The speaker gives voice to a state of total inner chaos, where every feeling immediately flips into its opposite. An ending feels like a start, and the more he pushes toward a goal, the further away he finds himself. Satisfaction briefly flares up in the middle of loss, like hunger creeping in right after a banquet. He is a walking, talking bundle of impossibilities — convinced he’s wise while playing the fool, or feeling ravished by joy inside a living hell. Nothing in him settles.
This rush of paradoxes creates a mood that is dizzying and unstable. The extremes of emotion crash into each other so hard that pain and pleasure, longing and revulsion, become indistinguishable. To be burning in ice and drowning in fire captures it perfectly: a person suspended in a moment where every desire turns against itself, and the self no longer knows what it is or what it wants.