THE YOUNG poet Frank O’Hara wrote,
To be able to throw something away without yawning and thus make good our promise to destroy something but not us.
How hard it is to create maxims, design thoughts for our lives. Just when we are in need of directions there seem to be none—everything is a zigzag, either a dead-end street or a frightening new road. For every categorical yes, there is always the hovering possibility of a serious no. For every hope, a fear. The past hangs heavily upon us and we feel the weight with impatience; and yet how grave is the risk of emptiness in casting off what is behind us. I myself am inclined to the belief that change, revelation, dramatic turnings in our lives must come from within, from self-knowledge, effort, and a genuine desire for change. Nevertheless, I have seen freedom, happiness, and goodness come, finally, from what had seemed to be the wreckage of personal existence, from alterations violently resisted, from unhappiness that fell as a devastating blow. No one would wish misery surmounted as the way to peace. It is merely important to remember that it can sometimes happen.
Throwing out, giving up, casting aside: sometimes this happens naturally, as one of the benevolences of time. Again, it may have to be a decision. Accumulation goes hand in hand with inertia. The pinching shoe, the single glove—what hope makes us hang on? Of course we have been brought up to believe in the hoarded piece of string as a moral truth; it is part of the absurd, the joke of existence.
There are single gloves in our inner life also. These are the impractical, cherished memories, the longings, the clingings, the regressions that we clearly see as useless, cumbersome, and still they will not yield. We stand before these memories paralyzed, unable to go backward or forward. Mournfully we look at the glove, pick it up, cast it once more back into the drawer or box. After all, it is perfect of its kind and needs only its lost partner to assume its role: The prodigal may return.
What is real? What is important? It is almost an insult to ask these questions, especially of an unhappy person. If the questioner had an inventory of truth he would be one of those transcendent mortals—a man who could not be surprised. For most of us, today is the future, action is belief, events are character. Giving up is for others. Sermons are for friends, children; resolutions for midnight.
We set out each day with our props, costumes, gestures—our personality. These are a part of a mask, and yet the mask is real. Suddenly, you, the mask, your life, are different, violently altered by events or persons you have depended upon. We ourselves are an accumulation, and a lot of what is us has been supplied by others. When our relation to others suddenly changes, everything valuable seems to be brought into question with an unbalanced swiftness.
Memory: It is a forest. It is the sun and shade, the air current, the luminous crown, the damp root—the precious jungle of our being on earth. In memory, with its density of feeling, the treasures of human experience are preserved, just as the forest represents the aesthetic apotheosis of actual nature. And yet memory is also a menace—dark, lonely, fearful. Our rootings and clingings to memory are a sad entanglement from which one would, at certain times, free himself if he had the power to do so.
In painful memories, those that represent attachments to a lost past, the very suffering distorts the complexity of life, makes the flawed more perfect, the mixed more beautiful than it was, the doubtful more true. Memories are also the mausoleum enshrining resentments and long, futile angers. A need for rest, tranquility, for the promise of the future finally challenges the domination of painful memory. What is hoped is that in giving up the obsession with the past a new present can come into being.
Forgiveness is the goal of troubling memories. If it is possible to set aside the memories, it can then be possible to think of reliving them someday, without desperation, in a new form, kind to our souls, soothing. All the losses of life, whether accidental, inevitable, or simply cruelly thrust upon us, seek to be forgiven. Always what is most important in one’s personal life is to forgive the unforgivable. The forest of memory, with its balance of light and shade, of rain and dryness, its terrors and its silences, is not under our complete control. But it accommodates us finally, if the will is there, the wish to forget, the courage to cast off”.
Survival is a desert. By instinct we face it carefully, with a saving fear. Habits, expectancies, demands, vanity all disappear before the empty, unpredictable spaces, the burning and the cold, the loneliness, the sense of being utterly thrown back upon chance and one’s practical valor, inner resolution. In the desert there is no hope for the selfish, the hysterical, even if those are states usually brought on by the crisis of survival. The spectacular wastes themselves are the product of disintegration, change, erosion, lunar aridity.
The idea of the desert is a negative one—to explain what we can do without. Itself a mirror, an illusion of surfaces—it destroys mirrors and illusions. Our sense of worth and of the future trembles feebly before us in the drama of survival of our ego, our egotism, our self-love. In the stripping away of false hopes and false self-hatred there is beauty, like the beauty of the Sahara, created by winds. False self-hatred is the punishing wish to take on blame, to rush to accept bad luck, to use guilt as a sort of glorification, a strangely gratifying ego-trip.
The young are the center of all things and, alas, so are the more experienced. It is natural to build the universe around our own consciousness, and difficult to do otherwise. We would be less than we are if life kept us long in a struggle for emotional survival; and the effort made, almost unconsciously, is toward the restitution of something orderly, something to be counted upon, that does not immediately threaten. In love, the despair that comes from loss, from deprivation, throws us into the desert. Sometimes it is only by stark and splendid renunciations that hurt persons can find the water in the sand.
