Cetaceus

I’m in Paris, trying to work on my French in part by translating paragraphs from the last Foucault lectures, given in 1984, entitled “Le courage de la vérité.” In doing so, I came across the following, spanning pages 4 and 5. I won’t reproduce the French, but in English it says,

One can also cite a number of practices, such as these correspondences, these exchanges of moral, spiritual letters, of which Seneca, Pliny the Younger…and Marcus Aurelius give examples.

And on the one hand it makes me think, and this is almost too obvious, that we should write more letters, with all the care and time that goes into speaking in our own handwriting, the next-best, or just-as-best, thing to our own voices. On the other hand, it reminds me that we shouldn’t feel so bad, or silly, or as if it is somehow unacceptable, to share ourselves–and in the context of spiritual exercises this seems to always mean a kind of laying-bare, a way of volunteering a state of vulnerability–in the epistolary context. Most of all, for us now, this means over email, text message and who knows what else. But despite almost everyone’s (wise indeed, the problem of nuance over email is well documented), all texts require interpretation, even hand written ones. As such in writing at all, even electronically, in this way you are, after all, in the best of company, as Foucault reminds us.

A small, extra point about this that seems to be worth bearing: it is not at all a matter, for me in writing this, of that uncomfortable state of personal vulnerability that we hide from at all costs, especially in these ironic times, and especially in the context of the electronic-epistolary, being made comfortable or safe. Seneca barred himself to his friends and comrades, yes, and I need not even mention The Confessions, but we don’t know that this was easy for these people, and I would hazard a reasonable guess that in fact, it is precisely because it wasn’t easy or comfortable that it was worth doing. And for that reason, I remind you, and myself, that these kinds of acts and the discomfort that they invoke should be fostered, done, continued not because in recognizing their discomfort we do away with it, but in spite of that sense of vulnerability, and with the aim of taking note, exploring, reflecting on that experience, that feeling, those thoughts, what they mean, what they do to you, how they constitute who you are.

So for this reason, I would reccomend that you (and me) maybe do one of the following, or anything else that fits under the rubric Foucault delmits here: write someone a personal email, be honest and let your gaurd down, be self-effacing, or explore your faults (or perceived faults, as they are just as important) in an electronic correspondance; tell someone you are angry with but which you know you’ll see again and have to reckon (and work it out) with, in plain English to “fuck you”; email a song to someone you care about; and so on.

In doing this, you’re doing something for yourself, and “to” yourself, that is an unecouraged in our culture as it was for the ancients. But again, in doing so, you are in the best of company, and who knows what else.

Not to be too heavy or anything, but the truth about the period in history from my 29th birthday up until the present is that is has been unequivocally characterized by loss. And I mean loss in the serious sense: the loss of people, 2 simply from my life, one, the most important, from the lives of everyone I love. This latter I can’t even speak of here, it’s too much, the venue–as much as I am honest in this space–unworthy. I will leave it just there, then, and save that grief and my efforts at outlining that grand and profound lack for the realm of the verbal, or at least the non-electronic.

The former two, lost from my life, those bother me in different ways. Above all else, because with grand, profound and ultimate loss, there is an important way in which you are helpless, you can do nothing, it comes upon you and leaves you there. These smaller losses, those lost are still here in this world, you sometimes see them, and in many ways that can be unbearable. One of these, indeed the next most profound in the hierarchical schema of these events (frankly the first doesn’t even go in the same category as these others, but there is a kind of thematic connection), I will also refrain from speaking of here. This is the next most present, or rather that absence which is marked by a more than occasional and fantastically difficult presence, also belongs elsewhere in terms of any reflection on it. The thing that makes this one difficult is the ever-present and nagging sense that this loss need not have, and even should not have, happened, and only did out of the efforts of radically negative forces in my life: including my own stupidity and sleeper penchant for self-sabotage. But I leave that there for now, as it was discussed (a discussion ever unfinished, making it worse) yesterday.

This third loss, both seems and is the most trivial–which is not to say at all that it is actually trivial, it is important to me but compared to the other two it is by definition less so. But speaking in relative terms can be extremely misleading, and I don’t like it. Loosing someone is loosing someone, and that is always awful. The difference is, this loss is of the kind that I feel comfortable enough recording some thoughts on it in this venue, for whoever may or may not still read this. And, secretly, since the object of these thoughts is now lost to me, to hope that a specifc pair of eyes glance across this page some how. Of course, if you are reading this, you know who you are and why I put this message here rather than elsewhere.

