My Body Is a Cage, My Eyes Are the Windows

 MY BODY IS A CAGE 

The word window comes from the Middle English windo e, itself derived from the Old Norse vindauga.  Vindauga was a compound of vindr, for wind, and auga, for eye.  WIND-EYE.  Built into the history of “window” is the idea of the eye becoming like the wind: a window represents the ability for vision to be like a wind and cross or transgress a boundary.  Interestingly, before the Old Norse came along, the Old English word for this was eyethurl — thurl meaning hole or aperture, eyethurl being a hole or aperture for the eye.  But it’s vindauga that won out in the end and gave us the word we use today – window — as if it was decided somewhere along the way that eyethurl was too passive, too still for what a window psychically allowed one to accomplish.  

 My computer screen is a window–it’s the shape of a window, framed like a window, and like a window it enables my sight to transgress an imagined wall and visually enter the space on the other side of it.  Through this window, I can tour Keats’s house in Hampstead Heath;  learn lots about Pablo Fiere and Claude Levi-Strauss; read the collected works of William Carlos Williams; commune instantly with you through chat; find out what at this very moment is going on with friends all over the country; Skype my client in Costa Rica; watch any movie I want to; examine a store front on Helms Avenue right now, in real time.   Through this window, I can experience the whole world.

A window, but so much better than the window on a house.  Because while I remain stationery, the views through this particular window can change ad infinitum and at will.  This 11″ x 13″ window frame is quickly becoming the only window I need.   

POV video games and Wii are windows, too, windows that become my eyes in that other world.  Were I walking around in that virtual world, my eyes would see what’s seen through the window of the monitor.  I’ve played games where I hide and duck, run for cover, shoot through bushes—and on a television big enough for it to be actually life size. In my mind, I was on the move.  It’s like I am in the house from the Wizard of Oz, spinning through space while seated safely and comfortably before this window, through which I watch so many things go by.  Or more accurately, like I am in somebody else’s body, in a different space, looking through his eyes.

A body as a vessel, as a contained space one looks out of.  If this monitor is a window that I look out of, then that makes me a building, an architectural space to be looked out of, a house.  My body is a house, or a cage.  My subjectivity lives in it, looking out this window. 

It’s not conscious, but the metaphor informing my experience of myself is that my subjectivity, my consciousness inhabits an architectural space, is inside of something and looking out from it, inside a structure out of which it perceives the world through a window.  This has always kind of been true—lots of us think of souls inhabiting a body, or of the body as a cage—but never as true as now, when this window, the computer monitor, rules the world.  I’m kind of addicted to looking out of it, in fact.  It’s like the compulsive gazing of the back-seat passenger in car.  When you sit in the backseat, do you stare at the upholstery, the back of the seat, the dashboard?  No, you stare out the windows, of course.  You can’t not stare out the windows at the passing views.  That’s what this computer is like to me sometimes.  I can’t not stare out of it.

The monitor is a window and I am a location or an address rather than a 3-dimensional flesh and blood creature grounded in corporeality.  Or more accurately, my body is an architectural space with an address.  I am only a resident here, in this location, at this address.  Does that mean that my house is no longer integrally part of my identity?  Am I no longer defined by this body?  Can I move or relocate?  Maybe: the body can be transformed far beyond what nature intended.  I can redesign my very self if I have enough money.  I can go to an architect–a plastic surgeon, a trainer, a Pilates instructor–and renovate this house.  Would I still be me in a different house?  We believe that I would still be me in a different shape, because we’ve gotten so accustomed to thinking of ourselves not as bodies, but as inhabitants of this architectural space called a body.  The body is just a house.  Paint it a different color, add an extra bedroom, but the same family still lives in there.  That’s what we believe, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.

This monitor is my window.  Through it, I see you.  By Sunday afternoon, I looked through this window and saw what costume you wore for Halloween the night before.  I knew what parties you had attended, and who with.  I saw whether or not you had children, and, if you did, what they dressed as–and all this without talking to you directly.  I see you as a series of images and sets of words, not as a body with which I come into contact physically or even aurally.   I can know you well without ever even meeting you, touching you, dancing with you, eating with you.  So what do I think of when I think of you?  You are abstract: “Withdrawn or separated from matter, from material embodiment, from practice.”  You are an abstraction: not actual corporeal presence, not action, not movement in real-time, but a constellation of ideas, words, emails, images that together constitute “you.”   

If I’m teaching a lecture hall full of undergraduates who are all staring at their laptops -chatting and IMing, emailing and observing–than are these undergraduates present, i.e., with me, or absent, i.e. somewhere else, projected like wind through that window?  Physically present, yes, but emotionally and mentally absent. . . I’m not sure which is more important.  I’m not sure which one qualifies their experience of our shared reality as participation.

I wonder what this means for how you and I interact.  I wonder if it makes us more ethical or less so.  More honest or more deceptive.  Grounded in a truer reality that makes this life a better place, or seduced away from the blood-and-guts reality of our effects upon others.   Does it bring us together, or draw us apart? 

My body is a cage

That keeps me from dancing with the one I love

Maybe not so much, anymore.

Wuthering Heights – It’s “gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind “

This time of year makes me think of Wuthering Heights, probably because for huge parts of my life I read it every autumn; or taught it; or wrote about it.  Nights getting cold, wind knocking around the trees and leaving a scoured-blue sky for morning, and all the usual intimations of immortality visited upon us by the season get me longing, longing to take the special kind of voyage inward that is the experience of Wuthering Heights.  Lots of people I love don’t much care for the novel, but for me it’s one of the most powerful ever, ever.  Anyone want to do a Wuthering Heights book club?  I promise I can make you love this novel and show you how it will change your life.

Twin souls – doomed Cathy and Heathcliff.  Courage and Passion were not abstractions to Emily Bronte–they were Forces of Nature.  They were our only means of accessing the Divine, a Power which exceeds social and intellectual understanding (see “No Coward Soul is Mine”, her most famous poem).  When our courage and passion falter, we suffer accordingly and bring others into suffering with us.

The most famous passages:

These are from Chapter 9 (I think it is), when Cathy is explaining to her family’s household manager, Nelly Dean, how she feels about Heathcliff and Edgar.  Edgar’s a good man, a good provider, and has proposed to Cathy, whereas Heathcliff has been so mistreated by her brother that his future looks grim.  So Cathy’s in a conundrum.  She confides in Nelly that she had this dream the night before . . . .

