire to take on a maximally uncertain climb is a mark of deterioration. The only enduring benefit may be a touch of healthy fatalism. A person taking on a project won’t help himself because he can’t. It is part of the lifecycle, which rolls on with or without our acceptance. Amor fati, or not, the route may go…
Dedicated to the Game 