Try as I might not to be, I am something of a creature of habit. Mostly because there are specific habits and practices in which I find comfort. I can’t speak for others, but most everything seems to me to be about finding comfort. Writing, this very act, is high on the list of things that provide that, second only to certain forms of sleep, and speaking, genuine verbalization, of course. About this time a year ago, some changes came about. Good, but difficult ones, changes I still think on daily, even as the events themselves fade, and the weight attributed to them at the time seems more and more silly. But again, we must be vigilant against relativizing–if things are hard, they are just hard. If people are poor, they are just poor. It doesn’t actually matter if there are harder things later or elsewhere or for someone else, because in the moment, the time and place in question, none of that really matters. And so, one day, in the midst of that, I sent a letter seeking comfort, and found it. It was a little presumptuous of me, the whole thing, but the thing about speaking with others, especially if you are a verbose person like myself, is that they have to be the right people. They, or in some cases like this one, these specific individuals, have to have presented something to you at some point, given something, put it out there, who knows, that has invested them for you with an intuitive sense that that person can somehow receive the message. Now, this “sense,” sometimes that’s all it is, and you are wrong and only annoying the person. But it is like the good Doctor once told me: you can’t read people’s minds, and if you want to know what they think or if what you’re saying is ok, you ask. And when you ask, and when the response is something like “I don’t think I would ever want you to stop talking to me in this way,” well you take it for granted that this is true. I am not being accusatory, or angry or anything, but rather only reiterating something important. My penchant for trying to guess what people are thinking has only gotten me in trouble, and so now I rely only on the facts of the questions asked and the answers given. There had been an intuition after a certain point that this particular form of “finding comfort” may have been crossing some lines only ever imagined, never truly drawn, but I couldn’t tell, and so relying on the facts of the text I continued.

When some people are engaged in this kind of friendship, let’s call it an epistolary friendship, there are so many things that cannot be said, communicated or understood. The truth is, intuition, images, intangibles are all part of communicating, and there is some danger in the task of finding comfort when mediated through the blank stares and regular uniformity of illuminated computer fonts. The realization that perhaps genuine communication never happened, or that we never really understood each other (or that I didn’t make myself clear enough, but couldn’t have if I’d wanted anyway) even now sinks in. Writing in this way, to this person, gave me comfort. And whether or not it was known, so did the things given back. I have only resentment, and the conviction that the grounds for termination were beyond unfair, uncalled for and the results of a grand and fantastically ignorant attempt at mind-reading across a gap it is known does not brook such intuitions, in part by a third party outside these specific lines of communication. But, in a smaller and less important way in this case, I was powerless. I could be resentful, angry, contemptive–I was and still am all of these things–but the ignorance on the part of my former interlocutor of the context of the receipt of this interlocutive pink-slip was profound. Little did you know that thanks to a link here and an audio file there, the comfort you had brought me that day, true to form and all. But how could it have been otherwise? The effect would have been the same had the message not been the callous and cheap one I received: I lost. I lost a means of comfort, but one that could only have ever served that purpose because of the form that comfort had taken over that past year, in person, online and otherwise. To put it this way is not to make this former interlocutor anything less than the profoundly important part of my life that they had been, but rather to explain an important part–certainly not the whole story–of what that genuinely means. So, I lost, and felt it, and periodically still do. I wonder, and will I suppose never know, if sending that note was for you an act of loss or an act of liberation. My instincts tell me the latter, but I can’t rest simply on that. They’ve been both profoundly right and profoundly wrong before.

One sad thing is that it feels really good to say “fuck you” to people. I suppose that no one ever does anything intentionally looking for a “fuck you” directed toward them in the end, as the final outcome. The phrase, when deployed at its full powers, has the ability to bring a form of genuine finality to a situation. A finality that is such that the “fuck you” is present even in cases where it remains unspoken. I find the idea of endings to be terrifying, and frankly pointless–this is why I reject millenarianism and messianism in all their forms. The second coming will be the greatest fuck you in history, because it will not bring anything but pure finality and stagnance. It will not be a nice world anymore once change is over forever, but in fact change is the most fear-inspiring thing out there, and all of religion and philosophy have been driven by this fear. Yes, I agree with Dewey on that point, although he was too swell a fellow to call people out on driving history by fear, anxiety and a kind of pathetic form of weakness, so much that they have all told stories forever that amount, in the end, to wanting the most powerful being they can possibly imagine to just say fuck you to everyone.