Blame and resentment are like trunks on our backs. It is part of our nature to try to shift responsibility for ourselves to others and to condemn them when they “betray” us by refusal. Some of the greatest shocks of life are the recognition that others simply do not want always to be responsible for us. Women especially, or so it often appears, face the desert with a feeling of heartsore astonishment. The silence was meant to be filled with comforting voices. The rage they feel seems to them of a sacred order, theirs to treasure by right. One of the purposes of a more conscious and independent existence for women is to relieve them of their conviction that they will always be safe. The inclination to repeat our grievances, to insist that a payment is always due us—this is an indulgence that everyone must sooner or later give up. A hardening sets in as we go over and over the same ground. We can never be as accusing, impatient, and discourteous to anyone as we are to our own, to those we love. It is easy to see the indulgence of bad temper in others and for that reason the adversities of our friends seldom surprise us. As outsiders we had seen the blinking signs of trouble, interruption, reversal. For ourselves, vanity, habit, and rashness blind us to our follies, to the sins we commit against love.
Repetition—the motor of existence—and without it each day would begin anew in an exhausting need for discovery and experiment. Probably most of us could not bear to get up without the sigh of a blessed monotony to carry us through part of each hour. The principle of repetition is destructive, however, when it applies to our picture of things, as indeed it constantly does. To persist in a fixed idea of ourself, in a rigid evaluation of those around us who greatly matter, to think we have it all properly and finally placed forever is death.
Rearrangements, revisions, reassessments hardly occur to us at the point where they are most needed—our ideas about those closest to us. It is as if we had cast our footprints into cement and called it “our relationship.” The extraordinary thing is we know well that our husbands, friends, families are capable of quite different relations with different people. By this we mean, if anything is meant, that we recognize the reciprocal quality in the manifestations of personality, the way it is modified by another—and modified most of all by the amount of courtesy, attention, trust, imagination another brings to the shifting lights and shadows of our own being.
“He is very gay and friendly at his work. It is only at home that he is a monster of gloom and ill humor.” And, “To her own friends she is perfection and the life of the party. With the family—very sloppy and rude.” Which is the true person? The happy daytime or the morose evening? The elated partygoer or the sullen daughter? We are trapped and we trap each other in our fixed positions.
Our unfavorable verdicts are especially dear to us. The monstrousness of superiors, the fecklessness of inferiors, the ingratitude of children, to say nothing of the world at large, the bad luck, the betrayals and treacheries, the unacknowledged generosities: these are another accumulation. To give them up is an expropriation, a sort of aggression. And yet we are imprisoned by these negatives. With them no discoveries are possible, no exhilarating freedoms welcomed.
“A sense of reality”—what does it mean? It seems to suggest some are gifted with the capacity of the willingness to see what is rather than what one would like. Apparently others have the possibility, or the misfortune, of unreality. It is not quite a choice, at least not in every instance. States of feeling, problems of value are especially elusive in their connection with reality. Fortunately, we have such a tender tie to our consciousness of things that we take the grand and practical assumption that our feelings are real, our understanding of the world about us more or less in line with the understanding of others. Naturally, there are surprises and our picture of life is challenged. Then we are hurt, angered, or simply puzzled. The very frightened will feel small, tricked; the vain will be outraged, unyielding.
Few things are more gratifying to the spirit than the meeting of a person who practices a sort of eternal vigilance, who really asks himself what his life, the life of his family and friends are truly about. This is an enormous effort, like signing on for a peculiar régime of calisthenics. To think about a troubled person is to ask what can his life and his problems uniquely mean to him. Where does he hurt and can it be changed? Probably these questions can only be asked in silence. They are at the least an awareness that the wishes and hopes of others are as sovereign as our own. Of course it is difficult to keep on the alert in this way. Sympathy is a gift, sometimes almost an occupation.
Love. It is strange that love for humanity, for the good, for justice, for truth is not the same as love for a boy or girl, a man or woman, for someone whose elusive affection you are seeking. I have often wondered whether there can be unilateral, unreciprocated love between men and women. There is much in love that simply cannot float alone, without an anchor or an answer. We assert the imaginary claim of the past, of the time when love was mutual. Still, if one of the two has withdrawn affection, the rapidly changing emotions of the other are more violent, more ferocious than we can easily trace. Unilateral love may be a mask for jealous resentment, for an anguish that has turned love to fear, anger, even to hatred. “I am still in love even though I am not loved.” It is a puzzle. Can it be true?
One-sided love should be thrown away, if possible. It is not the impracticality, the poor “economy,” that cause hesitation, but the fact that it may not be real, may only be a blurred mask for power wishes. A wish to create guilt and confusion. Sometimes by the willingness to let go of a love that has, in fact, gone, we can reach, finally, after suffering, a true condition of “loving” someone who has long ago treated us badly. Then affection is not a weird, ambivalent manipulation of the death of love, but a sort of salute to its happier beginning. Love is an ethical idea. There is always renunciation as well as possession hidden in its heart.
No one, Pascal wrote, dies so poor that he does not leave something behind. And we are never so poor that we cannot, in the interest of a kind of purity, throw away many things that are treasured without joy, held as an infernal habit, an indulgence. In the renunciation of the useless and heavy, a useful and light spirit slowly pushes up through the ground.
1973