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.