31st May, 2014

Gratitude and Kindness. Twin totems of the good life.

If I wake from troubled dreams, provided I can only remember to remember "Gratitude and Kindness," the trouble does not make it beyond the first dozy readjustment of arms against the pillow. If my mind floods for a moment with memories of N___, N___ to whom I find it difficult to afford even a pronoun as pronouns provide a presence somehow, a solidity, and it is painful to concede such memories any solidity, Gratitude and Kindness (if I can remember to bring even just their names to my mind) keep my thoughts from dark places. Gratitude and Kindness are the safeguards of courage, and the more courageous one feels, the more natural love becomes. When fear is gone, love is inevitable. 

"Love your enemies..." Matthew 5:44. Every translation I have come across uses the term "enemy" here, and I must believe that something is lost in every translation. Your fellow man may regard you as his enemy, and still you may love him. This I believe. But you cannot regard your fellow man as your enemy and still love him. This is a contradiction. "Love your enemies" is a contradiction. I cannot love N___ provided I account him my enemy. If I am to love N___, I must learn to see him, to truly and whole-heartedly see him, as my fellow man, my neighbor, my friend. As soon as you love someone, that someone is no longer your enemy, and therefore it is impossible to love your enemy. You can "bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that...use you and persecute you," but you cannot love your enemy.

For thirteen years I have struggled with memories of N___. Mostly I have tried to blur, to efface, to repress. Occasionally I have tried to confront the memories head-on, but this is a work for much stronger constitutions than mine and, in my case, never ends well. To be at peace with my memories, I must find a way to love N___. I must find a way to love the most essential thing about N___. His soul. (A pronoun! This is progress; this is a good sign!)

Do I believe in the soul? 

I do not know what I believe. My ignorance overwhelms me. I do not know how to articulate that in a way that properly conveys what I mean by it. My ignorance  OVERWHELMS  me. I feel the need to start from the ground-up learning-wise, but I've no idea where to begin. I have no guiding confidence in any of the available approaches to understanding the world. The scientist, the theologian, the historian, the poet, the philosopher, they ring in my ears as so many tongues of babel, all calling me, but I am as Buridan's ass caught between hay-bales. The limitations of my senses, of my spirit, of my time, of my imagination, of my Reason leave me utterly uncertain of everything. Where does one begin when one's utterly uncertain? If I were a relativist, that would be some help. Even relativists have faith, faith in the relativity of things. And faith is the key; faith is security; faith is a compass; faith tells you how to live and where to go and what to do. How do I develop faith? Faith in science, or faith in God, or faith in the senses, or faith in the intuitions, or faith in logic, or faith in feelings...how? How do I develop faith? Can I develop it? Or do you have to be born with it? Are some people just naturally faith-inclined?

   

Gratitude and Kindness teach me courage. They teach me to genuinely want the best for others, and not merely to act in others' interests because it benefits my own interests. When fear departs, all that remains is love: the most perfect, beautiful, unquenchable love. 

I am thankful for today. I am thankful for almond-milk lattes and for alfresco tables. I am thankful for spinach salads eaten at the window of charming cafes in charming old American small-towns. I am thankful for honey-locusts in the dusk-light and for beautiful shop-girls who think I'm Australian. I am thankful for bare feet on the cool clay of lake trails. I am thankful for memories of wild strawberries rekindled by men with wild hair and cherry-red skin. I am thankful for Abel who keeps inspirational newspaper clippings in his back pocket. I am thankful for the feeling of always knowing someone and being known by someone in the places I visit, the feeling of community--this is precious in a world grown so large and dispersed. I am thankful for the look of my gold-ribboned shoes against the aged wood of the railway tracks. I am thankful for raspberries. I am thankful for the dungeons-and-dragons player at a further table who pauses mid-game to explain the finer points of World War 2 politics to his friend; I am thankful for the carefulness with which he numbers the allies on his fingers, and the gravity with which he quotes Churchill. I am thankful for the scent of flowers at sundown. 