I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind . . .

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there, had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

. . . .My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath–a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind–not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

Unbeknownst to Cathy, Heathcliff was eavesdropping but only to the point where she said it would be degrading to marry him.  He takes off before he hears the rest, and isn’t seen or heard from for years.  In the meantime, Cathy marries Edgar as planned and lives the life of a lady . . . until she dies giving birth (get the metaphor?) to Edgar’s progeny.  On her deathbed, Heathcliff says to her:

You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why do you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry, and wring out my kisses and tears; they’ll blight you – they’ll damn you. You loved me–then what right had you to leave me? What right–answer me–for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart–you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

If you’ve ever read the novel and if you’re not hopelessly ironic, then you  know what I’m talking about.   Some of the most wrenching, archetypal love-truth in the English language.  But then again, as a former Romanticist/early Victorianist, I live for this shit.

When I hear Stephanie Meyers say that WH inspired her to write one of the Twlight novels, I want to throw up in her lap.

Your permanent record.

Remember your horror as a kid at the idea of getting caught doing anything that might go down on your — gasp!– “permanent record”?  Now with email, text messages, and FB, it’s all on your permanent record.  All of it.  Every word you share might be even more permanent than you, since it’s theoretically possible that all the online chats, drunken texts, status updates, blogs and emails you’ve authored will outlive you and achieve immortality in cyberspace.

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I studied Victorian Autobiography for a brief spell.  The challenge there was that only a specific subset of the population–the middle and upper classes–possessed the education, means, and time to write anything down, much less publish what they’d written.  As a consequence, most of our ideas about England in the 1800s came from the middle class, and what we knew of working-class life, by contrast, was only what could be put together from the discovered stash of rare letters in an attic somewhere.  That’s won’t be the case for future scholars of the 21st century.  Everyone writes  everything down anymore.  Imagine: far into the future, a UCLA musical scholar will seek to investigate the twenty-first century preponderance in Los Angeles of bands named after locations.  He’ll simply google “Just Off Turner” or “Astra Heights,” then cross reference the band members’ names.  Et voila.  This scholar will know instantly that Bryan Mounce dated this great chick who did improv, that Phil Metzler wished he had an afro like Jeff Lynne’s, that James Morales mostly wore black and Timmy Morales like to imbibe the $1 beers at Crane’s every Monday night.  That’s a lot of information, compared to what I was able to learn in the archives about 19th-century buskers, which would’ve been nada.

Everything ever known about you now will be known about you forever.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Imagine yourself liberated from the past.  That’s what a truly permanent record does: it says to you, you can’t hide from what you’ve done, you can’t distort it, you can’t put it on anybody else.  It is what it is.  Deal with it.

So you do.

I once read there’s a very good reason memory fades: to ease pain and to make room for new feelings and ideas.  I don’t believe it.  There is no good reason for memory to fade.  Well, I take that back–maybe it’s healthy for emotional memories to fade.  But not the historical record, the things you write to other people that are supposed to mean something.  To the contrary, it’s better to have a record of everything you’ve ever written or that’s ever been written to you so that you can hold the world and yourself accountable ad infinitum for the words that have been committed to paper.  That’s sort of what’s meant by transparency and honesty.

I mean, it’s fine to change your mind, and sometimes what you emailed a week ago is no longer emotionally true for you today.  But if it’s in an email or text message, at least there’s empirical evidence of that emotion having been experienced (unless you’re a liar,  in which case there’s evidence of its at least having been expressed).  And if there’s evidence of that emotion floating out there in the world, it’s much harder to pretend it was never said, or that it doesn’t exist, or that you didn’t involve another person in it.  Somehow or another, even if only internally, you have to acknowledge it and decide what to do with it.  You have to deal in uncomfortable truths.  You have to remain accountable for your permanent record.

We’ve always been told that words are weapons, that they’re so powerful that they can change things.  Use a different word, create a different world.  Maybe in this new era , we’re going to start living like that’s actually true, because all of our words can come back to haunt us.  Either that or treat everything with the gravity of an emoticon.  Said today, gone tomorrow.  A world of meaningless words, where nothing’s ever really as stake.  That’s what politics feel like, right?  Blech.

More personally, I labor under the belief that feelings never really go away, they just get lost.   The permanent record helps you to find them again for a little while.

Which is why I have a gmail address for the girls to which I send things every once in a while: links to the blogs I’ve written about my daughters, outpourings of love typed out late at night, and lots of the emails sent between her father and me the first couple of years. The gmail account was born of the impulse to keep a historical record, in all our original words, of a confusing time in our lives, the time when Djuna’s family underwent cataclysmic transformation. I knew enough from my own experience as a child of divorce–and, granted, I could be projecting here–that one of the most frustrating things about having your life divided in that manner is the mystery that shrouds it.  My thought was this: if someday Djuna and Poppy want to puzzle through the narrative of their parents’ marriage and separation–and they very well may not, and that’s fine, too–then better to draw their own conclusions from the historical record than leave it to the distortions of their parents, the adults too screwed up to keep our shit together and too proud to part amicably on their behalf.

I’ve always been a pack rat, anyway, so even without the gmail account there’s be a lot permanent record.  I kept a daily journal from January to August 1992, which began with Kevin and me first hooking up after a late night at the 500 Club in winter and ended with us moving in together into a little apartment off of Melrose and Fairfax in the autumn. Love letters their father sent me, Mother’s Day cards, birthday cards, photo album after album, boxes of ticketstubs, postcards, brochures, and flyers from all the things we did together.  I’m told it’s important for children to know they were conceived in love, whatever else followed their conception, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in this stash I’m saving for them.  But I’ve often wondered what Paige and Kevin will make of this historical record.  The one time recently I was at Dick and Julie’s house, I noticed that all pictures of me were gone and replaced with pictures of Paige.  Which makes sense, I guess, it just gets me curious. Will that side of the family present to our daughters a history from which my relatives and I have been erased, a history that didn’t begin until September 2006, 15 years in? (Draw your own conclusions from Paige’s account here of how she and Kevin met: http://www.oncewed.com/17437/real-weddings-blog/once-wed/kevin-paige/)

