Saturday, September 27, 2008
Options
Together or separate? Which is better? I don't think either work, and I don't like either option. Is permanent liminality possible? Can we be perpetually caught between separation and companionship? How am I to love you without leaving you either lonely or still--one is solitary, the other silent. Would you rather be alone or not speak? Would you rather bathe in a self-hood without target, anchor, or direction out of which to create, cultivate, and process; or stay still in a silent stillness akin to death? Are these really the only two options? I hope not. But, I know not. I'm sorry. I wish I could do better.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
So, what does all that mean?
It means that despite the cliche nature of it all--I wish I could be your hero. I do. I wish I could take your breath away and willfully permit you to take mine. But, I am afraid that would smother all the gray areas about you, and about me, I find so desirable. I am afraid that decision would smother the desire that spurs both of us on--that means we are the mutual heaven-makers for the other. I want to give you what I don't have. I want to receive from you that which I know you don't have. But, would giving it mean the end of it all--of that circle of desire that gives us the temporal fragmented lives we enjoy? Would it mean death? I couldn't bear the thought of killing you, even if I wasn't existing to realize what I had done. So, I won't. So, I'll stay here in the ambiguity of the circle. Please don't hate me for it.
It means that despite the cliche nature of it all--I wish I could be your hero. I do. I wish I could take your breath away and willfully permit you to take mine. But, I am afraid that would smother all the gray areas about you, and about me, I find so desirable. I am afraid that decision would smother the desire that spurs both of us on--that means we are the mutual heaven-makers for the other. I want to give you what I don't have. I want to receive from you that which I know you don't have. But, would giving it mean the end of it all--of that circle of desire that gives us the temporal fragmented lives we enjoy? Would it mean death? I couldn't bear the thought of killing you, even if I wasn't existing to realize what I had done. So, I won't. So, I'll stay here in the ambiguity of the circle. Please don't hate me for it.
Take my breath away; this equals love. Love is willfully giving one your breath? Willfully submitting to the finality of having no breath--of death? Strange, don't you think? So, Freud was right, the death-drive is intimately related to the experience of pleasure.
What should our response be? I don't know.
I do know that death seems to be something in which I do not want to wallow; something that repels me. If Freud was right, I think Heidegger was right too--instead of reveling in death, why don't we revel in dying so as to revel in life? Let us revel in the ambiguity, the indefiniteness, the uncanny experience of waiting for an end that is so foreign, so other, we don't really know how to think about it. In short, let us revel in the dying, not death. Let us relate, communicate, and try in a space which emanates gray, while providing the place for endless movement. Let us move in between poles--between the desire for love (death) and the bliss of finite freedom.
I can be your hero baby? Really?
A friend told me once that there are no heroes. I don't know if that is true. What I do know is that it is more fruitful to hope for the impossible, unexpected, unthinkable hero--the one that can provide love apart from death--than to rely upon, or hope for a hero within the field of our experience. The lab 'hero' should be reserved for those that provide us with the presence for which we hope, without the death which we fear so absolutely, so definitely.
What should our response be? I don't know.
I do know that death seems to be something in which I do not want to wallow; something that repels me. If Freud was right, I think Heidegger was right too--instead of reveling in death, why don't we revel in dying so as to revel in life? Let us revel in the ambiguity, the indefiniteness, the uncanny experience of waiting for an end that is so foreign, so other, we don't really know how to think about it. In short, let us revel in the dying, not death. Let us relate, communicate, and try in a space which emanates gray, while providing the place for endless movement. Let us move in between poles--between the desire for love (death) and the bliss of finite freedom.
I can be your hero baby? Really?
A friend told me once that there are no heroes. I don't know if that is true. What I do know is that it is more fruitful to hope for the impossible, unexpected, unthinkable hero--the one that can provide love apart from death--than to rely upon, or hope for a hero within the field of our experience. The lab 'hero' should be reserved for those that provide us with the presence for which we hope, without the death which we fear so absolutely, so definitely.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Love and Space
"I can be your hero baby
I can kiss away the pain
I will stand by you forever
You can take my breath away" -Enrique Iglesias, et al.
"Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in teh face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love." --Ivan Klima
Born without a choice. Thrown without a word. Running towards nothing.
These conditions--those of existence--equal isolation. They result in alienation not only from one's self, but also from all others. Is it possible to not be alienated from others when you are alienated from yourself? In this case, alienation equals isolation. So, at bottom, we hope to find ourselves. And, we think we'll find it with another. It is as if our desire--the one we didn't choose--the one with no beginning--is somehow instinctively directed at another as it searches for itself. It bellows silently--"If you overcome isolation, you will overcome alienation." It drives us to believe that if one can have an encounter, they be will his or her self for the first time.
This is why death and love are so similar. This is why death and love are always blurred to indistinction--why completed love is indistinguishable from death. Why would else would love involve one person taking another's breath away? In any other context taking someone's breath away means ending their life. Death is the end of desire; fulfilled love is meant to amount to the fulfillment of all desire. The problem is that it is in the hope--the space--where desire moves that life is lived.
Alienation is a fact of existence we owe to time. Isolation is a fact of existence we might owe to death. Love isn't overcoming either of these. Love is recognizing one's interior infinite within, moving in, within, and between the endless space in which the insatiable desire for fulfillment dwells and the infinite abyss in an-Other. Love--eros--Revelation--is never a substantive, nor can it be configured in the past tense. Love is a verb we can conjugate only in the present because it signifies the endless quest for presence--the quest, doomed to failure, to give the present of presence to an-Other and thus to receive it in return.
"Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was in some new space. I'd entered the place where oblivion was born. Or despair. And also understanding. Or perhaps even love--not as a mirage but as a space for the soul to move in." --Ivan Klima
I can kiss away the pain
I will stand by you forever
You can take my breath away" -Enrique Iglesias, et al.
"Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in teh face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love." --Ivan Klima
Born without a choice. Thrown without a word. Running towards nothing.
These conditions--those of existence--equal isolation. They result in alienation not only from one's self, but also from all others. Is it possible to not be alienated from others when you are alienated from yourself? In this case, alienation equals isolation. So, at bottom, we hope to find ourselves. And, we think we'll find it with another. It is as if our desire--the one we didn't choose--the one with no beginning--is somehow instinctively directed at another as it searches for itself. It bellows silently--"If you overcome isolation, you will overcome alienation." It drives us to believe that if one can have an encounter, they be will his or her self for the first time.
This is why death and love are so similar. This is why death and love are always blurred to indistinction--why completed love is indistinguishable from death. Why would else would love involve one person taking another's breath away? In any other context taking someone's breath away means ending their life. Death is the end of desire; fulfilled love is meant to amount to the fulfillment of all desire. The problem is that it is in the hope--the space--where desire moves that life is lived.
Alienation is a fact of existence we owe to time. Isolation is a fact of existence we might owe to death. Love isn't overcoming either of these. Love is recognizing one's interior infinite within, moving in, within, and between the endless space in which the insatiable desire for fulfillment dwells and the infinite abyss in an-Other. Love--eros--Revelation--is never a substantive, nor can it be configured in the past tense. Love is a verb we can conjugate only in the present because it signifies the endless quest for presence--the quest, doomed to failure, to give the present of presence to an-Other and thus to receive it in return.
"Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was in some new space. I'd entered the place where oblivion was born. Or despair. And also understanding. Or perhaps even love--not as a mirage but as a space for the soul to move in." --Ivan Klima
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Stretching
Stretch me out. Stretch me out in the in-between--in the interim that perpetually lies between longing and completion. Stretch me out--pull me and push me--back to where I never was, toward where I'll never be. Stretch me out, and let me lie in the ambiguity--let it run all the way.
