November 1st, 2008
Lighter Flower
What is in your head, that if you let it fall you would feel lighter?
Transcriptorial: It gets lighter. I promise.
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What is in your head, that if you let it fall you would feel lighter?
I have let go so many things from inside my head that there’s very little left in there (no pun intended).
Perhaps an expectation I have of another person re: an important day, which I know already he will not meet. He doesn’t see the importance of it. Which is more important: to force him to bend to my will, or to let go and lighten up?
Sigh.
Lighten up. Yes, I know.
But.
Sigh.
Uncurl those fingers, Orinoco.
The worry.
…What to choose first?!
Decisions, decisions.
I cut ten inches of hair off last week.
Wait, IN my head?
Regret. Definitely regret.
Money. Always money. And I hate thinking about it.
If I could let anything go, it would be the thought of finding true love.
I search for it.
And I shouldn’t.
I should just let it find me.
But I can’t help it.
This I know: when you stop looking for true love is when it appears in your life. I am living proof. Let go. It will find you, I promise–it sneaks up when you’re thinking about something else.
Love should always be true.
Otherwise, it wouldn’t qualify as love, at all.
You don’t need to look for it.
When it’s there, it’s there.
When I change my life, such as when I left the Navy or when I took up helping my current handicapped roomie, I dumped things I no longer needed from my mind. It makes adding the new stuff you need easier – usually…
“When I was a child I thought as a child…”
Changes like the ones you are describing put so much distance between you then and you now.
From the King James Version:
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophecy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” (1 Cor 13:1-13)
I thought the context of the passage you referenced important. Sometimes when I read this passage I am put in mind of the immanence of a conversion experience, the latter of which is either a heightened state of psychological denial, or something incommensurate with theories of psychology. The writer makes a necessarily imaginative analogy when he speaks of the child’s relationship to the man: the unknowable distance at which he sets the certain future unsettles the notion of a clear cut distance between parent and child.
More to the point, I like being reminded that love is an ongoing practice. I have erred countless times in love; one hopes the universe is forgiving, loves the universe in the meantime.
memories. of people, of times. of daydreams, even. there’s a lot of them, i’m not quite sure how they’re in there because my memory is awful. but there they are. and feelings about things happening or past or hopes for the future or now.
money is certainly a problem. greed, maybe, but that’s not the word i want…
new daydreams and fantasies of things that won’t happen. things about love. but love is a minor issue, because it’ll happen when it wants to. i have immediate issues. like cleaning.
the list could go on and on…but i think i’ll stop rambling, now…
Regrets, and bitterness.
So many years my body pressed hard under the weight of his body as though I were human and the world forgiving. Anyone might try to reach me, but no lips like his unyielding and no eyes so penetrating. All gesture is impotence. He touched me every time he knew me. All memory is lightness. My love, my love, why have you forsaken me?
My roommate and I have been discussing memories we want to carve out of our heads. Just recently, he accidentally misspelled Delilah in an internet search and instead came upon pictures of the Black Dahlia murder. There are articles, accounts, pictures, and videos I’ve seen that make me queasy whenever I think about them. I’m sure I would feel much lighter without them.
Sublimity is compelling, even traumatic, and perhaps more deeply destructive than the violence of banality. I am moderately preoccupied with this question at the moment.
There are different kinds of lightness, just as there are radically different kinds of human beings. I want to become light in ways that allow me to continue to feel the call of conscience, which is another way of saying that I want to learn and grow as the kind of human I was born to be:
“the world seems to pour through you into me / even if God made me to be alone in the simplicity / that I was wished to be.”
Forgetting is lightness, yes, but one need not bear one’s suffering alone.
The difference between forgetting (laying aside as no longer necessary) and denial (blocking out) is that forgetting can be healing and a lightening of the burden; denial leads to the unbearable lightness of being, as you try to ignore what you’re still carrying.
Yes, I think you are right about this. I think your response to me addresses both this comment and my later reflection on Corinthians. Thank you, orinoco womble.
I might add that it is one thing to recognize the difference you describe, and quite another to experience it. I’ve spent months living in unbearable lightness–which is an altogether different order of reality. Before experiencing unbearable lightness, I would have recognized the insightfulness of your reference insofar as I’ve read Kundera and was imaginatively instructed by the reading. Unbearable lightness on the inside, however, cannot see its unfreedom. Only love–i.e. real, honest, caring relationships–can help to interrupt the short circuiting in the brain that happens in the wake of a traumatic incursion of reality. Thank goodness for friends who do not give up on us when we have given up on ourselves. I like knowing that others want to help me bring myself back to life, not only so that they might listen to me singing about my travels to other side, but because they would miss my smile, for its own sake, if I were no more. I want to love other people as generously as I have been loved.
Anyway, thanks again for responding to me, orinoco womble.
I’ve never read Kundera, but I have a lot of experience with laying aside baggage that is bearing you down with its burdens. In that effort I found the Bible much more helpful as a source text than any philosophy.
You are right…those who are under the harrow cannot see it pressing them down. They know they are not free, but they can’t see a way out.
“I know there’s a comical side to a toad under a harrow; the question is, does the toad see it?”–L. M. Montgomery.