Ah, historical revisionism.  The fine art of scapegoating, of erasing, of distorting to save one’s own ass.  You have to pretend that X never happened, so you replace it with Y.  But it’s a fetishizing game, which means it’s a losing game: the substitute only commemorates the thing it’s meant to hide.  The more zealously you forward the Y, then the more anxiety about X that you betray.  That’s what happens with Paige’s blog.  The old scapegoating version they told was that I drove Kevin nearly to suicide, until Paige rescued him from our marriage.  In this new version, they weren’t even married anymore when they met.  Mark and I have been vanished.  But I would guess from this revisionism that Paige is ashamed of what really happened; which, weirdly, makes her blog an unintentional acknowledgment of guilt even as she’s trying to whitewash it.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.  I’ve begun to wonder if guilt isn’t an even more powerful emotion than love.  I’m sad to say I’ve seen a lot of love thrown away in service of guilt.  In that regard, I acknowledge Kevin’s courage: he loved Paige and so he chose her, despite the social pressure to be a good boy and in spite of the burden of guilt he’d have to struggle with afterwards (or, sadly and less heroically, displace to my shoulders in classic scapegoat fashion).  I’m not sanctioning anything, I’m just saying: they’re obviously happy together, and maybe they belonged together, maybe more than either Kevin and me or Mark and Paige . . . who am I to say what God’s will is for any of us?   But the guilt  . . . it makes people do ugly things.  It’s so painful that it makes them desperate to spread the guilt around, to parcel it out, to bury it, or to pretend it away.  So they start revising history.  And all revisionist history needs a scapegoat.

So I know a thing or two about being scapegoated, or at least about being scapegoated in love triangles.  It’s not a pretty feeling.  A shrink during the divorce explained it to me like this.  In a love triangle, one must choose between the other two and, in order to do so with a clean conscience, he must throw one of those two to the dogs in order to place the other on a pedestal.   So two gang up on one and begin the scapegoating process.  Whether by projection, or blame, or through solidarity, the majority project all the guilt and shame upon the minority, who (ideally) accepts the burden.  Then the scapegoat gets outcast, exiting the triangle and taking all the guilt and shame with them so that the remaining two are temporarily liberated from it.  If the minority won’t accept the burden, if the outcast won’t voluntarily exit the triangle, then there’s an intermediate step, and that’s where revisionist history comes in.  It’s a form of violence whereby the majority in essence forces the scapegoat out of the triangle–by bullying the scapegoat, by isolating the scapegoat, by brainwashing the scapegoat, or by (symbolically) killing the scapegoat.   One way or the other, the minority has to be scapegoated and symbolically sacrificed in order for the remaining majority to live in peace.

It’s a never-ending cycle, because the guilt and shame projected upon the scapegoat have only been symbolically eradicated .  In truth, the causes and symptoms of the guilt can never be magically vanished.  So scapegoating is a vicious pattern that repeats each time the guilt and shame creep back in (which they inevitably do), and one that will continue to repeat until we recognize in ourselves the mechanisms of denial, projection, and psychological violence that necessitate it.   Jesus was the only scapegoat able to break this cycle.  That’s because his resurrection proved something to his community that most scapegoats can’t: “Look at me, here: see, I am entirely innocent of everything you projected onto me.  No arguing with me on this one, is there?  I’ve been resurrected, that’s how innocent I am.  So that means you better take a good look at yourselves, instead, for the real cause of all that guilt and shame.”   And they do, and they see it, and they are reborn.  And the cycle of violence that culminates in a scapegoat is broken.

Maybe a permanent record can serve in a parallel manner, if we pay attention to it.   Because we now have detailed written accounts of so many of the emotional transactions that we engage in on a daily basis, it becomes more and more difficult to creatively revise that record down the line.  Therefore it becomes more difficult to successfully execute the mechanisms of distortion, projection, and denial that scapegoating requires.  The permanent record smacks us upside the head with undeniable evidence of our own accountability, and we are therefore liberated from the temptation to go into denial, to hide from the truth, or to project guilt and blame onto anybody else.  Imagine that.  Ongoing atonement that keeps your slate perpetually clean.  Real honesty.  Real transparency.

So next time some I see some ugly conflict coming down the pipe, or face a big choice, or simply feel I’m misunderstanding somebody, I’ll pull out the emails and text messages and wall postings that we exchanged.  I’ll glance at my status updates on Facebook.  I’ll take a long gander at what was said to get me to this point.  I’ll be true to the moment I’m in, for sure.  I won’t live in the past.  But I won’t hide from it either.  I can’t anymore.   It’s on my permanent record.

Bye bye Lucy.

So Lucy had to go last night.

On Sunday, she busted through the screen door to get at a dog walking by, one of two aged pointers this older woman walks regularly.  I went out and separated Lucy from them.  Put Lucy in the house so I could speak to the owner.  While I was speaking with the owner, Lucy busted through the window screen and attacked the same dog, again.  I put Lucy back in the house and, as I was again approaching the owner, Lucy came from I-don’t-know-where to go at this poor dog a third time.  I tackled her midstream and locked her in the bathroom to apologize to this woman and her poor dogs.  There was blood all over the dog’s throat, all over Lucy’s face, all over the window pane she’d jumped from.

Oh, the Vet’s bills.

Lucy was fine.  The girls were shaken up.  I was devestated.  This was the umpteenth dog Lucy had attacked.  We don’t have a yard and, everytime somebody walks by, she tries to pop open the screen door in the hopes of getting out and getting even.    If she can’t get the door open, she headbutts the screen or scrounges around for a window to bust out of–three times she’s  jumped through a window after we’d thought we’d successfully blockaded it.  She’s gotten out half a dozen times, each time attacking a dog, and I’ve been bitten twice ripping her off the throat of some unsuspecting passing canine.  When we walk her, she’d lose her mind if she saw another dog–screaming, strangling herself on her choke chain, blind with anxiety.  I got afraid that she’d kill a dog eventually, or get killed, my daughters witness to some bloody canine trauma.  Or worse, that while in the zone she’d turn on them and snap.  (She’d get those wild, crazy eyes.)