This is where I hope from? To? From my natality to my mortality? From the immemorial institution of my desire to the end I'll never know?
Stretch me out and leave me here. I don't want to fix it. I don't want to exit--I love the desert of the surreal gray. I love it as much as I will ever be able to love anything. I want to wallow, if just for this moment, in the indiscretion of not-knowing. Leave me here and don't suggest a solution. Leave me here, and if you are going to stay, at least stay silent.
This is where I hope from? To? From my natality to my mortality? From the immemorial institution of my desire to the end I'll never know?
Stretch me out and leave me here. I don't want to fix it. I don't want to exit--I love the desert of the surreal gray. I love it as much as I will ever be able to love anything. I want to wallow, if just for this moment, in the indiscretion of not-knowing. Leave me here and don't suggest a solution. Leave me here, and if you are going to stay, at least stay silent.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Encounters
At the bottom of all our hopes lies a yearning for encounter. -Ivan Klima
What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I'd made a decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o'-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me. -Ivan Klima
At the bottom of all hope--that endless circle, the one like all circles--without beginning and without end--is the desire for an encounter. It is the desire to know an-Other, and more importantly, to be known by an-Other. What is strange about this desire is its whence--its originless origin. We fight, scratch, claw, paradoxically, even to the death, to be recognized as an irreplaceable, singular one. Without one's irreplaceability, they are as good as dead--a subhuman entity incapable of true living. Without one's singluarity we are just a machine carrying out meaningless functions within a mechanical world. "NO!" Even the non-believing souls cry this--bellow it from a hidden place--"I am more."
This desire--the one for an encounter--is born out of this fierce defense of singularity and irreplaceability. It is that singular, non-replaceable infinity that longs to be found. It is like an egg waiting to be pierced by that one--one in a million--one of trillions--swimming head--to be punctured so as to give birth to life. We believe--in a place so secret not even we have access to it, from a past we were not privileged with experiencing, in a present we did not choose, in a future we will never see--that if we can have one encounter--if even one eternal moment --that life will be born; life will be experienced; we will become what we supposed to be all along.
But, what is paradoxical, excruciatingly paradoxical, about this desire--this circle--is that it is its spinning that makes life possible. If the circle doesn't spin there is no desire for encounter simply because there is no "is". If the circle stops moving the conditions for any encounter are vanquished. Yet, as long as the circle spins--as long as that desire burns within one's soul--searing scabs and scars along the outer membrane of the secret space--the place where an encounter might take place--it will long to be understood, to express, to try to explain the secret that has no words.
Escape and return. Longing and fulfillment. Yearning and rest. This is the cirlce. This is the pendulum in which desire swings.
To choose once and for all? To claim I've had an encounter? What kind of fool would I be to make such a claim?
A greater fool for never trying? A greater loss for never trying to somehow lead another down the winding, impossibly hidden, spaceless space of the infinity in which I reside?
I can't answer that. Can you?
Thus, it is no coincidence that eros and revelation are two sides of the same coin. Revelation--the Word being communicated. Eros--communicating something so secret--so precious--so vulnerably personal--without words. Both involve the uncovering of the Infinite. Both claim to lead to an encounter--to a meeting that couldn't, wouldn't otherwise be possible. Revealing the Word with special words, and revealing one's self with no words. Revealing--physically and not. All of it is in hope for an encounter. And, both spawn words--writing. Which is itself the only way to life--the immortal kind, that is.
When I can't write anymore I'll die. But I'll die loving. -Ivan Klima
What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I'd made a decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o'-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me. -Ivan Klima
At the bottom of all hope--that endless circle, the one like all circles--without beginning and without end--is the desire for an encounter. It is the desire to know an-Other, and more importantly, to be known by an-Other. What is strange about this desire is its whence--its originless origin. We fight, scratch, claw, paradoxically, even to the death, to be recognized as an irreplaceable, singular one. Without one's irreplaceability, they are as good as dead--a subhuman entity incapable of true living. Without one's singluarity we are just a machine carrying out meaningless functions within a mechanical world. "NO!" Even the non-believing souls cry this--bellow it from a hidden place--"I am more."