Dear friend: although you probably didn’t realize it, this is precisely what you were invoking, and my only recourse was to hand your shit back to you, because I don’t want it. Like I said, I hate endings, and as such if I am going to live with them, I am compelled to do it on my own terms. Someone once said, “Fuck me? No, fuck you.”

I think there is one true thing I can think of to say about these situations, the ones we’re all always looking to get ourselves into, and which for that reason we are all already embroiled in. It is this, and read it with the right accent: “everybody chasin’ somebody else.” I’ll be clear about what this means: everyone I have ever met has been in love with someone who isn’t in love with them, and who in turn is in love with someone else who, like they themselves, do not reciprocate that affection, or at least not in the same way.

At the same time I know and it is clear that the about-face does happen, where someone finally turns around and looks, happily and truly, at the one looking at them. And for this reason, one must apologize for the petty reaction one has to the news that this turn has been gifted to the next person in line, the one you’ve been chasing, who’s caught the attentions of the one he or she has been chasing. Apologies are all around forthcoming, and we hope to be grown up enough to offer them.

When one has planned to spend one’s Sunday reading Hume, it behooves us to not allow distant events–from the personal to the political–in far-off countries and climes to take our attentions away from the texts. That said, it is inevitable, as my attention span is no match for the irrational drive to hang my hat on your every word. If only we’d've played the cards we’d been dealt decisively, with purpose and at the precise historical moment when that stacked hand had been called for. Waiting forever, patience, and so on, are all cover-ups for cowardice. Let’s hope the president don’t make the same mistakes the rest of us tend toward.

You must always tell people exactly what is going on in your interactions. This includes your intentions, your thoughts and your feelings.

In doing so, you can neither exaggerate, deflate or misrepresent any of these things. You have to be precise, if not for yourself, because the other person deserves that precision.

You must never assume that someone else already knows what you are thinking or want when you have not explicitly verbalized these things. It is not possible to be sure of these things, and as there is a fantastic weight carried by the ephemeral things we usually see as existing “in our minds,” one cannot or should not act on assumptions about what someone else thinks or feels.

Anything less than the kind of explicit, overt, clear communication with others is, and this is the precise word for it, cowardly. This being the case, we are all therefore cowards.

Let’s make one thing clear, above and before all else: I am not old. I am, however, and I think fairly, becoming of late more and more aware of the passage of time. I will be 29 in about 2 months, and it is a strange thing to look up and realize that amongst the majority of my new contemporaries, rather than being around an evenly spread (Philadelphian?) mix of those above, those below and those just about the same, I am of late most often in the (Chicagoan?) company of folks on whom I have a few years. It manifests itself in interesting ways. Trying to balance the undertstanding of the importance of humility and the arrogance I sometimes allow myself just a bit of indulgence in, I have noticed on a few small, perhaps perceptible only to me, occasions that I am in the position of being asked. What I mean by this is that in these handful of cases, I notice that I am somehow being appealed to as if not an authority, as someone who would probably know. Know about what, I’m not sure. This probably sounds cocky, but I am not claiming it as a point of pride, or something that happens all the time. But rather a point of aging, of somehow making it known that I have both traveled a lot and had a lot of jobs and spent the lengths of other people’s longest relationships thinking hard and writing more about relationships. There are of course some folks who, as we say where I come from, “won’t give you anything,” who immediately try to call you out when you present something with assurance, as if your experience and insight is somehow threatening to them. I can’t figure these people out, because I tend to make it clear to myself at least that I see and act on a very specific attitude toward the relationship that exists between myself and someone I consider an experiential authority. Some people have a hard time with this; I think it’s a cultural thing, maybe an American thing, maybe even a leftist thing.

I think my comfort with it stems from my lifelong interest in what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” When you read about this sort of thing, first in popular and then later in scholarly sources, something that always gets stressed, especially in ancient or non-western sources, is the importance of the student-teacher relationship, the very special and specific relationship around mentorship. I also try my best to make it a point to recall my gratitude toward those mentors and teachers that I have had in my life, because I want to by mindful of the gifts those people have given me. This goes all the way from my grandparents, to my father to my old boss to various professors, and I tend to expect that relationship. When I came to Chicago my first goal was to present myself to the person who I am excited to have as my advisor, because I have an intuitive (and conscious) sense of the importance for me of having a mentor, a guide, someone with whom I can safely and comfortably bounce ideas and ask even dumb questions, but not simply in a professional way, but also as facilitating an intellectual camaraderie. I am not sure who else thinks this way or assumes these things, but generally I get the sense that a lot of people I meet, again even leftists, have internalized this “go it alone” narrative, this weird American thing where somehow things get done by individuals, and they must to be worth anything. I’m not claiming that anyone I even know actually believes this, or believes in it, but at the same time I think it’s in there, and it evinces itself in a certain standoffishness I see in folks. There are a few ways it comes out: the fear of being to overtly kind to others, of not verbally complimenting or acknowledging others’ strengths, of not feeling comfortable either being a mentor or seeking one out. And so on.