So Monday I called around and found a breeder who also rescues aggressive Frenchies.  This breeder came to pick up Lucy last night.  Poor Poppy, her face cradled in her hands as she watched out the front window while we put Lucy in the car and said goodbye.  I came back into the house and Poppy started to cry.

“I don’t want Lucy to have to go!  I love Lucy, Mama!  I don’t want her to go!”

She started to wail.  I bundled her up in my lap and held her.  Djuna, meanwhile, sat beside us chattering about how it was all for the best, because Lucy was trying to kill every dog that went by the house.  And it’s true.  Lucy spent most of her time worried sick that she’d fail to fulfill her obligation to kill any dog that came within 75 feet of us.  Out walking.  From the front door.  In the car.  At night, at 3 am.  , when a distant dog barked somewhere.  She had a reputation around the neighborhood for being nasty and loud.

But she wasn’t, not when it came to people.  With us she was sweet and very affectionate and playful.  She slept with Poppy every night and let Poppy push her around and followed Poppy through the house.  Lucy chewed the black plastic eyeballs off of all of Poppy’s stuffed animals and pooped in the bathtub rather than have an accident on the floor.  She gave hundreds of kisses every day with her warm, soft flappy bulldog mouth, and escorted me like a shadow, her claws rat-tatting on the wood floors, when the girls were with their father.

I feel like I failed Lucy and, worse, I feel like I failed Poppy. 

It’s been a rough couple of weeks, folks.  We’ll miss her.  It’s going to be a rough week, still.

Life, Love, and Lies in the Age of Emoticons.

Life, Love, and Lies in the Age of Emoticons.

Lying fascinates me. It’s a form of acting, the performance of an un-truth. Profligate liars are profligate performers, people who divide themselves into different roles for different people. When they are lying, they are pretending to be something that they are not.

But to look at lying as a performance is to assume that the opposite is true: that in opposition to the performance, there is a genuine individual, a genuine subjectivity that exists that’s not only different from the performance you’re getting, but also better than the performance because it’s more real. This view of lying sees it as a departure from what is real. When you discover, say, that your partner has been two-timing you, one of the reasons you’re so outraged is because that means they were only performing monogamy and all the feelings that monogamy entails. The assumption then follows that the real, which is by necessity different from the performance, is something else: is not monogamy and is not all the feelings that monogamy entails. This takes away the ground beneath your feet. “Who are you?” is a question that the betrayed often find themselves asking of the betrayer over and over again. “I don’t know you anymore.”

So the discovery of deception is shattering to the Romantics among us. Romantics are deeply invested in the whole idea of “I”, which is not at all to say that Romantics are necessarily self-obsessed (although they can be), but that Romantics believe in the idea of a unified, consistent consciousness in each of us. The “I” is an identity, and it identifies the same subjectivity across time. Who “I” am now is a product of who “I” was in the past; there’s supposed to be a relationship between the two, and a teleological one at that, evolving over time like an arrow pointing heavenward. Past, present, and future selves are all just different points on the same arrow, all contributing to the same trajectory. Do something–like lie, or deceive me–that places a point anywhere but on the imagined arrow, and the entire arrow must shift direction to accomodate it, because to me it’s not conceivable that somebody’s arrow might be crooked or, more shocking yet, not an arrow at all (maybe, say, a constellation instead, or a pure choas of dots).

I think we are most of us Romantics.

The tricky part is this. It’s not that Romantics believe in this view of subjectivity because of how they feel about themselves, their loved ones, or the world at large. Romantics feel the way they do about themselves, their loved ones, and the world at large because they believe in this view of subjectivity: they believe in arrows. I tell somebody I love them in January, and in February one of the reasons I’ll feel as I do about them–still loving them–is because I feel in my very bones that what I said in January is unquestionably related to who I am in February. My belief in the connectedness of emotional experience is what generates the feelings I have right now (in relationship to what I felt before) and the feelings I’ll have tomorrow. My accountability to who I was and what I said in the past is so deeply ingrained, it becomes the unconscious programming that conditions how I process information, feedback, and my own emotions. Put another way, my belief in the unified, consistent and linear nature of subjectivity is my hard drive. My feelings and perceptions are the software. They seem to have a life of their own, but in actuality what they are capable of is determined by what the hard drive allows them to do.

Who knows where Romantics get this linear view of themselves and human consciousness. Being a literature person, I would say that they get it from the way in which they’ve seen narratives structured over the course of their lives. Television dramas that presented them with the same characters week after week, year after year, interminably: character consistency reinforced by the regularity with which it is was consumed. Movies with conventional linear narratives that you encountered not in a dialogic way (like we do now–we walk into a movie with a well developed set of preconceptions & opinions derived from massive marketing compaigns and press junkets, and we put these into dialogue with the film itself as we watch it), but rather as a single, monolithic narrative unfolding in the darkness. An assumption that realism was actually a reflection of the way the world operates, rather than an awareness that we think of “realist” as such because we’ve read and watched so much realism.

But this view of our feelings and ideas is considered deeply sentimental by Postmoderns. For the Postmoderns among us, the illusion that the present is evolved from the past is just that–an illusion; a dishonesty; a lie. For example, the Romantic might remain loyal to a lover because of their shared history, because of a horror of throwing it all away, because of a vision of the future evolved from that history to which the Romantic remains attached. To the Postmodern, this is sentimental and nostalgic claptrap. If you’re with somebody right now for any reason other than in this very moment you want to be with them, then you’re not being genuine–you’re performing. You’re lying, whether to yourself or to them, in an effort either to heroize your emotions or to return to a known past. To the Postmodern, this is not only ideologically conservative (how radical can you be if you feel chained to something you said or felt in the past), but cowardly. Live in the Now.

Because the past is dead, according to the Postmodern. It is an illusion seeking to control us, to make us behave in certain ways, to keep us obligated to the status quo. The idea of an arrow keeps us all pointing in the same tired direction, when in fact we are a mess of unpredictable dots, our consciousness in actuality unfolding over time more like a supernova or a school of jellyfish than like a rocket or a tree. Romantics think of the past as our teacher: if you don’t learn from it, you’ll repeat its mistakes. That, in spite of the popularity of this Romantic belief, we all keep repeating the same mistakes–genocides, wars, plagues, environmental disasters, relationships–suggests that learning from the past can’t really be done. That maybe the Postmoderns are right. That whatever we believe sentimentally, the past teaches us nothing that substantially changes the present or the future. The past is an illusion, a representation of an idea that keeps us from becoming truly liberated into the Now.