I do not know where to start, but I shall start somewhere. I am thankful for the opportunity to start. 

I am thankful for today. 

I am thankful there shall be a tomorrow.

28th May, 2014

"Come hither, all ye--and thou, and thou...and thou, too, most solitary of all fugitives!" --A--

Call for me also. Call for me, for me as for all the others. Call for me also. Please do not forsake me. I am standing on the rock. I am standing on the sand. My feet are weary, weary. My eyes are salt. I cannot hear you. I do not know what is wrong with my ears that I cannot hear you. I stand in rain, and then in sun, and then in the the slice of the chill Northern Wind. The bushes put forth ghost flowers and glow cool in the gonelight. Does my own skin glow cool in the gonelight? It is only Spring and I am already steeling myself for the Winter. The flowers are only just come and I'm preparing myself their passing. So short a season! Who can tell the difference between lullaby and elegy? Oh trillium...oh darling little speedwell...forgive me. I am a goose. I was weeping for your departure before you ever arrived. 

"Most solitary of all fugitives!"

Call for me also. All this life and all this motion. The gush-gushing of it, the cyclic swoosh of it, the roar and the roll and the whoosh. I must get to higher ground. If I get to higher ground I may at last get to hear you, turn to you, come to you. Where is higher ground? 

I miss Chesterton.

27th May, 2014

It is strange to be 28 and find one's life mostly over. I do not mean by this that I anticipate a young death; on the contrary, if genes and lifestyle are any prognosticators, chances are I'll hit my centenary before the reaper comes a-scything. And I do not mean to indicate a general dysthymia either. Granted my heart aches, but this aching is neither odd nor enfeebling. Scars keep the ego from becoming a tyrant, and this heartache, which does not fade and--I'm coming to accept--may haply be permanent, is but a much-needed scar on my soul. If the heartache helps me think more humbly, behave more thoughtfully, and be a more loving person, I am glad for it; I shall sing its praises. I do not want to be the patient who begrudges my medicine its taste.

     Yet my life does feel over insofar as I can no longer envision it following any of the normal routes, nor meeting any of the ordinary goals. When I was a little girl, I had a notion of what life meant, and of what it consisted, and of how it played out. My notion was not so very far removed from Shakespeare's "seven ages" of man, only I switched out the "soldier" for the "artist." I would progress, so I thought, from child to lover to creative force to wise woman to dreamy dotage and finally to sleep, with no stage ever departing me, but rather with all stages aggregating, like so many sedimentary layers, each casting their subtle influence and shaping the stages piled on top. 

     Yet now this notion is all gone. I had a husband; I was a wife; but that is at an end, and I cannot see myself being in a romantic relationship again. I venerate Eros too highly (I know C. S. Lewis would scold me for it, but I do). Sentimental irrationalist that I am, I would rather never entertain kisses again than kiss any I am not convinced is meant to be thusly kissed, and as by "meant" I mean something along the lines of "Fate-appointed," the odds of me ever kissing again seem unlikely. And I confess this is odd, for in my marriage it was always Wade (admittedly a thorough-going determinist) who talked of "destiny" and "fate" where our relationship was concerned, and it was always I who argued against him. There is even a sonnet, in an incipient sonnet sequence I attempted four years after taking my vows, that addresses this contrast:

My love was never one without conditions,

I said as much right from the very first,

And yet you ask me now for such remissions

As would see my thoughts on this score reversed?

You scowl at me and tell me I'm too cold, 

Too scientific in my heart's affairs;

I know of romance naught, you do me scold,

To calibrate the weight of Cupid's cares.

What sort of love is mine that does not live

Immortal but some day may fade away?

What sort of love, you ask, that will not give

Eternal vows but lets itself decay?

The truest form, say I, that love can take:

The love of man, and not love for love's sake.

Yet it is Wade who, in the wake of our separation, has sought comfort in the arms of another, and it is I who look to the nun's life because I am so intent on keeping Eros and all of his rituals sacred. I, who refused to believe in destinies, would now apparently rather surrender all the touted consolations of coupledom than act contrary to the belief that such destinies might be a reality. 

