Le Gouffre

Lyrics

The session begins. Subject reports a persistent vertigo.
Not of height, but of possibility. A kind of psychic agoraphobia.
The floor has vanished. There is only the falling.

We trace the etiology to Copenhagen.
Eighteen forty-four. A man named Søren, writing by a weak light.
The scratch of his quill diagnosing a world that didn't know it was ill.
He called it Angst. The dizziness of freedom.
Not angel, not beast, but a synthesis, you see.
And the more profoundly you are in anxiety... the greater the man.
Or so the text suggests.

Le Gouffre. The abyss that opens at your feet.
This is the terror of the blank page, the unwritten street.
Every choice a new universe, every step a new decree.
Existence precedes essence. You are condemned to be free.

The condition presents with visceral symptoms.
Observe Jean-Paul at the Café de Flore, the Gauloises smoke hanging, indifferent.
Or in the park, nineteen thirty-eight.
The root of a chestnut tree becomes... obscene. Black. Knotty.
Just there. Without reason. An absolute.
Born without cause, prolonging itself from weakness, dying by chance.
He called it Nausea. An accurate, if incomplete, diagnosis.

Le Gouffre. The abyss that opens at your feet.
This is the terror of the blank page, the unwritten street.
Every choice a new universe, every step a new decree.
Existence precedes essence. You are condemned to be free.

And then there is the Camus complication.
The one truly serious philosophical problem.
Judging whether life is or is not worth the living.
Standing at the edge, one asks the question.
The indifferent sky, the silent cosmos, offer no opinion.
Just the weight of the stone. And your hands. And the choosing.

The vertigo does not subside. It is the new baseline.
You are not ill. You are awake.
There is no cure for this clarity.
Only the next choice.
And the next.
And the next.