That’s the Postmodern way.

So for the Postmodern, there is no personal metanarrative to which this moment’s desires must answer and no past self to which this moment’s impulses must reconcile themselves. There is only now. But what happens when one is liberated from a teleological view of subjectivity?

One answer: irony prevails, and that has been the Postmodern norm in our culture for a couple decades now. There is no teleology, no utopic endgame for us as individuals or as a society, so we may as well have a good laugh and make fun of ourselves for being so earnestly idealistic. But on a more personal level, I’m asking this question about Romantic versus Postmodern subjectivities because I’ve noticed, in my limited world, a shift in the value and meaning of words as the expression of genuine emotion. I’ve noticed a shift in the perception of what it means to lie.

Think of each communication you’ve had with, say, your partner as a single word. Over the course of a relationship, for us Romantics, these words comprise a sentence: the significance of each word is affected by its placement in relation to other words in that sentence. Again, the idea of continuity, linearity, unity. For Postmoderns, however, there is no sentence. There is only a series of isolated utterances, each independent of the other in its claim to truth status. No one utterance in that collection of utterances owes any debt to to any other utterance, nor to the sentence of which it is imagined to be a part.

So what is a lie, in this view? The Romantic believes: if a person says today, “I believe in God,” and then the next day says, “I don’t believe in God,” then that person is lying on one day or the other. The Postmodern believes: that person just believed different things on different days.

Which, strangely enough, gets me thinking about text messages & emoticons as epitomizing this different, Postmodern attitude toward emotional metanarrative and, by extension, truth and lying.

When I go to write a letter to somebody I like, I craft it carefully. Whether because I’m a Romantic, or of a certain generation, or an ex-literary scholar or a writer, I believe words have substance, weight, consciousness — that they represent a current self to which my future self will be responsible, and therefore I better speak only the “truth.” By implication, the truth is thus a contract with myself, and with my audience, regarding the future: what I say I feel now now will be something I need to take into account in a minute, a day, a week, a month.

But text messages are of the moment, and only this particular moment. They are not expected to imply an obligation to any kind of sustained metanarrative of emotion. They are drafted on impulse, in drunkenness, in the heat of emotion, to make a quick plan (The Abbey at 8!!!!). You can text somebody a proposal at 1am on a Friday night ["Come over now "]; by brunch on Saturday morning, it is completely acceptable to act as if the text never happened. In fact, it is gauche to take text messages too seriously — in certain social circles, you never discuss a text exchange after the fact. It is almost as if text messages liberate you from responsiblity to any sustained emotional history beyond this moment, and everybody knows it.

Thus the now-ubiquitous emoticon. Emoticons are the embodiment of emotional ephemerality. Nothing conveys the 4-second expiration date of my current feeling like the emoticon. When I you, do you really worry that I might have learned I’m terminally ill? just lost my job? lost a friendship? Of course not. If I were, then I wouldn’t you. Likewise, if you were informing me of your engagement to Larry, you wouldn’t text me because that would be silly regarding such an important emotional event. We use emoticons to organize our emotional utterances into snappy, lightweight, easily consumable, of-the-moment units.

Innocent enough, right? Used judiciously, emoticons are harmless until you wonder: which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do you only emoticon when you have a light feeling, or do you have lighter and lighter feelings because you’re so busy texting and emailing and chatting that you find yourself expressing yourself all the time with emoticons? I tend to believe that representation informs consciousness–that we understand ourselves through the tools our culture gives us. Therefore, equipped with emoticons and text messages and online chatting, we come to understand our feelings as of the moment, fleeting, ephemeral, rarely worth getting hung up on. We are all becoming Postmodern. No wonder The Power of Now (which I haven’t read, by the way) was a bestseller.

Back to the issue of truth and lying, and especially in relationships. How do you know you love somebody? For the Romantic, this question pertains to an entire history of shared experience. What the Romantic feels about a person now is the culmination of everything that came before. To be in love is to give this history a name and a future: a “relationship,” a “love affair,” even a “marriage.” All these names we apply to committed relationships share the quality of unifying moments spent with another person into an entity with a history. They organize moments from the past in relationship to the present. After all, that’s kind of what’s meant by “I’ve fallen in love with you” — that I realize now how, all along, our time together has been building toward this moment, a moment which changes my idea of what your future and my future will be: our future.

That’s a Romantic. But take away the emotional metanarrative, take away the idea of consciousness as teleological, and to what sense of history can a “relationship” appeal? What can it mean to “fall in love”? If your cultural or ideological lexicon doesn’t include a conception of an emotional narrative with a linear, teleological trajectory, then how do you conceptualize a longterm, committed (monogamous) relationship? It shifts things. A relationship becomes a collection rather than an evolution: a collection of good times and getting along, rather than an arrow leading away from one thing and toward something else. Thusly the absence of teleological relationships — Californication, Hung, Don Draper (who is he, anyway?) — or of creatures incapable of teleology (vampires , zombies, and technological surrogates).

Which may be a more accurate reflection of how human nature and the heart truly work. I was in a long partnership. I know that the ebbs and flows of a relationship mean that at times one is lying when one says “Yes, I’m in love with you.” From this perspective, commitment is a choice, an agreement between two people to share the hallucination that their being together is an entity unto itself, a Romantic entity, with its own past, a present and a future. It is a hallucination that obligates you to the performance of consistency, whether you feel it or not. The Real me loves you, whatever this one lousy day or week may feel like.

Take that away, and perhaps you are living more honestly: time is an illusion, after all, and the past and future don’t actually exist. What is your responsibility now to the thing you turned into a truth yesterday by saying it aloud? You don’t have any. You told the truth then, and you’re telling the truth now, and they no longer need to refer to the same thing. Beyond the Now there is no Real Me for you to know, no Real You for me to grow old with.

Makes the Now seems kind of lonely, though, doesn’t it?

The Art of Poppy

Poppy made these earlier this week while I was helping Djuna with her homework. 

 

“This is for you, Mama,” Poppy says holding it up.  “This is Mama going upstairs.”

 

 ”And,” she tells me, “this is Djuna going upstairs.” 