More than anything else I am terrified by the thought that things might be without meaning. This feeling gets stronger and stronger as I get older. I do not know how to live in a meaningless world. 

I do not see myself again in a romantic relationship, yet neither do I see myself doing any of the other things my young self saw my elder self doing. I used to dream of going to Oxbridge and becoming a highly esteemed so-and-so, someone who contributed something really worthwhile and memorable to the world, a winner of Nobel prizes, a name for the history books. Yet now I desire more than anything simply to do good and die quietly. Like Jean Valjean, I have the feeling of one who has stolen a loaf of bread and two candelabras, and whose life should be now devoted to reparations, and whose gravestone should be unvisited and without name. And I say this not out of despair of myself; I am not trying to cut all my ties with the world; I am not covetous of total abnegation; I am not craving escape. The do-good-and-die-quietly path is simply the path that most appeals to me, the one in which I feel I shall do the most benefit for both my fellow man and my soul.

     It is for this reason that I now wish to study philosophy for my PHD. I shall not be a big fish in a small pond in philosophy, as I might have proven (with sufficient effort and ambition) in a PHD English program. And I might not have much hope of a career afterwards, but the career is no longer the point. I simply wish to learn. I wish to acknowledge my ignorance about everything, and to bow my head, and, with a humble curiosity, begin at last to learn. From scratch. From the beginning. I want to begin my lessons. 

I am 28 and my life is mostly over. I am glad. I am 28. I shall scrub myself clean in spring water. I shall put on a fresh shift. I shall come with blank sheets to the school-house. I shall begin my lessons.

5-15-14

I do not sleep. I do not eat.

Ten years. Today marks ten years. Did I sleep then? Was I asleep this hour ten years ago? I know I was afraid. I wanted to turn into a bird even then. So lost, so lost, so lost, so lost. All circumstance seemed a dread ocean, and I trapped in its undertow. If you fight it, I said, you shall lose all your energy and drown, and so I surrendered for the strength to tread water.

If I could somehow send love back through time, I would send it back ten years. Then perhaps...

I do not eat. I do not sleep. I ache.

There is the rain, though. I love it as a friend. If I do not sleep all through the night, I shall go walk in it when the dawn breaks.

I am so cold. I wear the blanket K_____ gave me, and headphones, and play Nyman on the piano, abnegating myself in arpeggios. I dissolve. I fade. I am not there; only the accents are there, and the tidal arpeggios. And I think: this is it. I shall give myself over to this instrument...to music...to this ocean. The world is too cold. 

And he...and what if he...what if the scans show...

"Over half of people with lung cancer die within a year of being diagnosed."

He has grown so thin. He seems so small, so fragile.

If the car had not broken down, I do not believe I would have spoken to him again. I would never have known. And who am? I who cannot manage even friendship? I who can say only "it hurts too much...I just...but you can call...I do not mind...if you need to...you can call."

And he is respectful; he does not call. Yet I must call and ask soon...

Ten years. An end to ten years. I must ask...

I do not eat. I do not sleep.

And he...

I'm being irrationally anxious...unexplained weight loss could mean so many things...

Yet if...the doctor's concern...the family history...the cigarettes...

And if it is? Half of people within one year?

But is may very well not be. He is not coughing terribly; he is elsewise fine. Statistics are fret-mongerers. I am being irrational.

It is ten years today. Ten years. I went to the library and got book after book on epistemology. Hume. Dewey. Epistemology and the ancients. Epistemology and the moderns. Epistemology and you. I woke. I did my morning exercises. I filled out my health insurance application. I looked into the PHD philosophy program, as L____ recommended. And I felt happiness; I felt excitement. I shall study my reasons for belief and non-belief, I said, I shall find out...

Was it only a stray glance at the date? Is that the root of my present terror of finding out...is it all because I glimpsed a few numbers in a line?

I wish I could live in the arpeggios.