Happy Birthday

Freedom isn’t free.
(heard)There’s an f to fucking feed.
(subtitles read) There’s a hefty fucking fee.

What follows is a deeply personal blog entry, and those looking for intellectual thoughts, notes on poetics, editing, and even wit, should seriously consider looking elsewhere. If you’re up for a personal journey, and the underworld, and confronting demons, then, as much as these words hold, you have found the right place.

I add this because I am aware werdenfield is straddling – perhaps awkwardly – two worlds, a personal one of process and growth associated with holistic therapy, mythology and Buddhism. The second is a blog chronicling an involvement with a specific community of writers, a specific body of writing and the arts. What these both share – for me – is an abiding interest in consciousness – its representations, narratives, and cultivation. The ultimate end of both is libratory – a shattering of illusions, a clear an powerful engagement with this world. Yet, from my limited and occasional writings here, and due to a certain distaste for pursuing a grand synergy here, I have largely left each to its own. But I think this unfocusing tension, this slight blur or wobble, is productive. And I’m afraid if I veer one way or the other, that something I am intrigued in will be lost – and that this will not be an ecstatic rupture, but a return to an old repression, to maintaining a wall between two gardens, for which there is no reason to maintain. You visitors can take care of yourselves, no? At a basic level, what both of these interests share is that they are worded, that I engage them through the medium of written language, and at that level, they are distinguishable only in particulars.

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PS - Sorry to be formal - its that kind of morning. And, even in America, form has its place, no? Why do I always have to pretend casual isn't its own form? The next, scarier question - is intimacy a form? Yikes. Thanks again for bearing with all these warm-ups. This blog often is my push-ups, stratches and squats. No pretense that that makes for great reading.

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It’s M_____’s birthday. M_____ L___ K________. How much weight can one word – a name – bear? In the dictionary, 28 definitions, 3 main entries, 2 or 3 columns. In the private mind, a stream of connotations and connections for every moment of interaction. Interaction with the person, with their imprint on you, with your memory of them (perhaps a subset of the imprint), interactions with others whom you associate or group with them. It is a work to dwarf Proust, and in constant motion, ongoing, even when left fallow.

Can I write it? Perhaps. What do I want to say here? I am going to call up M_____ and wish her a happy birthday, and part of me will be raging that this is the terms of our relationship, reduced to cinder ash. That voice will ally with a critical and masochistic voices so cruel that they will speak of how this is entirely my fault, that it proves my lack of worth, my inability to stand up, to be a warrior, a man, worthy of respect, anybody. Proves I am shit. I already feel the stings of those blows about my face, my muscles tensing in defense, uncomfortably tight, bearing the weight of the bad news. Enacting the very shrinking from responsibility, the very death and disease the voices reprimand and warn of.

So this – which has little directly to do with M_____ – how to confront it. I neither want to or can ignore/hide it nor lay out all my dirty laundry before the whole world, demanding their involvement. It is not a “how to stay out of trouble” situ, because I am already IN trouble. I can feel it, it rises up in me, demands expression, demands acknowledgment, demands release – something. A metamorphosis, or else a poison. So how to deal with this poisoning – to find its source. This allying of destructive voices, this failure to distinguish between tirade and rational observation, and the loss of perspectives and inner boundaries/ground that follows. A surrender to ghosts. The actual pain between my M_____ and I – is that second? IS that what remains? It is a starting place – but this upsurge of shame and worthlessness – and the anger that follows (directed at whom?) – this is the first barrier. Yes – I’ve made it. I am responsible, but it goes further, wider, deeper than just me. It’s accrued around me – I have come into consciousness as and through this – is this the Christian fallen, or sin – to find oneself in the claws of (and enacting) suffering from the get go – reincarnation of karma throughout the ages – but why call it wickedness then? Start here. Oedipus tearing out his eyes, abandoning the throne. Necessary gestures for renewal, for sobriety, for going on.

Drunkeness? My very ignorance and denial of the dark side of my mental drunkenness is what has brought me here. I am not talking of the delirious lightness, the warmth. I am talking about the dogged attempt to stay in that light, to cling to that central heating. An addiction in which I stand to lose the entire world. Overly-dramatic? Let’s see if I can continue to walk this straight line, arms out at either side. Let’s see if I can experience pain as pain, loss as loss, joy as joy, a joke as just that – a moment of finding humor.

Now to call that fucker.

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2ndPS- And what is left, when I listen and talk to M____ without recriminations, without anger, without drowning in inner dialogue? I hear M____, I hear the distance, betwene us, yes, but also the distances we each carry, and the touch-and-go of intimacy between these gaps. That often gape. Hearing the sadness, really listening, the sadness, the doggedness, the love, of an old relationship, and of two lives. This listening is heartbreaking - its hard to be with - evne by phone - hard to share space with someone who doesn't acknowledge their own suffering, doesn't question their own patterns, is out of touch with their own mortality. Not categorically - never totally, but the smallness of what we talk about, the return to themes of how unfair and difficult, and trying... the sense of burden, of being small and vulnerable before a mosnter threat of a world - and soldiering on, yes, but soldiering on with shoulders hunched, eyes down, rifle in hands. Hearing that - knowing we're still in touch because I carry that attitude to, but am outgrowing it, that I want to let it go - and seeing my own desire to help, the power of M___'s logic beeing - that to help, I must leave the convincing trap of M___'s terms - I must offer love on my own terms, trusting myself and M____, knowing that these dilemmas I am hearing are of M____'s own making. She is choosig to seal herself in stones. That there is very little I can do about them.

In the great Korean film Why Has Bodhi-dharma Left for the East? there's a scene where a monk returns to his mother's house without her knowing. She's blind, and hearing a noise, searches for her slippers to investigate. He watches her in pain for her difficulty in completing what is for him such a simple task. Unwilling to reveal himelf, he can only nudge the slippers towards her questioning hands. This has always been a cutting, heart-rending scene for me on the veyr humility and human smallness of a bodhisattva's acts. And it means engagign, recognizing, acting out of - but differently - that same pain.

Off to lunch, so sorry if the last line is cramped.