 

 

 

 

 

Then she finishes this one.  She holds it up.   She studies it with a dreamy sort of seriousness and announces in a hushed voice, “This is Someone Mysterious.”

Buck Fever, second anniversary

 I just saw “Into the Wild,” and there’s a scene that got me thinking about this old favorite I posted to MySpace in 2007.  (Spoiler alert; skip to below if you haven’t seen the movie.)  Winter’s approaching and Chris’s rice supply is running dangerously low.  He goes hunting, finds a big doe.  He has his gun aimed at it; he’s ready to pull the trigger. . . and then he sees its fawn, legs all a-aquiver, step out from behind a bush.  So he lets the doe go.  He dies of starvation soon thereafter.

Buck Fever is what happens when you finally screw up the courage to look somebody in the eye and leave him or her, but don’t.  Forced to choose between what you know (the relationship) and what you can’t really know until it’s too late (what will happen when you say the fatal words), how do you choose?  Commitment or love; sacrifice or self-preservation; loyalty or honesty, the safety of the familiar or courage?

When I began dating my ex-husband, years ago, I saw my first painter’s studio.  His was in the financial district of San Francisco, off of Bush Street, in the basement of a karaoke bar.  It was an unfinished spread of a space, all raw unpainted pine boards and 2×4s and broken up into two rooms, one of which was used by another artist, a “new genres” guy who shot guns at pictures and built large boxes with curtains and peep holes.  On Kevin’s wall hung the first Kevin Appel painting I ever saw.  It’s taken up a fair amount of mental space for me over the years, and I wonder where it is now.  Titled “Buck Fever,” it measured about 6 feet by 9 feet huge, done up in dark dirt browns, dried-blood reds, sand colors, and at the center left of it all was a big, 8-point buck, painted so as to be looking right into your eyes.

When I asked about the title, Kevin told me about Buck Fever.  Buck Fever is when a hunter, after tracking a buck for hours, finally faces it down the barrel of a gun but, at the last minute, he cannot pull the trigger; he cannot bring himself to shoot the animal.

Kevin was, as far as I could tell, fascinated by what Buck Fever implied about expectation.  If you went into the woods with a gun but no clear purpose, then when you came across a buck you could do whatever you wanted.  Shoot or not shoot.  No crisis.  You nor anyone else expected anything of you, so you had more freedom to follow your immediate inclination.  And the freedom would most likely save you from choking.  Buck Fever was a “fever” because supposedly you acted “ill” in the face of a certain expectation: you said you were going to do something, you had every opportunity to do it, and you choked precisely because you were committed to doing it.  And so you let the buck go.

Over the years, we tossed around the phrase “Buck Fever” a lot.  It was one of our private languages.  Kevin and I told each other everything (too much so), and consequently each of us alone knew when the other had committed Buck Fever.  To my mind, Kevin’s view about Buck Fever had more to do with how other people interpreted your final decision than anything else.  You might hope to kill a buck but keep it to yourself and, should you fail, only you are aware of the failure.  Succeed, and you wow everybody with your unexpected trophy.  Playing your cards of intention close to your chest was, in Kevin’s eyes, a win-win situation.

But what fascinates me about Buck Fever is the intimacy it assumes between the man and the buck.  It’s making eye contact with the animal and communing with him on some unspoken level that supposedly freezes the trigger finger.  You stand within throwing distance of a hugely magnificent creature who looks into your face without the least suspicion of harm, while you, the hunter, know full well the contrast you are about to create: where there is now life and trust, there will momentarily be pain and nothingness.  Because you are about to take it away, for one tiny moment you feel in your bones what Life is.  And you either harden your heart to it—which requires that you revel in your entitlement to this power over an animal’s life– and take the shot, or you let the Buck live.

We just passed the anniversary of Kevin’s telling me that he was considering divorcing me (and pointedly not telling me that, coincidentally, he was having an affair with my friend Paige).  For reasons both cosmic and coincidental, at this time of year the idea of Buck Fever peeks at me from around a lot of corners.  Now, understand that, for my whole adulthood, ever since Kevin first told me about Buck Fever, I had always sided with the Buck and thought that the hunter should choke: Buck Fever as cosmic lesson.  But I suppose that’s typical of someone who has never hunted, never wanted to hunt, and has no idea of what hunting feels like.  I have to allow that people who hunt feel a need to hunt.  What of their needs are met by killing a wild animal?  Is the power over Life addictive, a rush?  Is the ability to kill a creature while looking into its eyes a test of will that makes life’s other tests of will more possible to pass?  Does it allow one, for a minute, to experience the sense that one’s own needs, desires, and hungers are more important than the other creature’s?  Does it put one into touch with some truth at the core of existence from which we usually hide?

I realized that in 2006 Kevin looked at our marriage down the barrel of a gun, avoided my eyes, and pulled the trigger.  I could tell you the moment when.  One exact moment outside a sushi place on Sawtelle.  Over dinner, Kevin picked a fight with me.  I fought back.  I was puzzled by his cruelty this time around, because the subject of the argument was an old one and the sides well rehearsed, and with each argument we’d been moving ever closer to an understanding . . . but here he was, nonetheless going to extremes in his anger that he had never visited before.  Feeling out of my depths, frustrated, bewildered by the sudden and novel intensity of his hostility, and very, very angry, I’d stood up, walked out of the restaurant, sat on a bench on a side street, and bawled my eyes out. Kevin emerged from Hana Sushi a few minutes later wearing an expression that I had never seen before and that scared the shit out of me.  Set.  Stony.  Mean.  Gone away behind a closed mental door.

Now, I had been with Kevin for a long time and through many things and over many arguments.  And I knew from the strangeness of his face that something deadly and irrevocable, unprecedented, had happened.  And he walked over to me but wouldn’t look me in the eye.

That’s one way to avoid Buck Fever.  (That, and email or text messages.)

At first I told myself that the sinking fear in my chest was only an overreaction to what had been a pretty rough argument to begin with.  But the feeling just got worse as Kevin proceeded to tell me how sick he was of me and our arguments, and how during this one he saw my emotional face as if for the first time and thought to himself, do I want this, this, for another 50 years?  No way.  I’m done, he said he realized.  Done.