I may of course be completely off the mark here. Maybe I’m just misreading people, and they are more comfortable with this stuff than I think they are, who knows. I do know from a lifetime of experience however, that I personally (and my sisters), because of the background I have and the culture I grew up in, assume and act on a lot of things that are absent for others. The relationship I have to loyalty and fidelity is different than many of my friends and colleagues, and I think that if what I am describing above is the case, I think there may be a relationship between the two. What’s interesting to me is that “my people” tend to also be far less likely to back down from a confrontation. Perhaps we put more stock in relationships or something, and are more effusive about them in both the positive and negative sense. A lot of Americans, despite our cultural claims to bravado and swagger, are more prone to passive aggression, which is again the flip side of not wanting to get too involved in a positive sense with someone else, of lacking trust and so on. There is genuine distance there, and that distance, when I see it, makes me sad.

The more I move away from it in time, the closer I feel to my childhood. Maybe this is typical, but it is important because I tend to feel my own sense of myself as different in behavior and attitude from others more and more keenly. What the genuinely American part of me wants to say at this point is some kind of disclaimer: “who knows, I could be wrong.” The Italian side says, “fuck it, this is how I read this situation. If you disagree then let’s have at it, but I am not just going to fall all over your disagreement and acquiesce.” This has been a constant tension throughout my life, and it hasn’t at all abated.

I have been listening to a lot of Arthur Russell these past few days, as I have just spent the week back in that grand city of Philadelphia, amongst good scholars, good friends, and superlative aesthetics across the board. The problem with Chicago is arguably that I haven’t been there long enough, but going to a show and seeing 20 people I really want to talk long and deeply with, and 5 bands all of whom I know personally and enjoy fantastically is the kind of experience I tend to thrive on, and which is completely closed off to me in the city by the lake. There are good folks to be sure, and I would even say valuable people I cannot ever regret knowing, but the richness of a life built up around one’s best friends in a small and alive city is hard to parallel. In any case, the pangs of the darker parts of my life there have long passed, and I was able to enjoy the neighborhoods and the people again in a kind of pure manner that I can only aspire to in Chicago. All this really says to me is that I just need to make sure I get out more over the course of my time there, especially if that time stretches indefinitely into the future as it might. Thinking about it in this way reinforces the understanding that I have recently come to: that the benefits of purchasing a vehicle far outway my hatred of driving. For one thing, I want to seriously consider moving out of Hyde Park and up to, say, Pilsen next year. Further, the isolation of HP is stifiling for me, and the public transit treks are often prohibitively long, especially when late nights are in the picture. Finally, owning a car would make coming home for visits a hell of a lot easier, as well as things like grocery shopping and the like.

This understanding aside, I’ve realized a few other things lately that I will have to wrangle with for a while. In particular, my devotion to pluralism as connected with my atheism, and the implications–and limits–of what is possible there. I came to some peace with the fact a few months ago that while I aspire to be able to talk like a human being, coexist and be a true friend to absolutely anyone of any background, this is easier said than done, and that even at its best there are limits that must be understood. For example, I really couldn’t have a relationship with someone who’s relationship to the religious differs in certain ways from my own. Nor could I with someone who was politically conservative. This does not in any way mean I would not respect or be a good friend with such people, but rather that while it might seem obvious, it is something to realize in concrete terms. Will have to keep considering on these issues for the future.

As I have been very busy lately studying, I have not written much here lately. As such I want to reprint a very brief essay I wrote a month ago, originally composed as an email on some going thoughts that I have, in fact, not expressed in public at all, but only in very special and specific private conversations with certain individuals. As the response that I got from the best of interlocutors was positive, I thought I would put this out here. I’ve preserved the original email’s short contextual opening.