This desire--the one for an encounter--is born out of this fierce defense of singularity and irreplaceability. It is that singular, non-replaceable infinity that longs to be found. It is like an egg waiting to be pierced by that one--one in a million--one of trillions--swimming head--to be punctured so as to give birth to life. We believe--in a place so secret not even we have access to it, from a past we were not privileged with experiencing, in a present we did not choose, in a future we will never see--that if we can have one encounter--if even one eternal moment --that life will be born; life will be experienced; we will become what we supposed to be all along.
But, what is paradoxical, excruciatingly paradoxical, about this desire--this circle--is that it is its spinning that makes life possible. If the circle doesn't spin there is no desire for encounter simply because there is no "is". If the circle stops moving the conditions for any encounter are vanquished. Yet, as long as the circle spins--as long as that desire burns within one's soul--searing scabs and scars along the outer membrane of the secret space--the place where an encounter might take place--it will long to be understood, to express, to try to explain the secret that has no words.
Escape and return. Longing and fulfillment. Yearning and rest. This is the cirlce. This is the pendulum in which desire swings.
To choose once and for all? To claim I've had an encounter? What kind of fool would I be to make such a claim?
A greater fool for never trying? A greater loss for never trying to somehow lead another down the winding, impossibly hidden, spaceless space of the infinity in which I reside?
I can't answer that. Can you?
Thus, it is no coincidence that eros and revelation are two sides of the same coin. Revelation--the Word being communicated. Eros--communicating something so secret--so precious--so vulnerably personal--without words. Both involve the uncovering of the Infinite. Both claim to lead to an encounter--to a meeting that couldn't, wouldn't otherwise be possible. Revealing the Word with special words, and revealing one's self with no words. Revealing--physically and not. All of it is in hope for an encounter. And, both spawn words--writing. Which is itself the only way to life--the immortal kind, that is.
When I can't write anymore I'll die. But I'll die loving. -Ivan Klima
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Scabs and Scars
Scar. Scab. Scab. Scar. One comes sequentially after the other, and not exclusively. Scabs lead to scars; but, other things lead to scars too. With scabs however, it is a matter of only a replacing the "r"--the "are"--with the "b"--the "be". Strange, don't you think? That the constant pain of healing flesh morphs into the constant reminder of hurt and pain with only the change of "r" to "b". The change happens when the present--the presence--of "are" is changed to the general--the universal--the "be", being, to be. "I am" to "to be". The particular--the scab--the trace of pain--of a mark (even in which the memory of the blow--the incision--or the scrape has been lost) is one short consonant--one short constant--from the universal inadequacy and impossibility of healing. Time means scabs heal. Time means there will always be scars.
Transitions
There is that constant transition--the one which births language again and again, day after day--that transition from me to you. I am trapped as a wave between two nodes that I don't think truly exist. Down in me--in the infinite that holds nothing--there is a crying--an urge--a desire--so before me and so ahead of me that I can't put into the words--into the child of this longing. This child--my word--is inadequate for carrying the space from me to anywhere else. Words always are--that's why we turn time and again to either the Word, or that which we believe is beyond words (love). Sometimes, we even put the two together. Despite the inadequacy, that desire never leaves. Most days, times, moments, we hope--expect--through that desire. This day--this moment--it has absorbed--overtaken--submerged--not the desire--but the expectation. Response? Dancing in the play of images, logos, and ads--losing myself in a circle of atemporality, one with a catchy beat and lots of smoke. Filtering in and out of a crowd sheltered in semi-darkness, a crowd longing to peak at the light only through the filter of perpetual shadow--covering--dark.
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