Of course I only cried harder.  He stood there, looking straight ahead into the street, until I turned and started pacing back to the car.  Shortly therafter we tried to salvage the evening by talking reasonably and sticking to our plan, which had been to see A Scanner Darkly after sushi, but the air between us was charged like the stillness before a thunderstorm.  I kept waiting for it to pass, for one of us to crack the joke, for the impulse that, usually, visited me at such moments to kiss him and berate myself.  But I was too scared.  So scared that I meant it and was not fishing when I said, as calmly as I could: “I feel like you are not in love with me right now.”  He said nothing.  Still wouldn’t look at me.  And then he sighed.  “Leilani,” he said, sounding bone tired, “I will always love you.  You are the mother of my children.”

 I will not ever forget that evening.

 So I had always sided with the Buck, and now I’m trying to understand the hunter.  How hard it must be to relinquish what you know will happen—the buck will walk away, you’ll go home, have a beer, feel the same way you always did in the relationship—to relinquish what’s known in exchange for what remains a mystery until the very moment it is too late to undo it: you kill the buck, you feel what the world without the buck is like to live in, and you’ve got no choice anymore but to reconcile yourself to the blood on your hands.  Perhaps such a moment is intoxicating, liberating, a rush of power, a sublime encounter with your ego’s control over the universe.  Or maybe after shooting the buck, your heart breaks and you would do anything, anything to take it back, you go home and cry yourself to sleep, and still you can’t bring the big old deer back to life.  That life is gone from the world forever, and the world is a changed place.

I think that’s how I would feel.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I should’ve tested myself sooner.  Maybe I’ll test myself soon.

Stop All the Clocks

I have long loved how this poem uses commonplace details (the dog, the time, the traffic policemen) to nail down how cataclysmic, how cosmic, loss feels.  The poem makes me think of a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing one piece.  If that lost piece is an important enough one, then the larger image constructed by all the remaining pieces doesn’t make the same sense anymore, in spite of their being in the majority.  Worse, every time you look at the puzzle, everything that remains around the hole only makes you more upset at what’s gone–a reminder that tortures you with what might have been and should have been, if nothing had been lost.  What remains only makes you regret what’s missing that much more.

For the speaker, it’s impossible that the world should continue to operate normally–clocks still sticking, phones ringing, dogs barking, traffic moving, planes flying, the work week continuing, etc.—as if no one’s died.  So he re-imagines the world as it should be be: loss registered on every level, the usual banal gestures and rituals of the ordinary day transformed in acknowledgement of  the loss, so that even the sun and the moon and the stars, our oldest guides, register what’s happened.  Nothing’s the same.  Sounds change.  Sights change.  The rhythm of his life is punctuated differently.  Beauty is irrelevant because the cosmos makes no sense anymore.

I wish Auden had written a poem about the recovery from loss.  I wonder if for him the clocks ever started ticking again, the compass realigned, the stars became comforting once more, and purpose tiptoed back in.  Does anybody know if he did?  Because that really is what happens–don’t you think?–and that’s good.  Except that one might like to think that some love is so vital and some people are so important that our lives never recover from their absence.  But they almost always do, don’t they.  They almost always recover their equilibrium.  Eventually. Inevitably?

My students once upon a time loved this poem, too.  A lot of them would argue that it was about the death of God.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The Night before the First Day of the First Grade

Djuna’s first day of school was Wednesday.  On Sunday, we went to an ice cream social hosted by a parent to welcome kindergartners and new students.  Djuna was the only first grader, but she didn’t mind too much.  Here are some pictures.

At the crafts table.

Djuna and Poppy went to the table on the porch and found pages of stickers for making pictures.  After bickering over who got which sheet of little sparkly lipsticks, tiaras, purses, they went to work.

On Tuesday, we went to Tilly’s birthday party.  Poppy had asked if we could stop at Trader Joe’s on the way to buy a “bouquet for my best friend.”  I had said yes, but then the girls were so resistant to helping me clean up their morning play mess  that it took forever, so we were running late.

“Should we get the bouquet or get to the party on time?” I asked her as I buckled her in.

“Oh, get to the party on time,” she said without hesitation, then added, “but can we get a bouquet for me on the way home?”

We get to the party and Djuna takes off her little backpack, which she has filled with random treasures from their junk drawer: plastic crowns, and mardi gras beads from Auntie, little drawstring pouches, garden marbles.  As she was packing this bag, she had announced to me, “I’m bringing presents for all my friends.  I’m going to give each person a present.”  She is so sweet, so eager to make other people happy, that it chokes me up 3 or 4 times a day.  The way she runs after Remy, especially, makes me want to cry sometimes . . . like love is something you earn with kindness or thoughtfulness.

Anyway. While Djuna runs ahead to distribute her gifts to the younger children (Tilly’s turning 5, making Djuna one of the older kids), Poppy is stopping each person she meets along the entrance way to explain, “I had wanted to buy a bouquet for Tilly because she’s my best friend, and it is her birthday, but we were running late so we couldn’t stop at Trader Joe’s.”

After swimming

It’s a pool party.  All morning Djuna’s been instructing me to ask Ursula THE MOMENT WE GET THERE to let the girls borrow those blow-up things to wear on their upper arms.  Swimmies?  is that what they’re called?  I’m blanking.  Anyway, Poppy jumps into the deep end of the pool as soon as they’re on and starts dog paddling every which way. Djuna is more cautious and lowers herself into the pool gradually.  Later, when we’re in the jacuzzi and the swimmies are off, she says, “Look mama!” and puts the tip of her index finger inside one nostril and the end of her thumb inside the other nostril, then dunks herself under and holds her breath.  She comes up grinning proudly.  I congratulate her.  She’s got water in her nose, and I gently hint that the water might be due to her corking-each-bottle-tactic with the holding of the nose.  I demonstrate a more airtight approach, the standard index-finger-and-thumb-pinch.  She’s skeptical, and continues on with the corking tactic.  So cute.

Ursula hands out the craft: each child get a porcelain white saucer and cup, and a set of acrylic paints to personalize it with.  Djuna and Poppy enlist my assistance; each has very particular visions of their serving ware.  I paint a ruffle around the top of Djuna’s cup, and she’s bursting with pride over it.  Then Claire’s little brother Alex goes at it with his inky black paintbrush.  Djuna looks at his handiwork like her hearts about to break, takes a deep breath, and begins to cry.  We fix the cup, calm her down, I repaint it.  She recovers.  We all do.