On the #6 bus home last night I was thinking about love and when I got here I wrote a few paragraphs I thought I would share with you. I think a serious re-defining of the term is in order, for pretty much everyone’s sake:

On Love as Reciprocation
About to go to sleep I had some thoughts on the various issues that have been, for some time now, at hand in these and other conversations. With regard to both the idea and the execution of love, it strikes me that in fact love cannot be lop-sided, and if it is, it is not love but rather something else. What I mean to say is that the directionality of love must be considered, and more so, must be factored into its very definition. Love cannot be a one-way street; it cannot be something that is being put out or projected onto another person without return. This phenomenon, though often enough called love, is in fact something else. Love is, and I mean is, a reciprocal relationship, and the paths back and forth and the nexuses of human beings that it traverses do not and cannot exist in any form of hierarchy. Rather the movement between people of certain feelings, thoughts and actions, of varying proportions, are what concretely constitute love. Putting those things out onto someone else who does not, or does not equally, send them back, is not love but something that we do not have a word for. Taken this way, we see that love is like light: its energy is its mass and its movement is its being. Once it stops, by hitting a wall or another person, and is not re-routed and returned, it in fact ceases to exist. Unrequited loved is a misnomer, and the phrase makes no sense. It must be seen in this way, and I repeat: love is by definition an exchange, and if it is anything else, it is not love.

This is important for understanding some of the prime characteristics and concrete manifestations of love. When seen as necessarily an exchange, a perpetual movement that does not and cannot cease, so much is made clear. Take for example the reverie of love-making, at its best anyway: by this definition, one cannot revel in another who does not themselves revel in the situation, the act or the moment. Very concretely, if one’s partner’s heart is not in it, the experience itself does not reach its full potential. One cannot truly hold another in one’s arms whose muscles fail to fully leap at the sensation of being held. One cannot, I think, cook dinner for someone (in the context of love, at least) who cannot or does not taste all of the small ineffables that have gone into the preparation. Perhaps most of all, can one genuinely “be with” someone else if either of the people involved aren’t “all there” in the fullest possible sense.

Most of all, and this is a second addendum to this definition of love I want to explore, love is, like meaning and friendship, not something that is uncovered, but rather something that is built, crafted, made. One doesn’t find love. In fact, “one” doesn’t do anything, and this is the point. We are talking about an edifice that requires the rolling up of sleeves and finishing the day with dust in your eyes and dust on your hands. It is the type of construction work that cannot be soloed. The lines have to be too straight, the foundations leveled just right: this is a job for two. And again, if it isn’t, or if one decides to attempt this kind of work alone, he or she is building something completely the hell else. And even if it doesn’t seem that way, the final product of any such endeavor will always be something strange, maybe interesting, maybe in rare cases beautiful, but absolutely not what the single builder set out to put together.

Maybe it sounds sad, but I think it is the sort of truth that should be liberating: you cannot be in love with someone if they are not in love with you. It just doesn’t make any real sense. In those cases, folks are just projecting.

———————————–

I’ve decided to repost some other brief posts on the same topic here. I don’t think it makes sense for them to stand alone and out of context, and I want to clear up some clutter.

12.31.08 Two Further Theses on Romantic Love

We all have things that we want to say, or rather need to say, and as such will say. Our entire lives consist, if not wholly in large part, of needing to express various certain things, and is an ongoing movement of things we have said and needed to say, will say and will need to say. The issue with regard to the possibility of romantic love is one of finding that person or those people who will listen, and to whom you will listen.

But there is a danger here: we cannot be mislead by the one who says, “I want to listen because it is you who says these things, and because they come from you, who I love, I want to hear them.” This person has hopefully misspoken, but if not, and if what they say here is true, then it is not possible that there is love between you. The person who is bound to you, and you to them, by love is the person who wants to, and perhaps needs to, hear the things you say not for you, but for their own sake, because he or she is taken by the inherent value, beauty or insight, or is perhaps simply comforted, by these statements regardless of who they come from. It may seem paradoxical, but this is of vital importance, this must be the case because to a very large degree (I balk at saying “above all else”) we are these things that we are compelled to speak.

We must disabuse ourselves of the idea that we have already once (or twice) discovered that person with whom it is our destiny to fall in love, or more simply that “is the right person” for us, but that circumstances have barred the path for you both. More likely, we have not yet encountered such a person.

1.19.09 Another Thesis on Romantic Love

Romantic love is like a mix tape you have been working on your entire life, in anticipation of finding the right person to give it to. You know the extent to which you’ve discovered that person by the level of anxiety experienced when, in the first moment after finally gifting the collection of songs, you genuinely realize that the compilation cannot be completed. And you are certain you’ve found it in the moment of accute doubt experienced when questioning, probably for the first time, the validity of the project itself.

“It’s always night or we wouldn’t need light.”

–Monk

I now feel as though I know what this means.