Later on, when it’s time to go, I go looking for the girls to warn them.  I come upon them behind the couch, three little ones including Poppy enraptured by Djuna’s elaborate puppet show and storytime.

Djuna special "nature table" complete with backpack and first day's outfit

So cute I had to photograph it twice.

On the way home, all Djuna talks about is the first day of school. How she’s going to get everything ready the night  before.  We get home, she packs a backpack with pencils, magic markers, and paper. I iron a skirt for her, and she moves one of our little Ikea side tables into her room, facing the bed.  Onto the table she puts her packed backpack, and next to it on a stool she puts a shirt, skirt, shorts (“so no one can see my panties on the playground”), socks, panties, and sneakers. Then she drapes them in silks to await morning.  She and I pack her lunch together: grapes, turkey sandwich with cheese, a homemade blueberry banana muffin, string cheese, pear sauce, and a thermos of Strawberry Kefer (it’s a special occasion!).

Bath, story, bed.  The usual.  Djuna tells me she wants two braids in her hair tomorrow.  She reminds me that in the morning I cannot hit the snooze button at all, because it’s the first day of school.  Then she lets me know what she wants for breakfast: three eggs with catsup, a muffin, and a bowl of cereal.  “Because, Mama,” she instructs me, “at my new school there won’t be a morning snack so I have to eat well.”

Negative on Negative Capability

When Kevin sent the girls and me away to Florida, he told me that I had nearly destroyed our marriage with all my selfish character defects and that, if I didn’t give him some space, he would divorce me.  So I went to Florida with my girls.

And what did I do when I got there?  I wrote him a journal entry every day, about the girls and me, complete with pictures, and I emailed these in bulk to him at the end of each week.  I struggled with the impulse to call him, because he’d said to leave him alone to work on his shows—and I can’t tell you what a struggle it was, not to call him.  When we did speak, I asked questions and drew conclusions and subjected him and myself to analysis.  When I wasn’t writing to him or talking to him, I was reading up on my character defects, in order to find out how to fix myself.  I would then share with him what I’d found, and express my gratitude and sympathy for his having endured me as long as he had, and tell him about hwo we could fix what ailed me.

I could not sit still.  My mind could not be still.  I had to figure it out.  I had to know the reasons.  I had to understand why.  I had to find solutions.

Fast forward three years.

Something happened that might have signaled the end of  friendship.  At first I felt that if I could understand what had happened, if I could unearth its source, then sympathy for the pain that caused it would make everything okay.  Okay as in, we are still friends, nothing has been irreparably corrupted or irretrievably lost.  I will still be here for you, and you must, must still want to be here for me.  I couldn’t find anything to make it okay, though.  Analyze as I might, I couldn’t piece it together in a way that proved their loved endured in spite of what had happened.  What I did find, though, was that my love was more enduring than what had happened.  And I didn’t need to understand in order for that to be true.  Love is a leap of faith over what you can’t understand.  Negative Capability.

John Keats, one of my favorite poets, described in a letter he wrote to his brother this thing called Negative Capability — “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”  I’d studied this idea in graduate school but only in the abstract.  In the wake of my husband’s affair and our divorce, I experienced what he meant through my lack of it.   I had negative Negative Capability.

Have I learned anything since?  Well, I think I’ve learned that Negative Capability is a kissing cousin to humility.  I’ve written that I believe humility to be the abdication of will: the abdication of self-interest, self-righteousness, control.  I have struggled for humility these last three years, with middling and inconsistent success.  I have prayed for acceptance of the basic fact (easily grasped by most of my friends, it seems) that you are not entitled to understand everything, not even the things that profoundly affect you.  I have learned by sometimes painful means that claiming to understand people, even in the name of love, is hubristic – as if you have the right much less the insight to understand another soul.

I think I know these things now, but they are very very hard to put into practice.  Nonetheless I should keep trying.  Negative Capability made more space in Keats’s life for imagination and beauty.  Negative Capability would make more space in my life for God, for the mysterious and inexplicable workings of the heart, soul, mind.  For imagination and beauty.

The irony is this.  I was blindsided by the affair.  Setting aside what I should have known or seen coming, I did not, and so I was blindsided.  I assumed I knew what was going on with somebody I loved, and golly I could not have been more wrong.  I assumed I understood him, and proceeded apace.  And tried to fix things accordingly.  Big mistake.  Negative Capability might have worked miracles.  But that’s the irony.  Having been blindsided by somebody you love leaves you, or has at least left me, only more lacking in Negative Capability.  If I even smell danger, my emotional memory of that awful summer stirs and I do everything I can to protect myself.  Which means that I do everything I can to understand what is happening, might be happening, or could happen.  To find words, to hear words, to write the words.  The lesson of Negative Capability falls by the wayside.  Because I won’t be blindsided again.  I’d rather die first.

But still, you get blindsided, and you don’t die beforehand.  You get blindsided because that’s how it works sometimes.  People may love you one day, and then change their minds a week, a month, a year later.  People might say at one period in their lives that they will always, always be by your side, and then at another time feel entirely justified in leaving.  There is nothing that anybody can do to guarantee you that they will honor their words.  And if their feelings have changed, why should their words be honored?  Wouldn’t living like they loved you just because once upon a time they’d said those words, but have since moved on, wouldn’t that be dishonest?  How do you live honestly and still honor trust and faith?

I don’t know.  Sometimes I hope it’s as simple as this: find happiness in loving, not in being loved.  Pray a lot.  Strive for Negative Capability whenever another’s heart is involved.  When sadness comes, accept it as a gift from God trying to teach you something you need to know, rather than as a curse you must try to outrun or outsmart.

Still, loss or potential loss makes me want to crawl out of my skin, and there are some days I can’t trust anything enough to let go of what little power I have: the power to try to understand—understand you, or us, or our past, or our relationships, or our destinies.  I will ask, and I will push, and I will pull, and I will exhaust you.  I’m sorry about that.  I should know better.  I should know by now that I am powerless, that there is nothing but to experience this moment, right now, with or without you in it, whichever that may be.

Still, when you leave, I will miss you.