What the Hell is This?

Mornings stab me awake, again, like they did after my exile from the studio, only with a new awfulness. As soon as I come to awareness, my bowels go cold and a fierce ache consumes my chest. I try to go back to sleep. I try to sleep for as long as possible. I am not working any kind of normal schedule. I’ve given up my place on the training team so that no one will rely on me to be at work at a certain time. I stay in semi-conscious limbo, in this cocoon under the comforter that still bears Sam’s DNA, enervated by loss. Like an illness, it demands down time.

I regret now all those impatient mornings I dragged Sam, unwilling, from the warm, dreamy womb of our shared bed and out into the cold, harsh light of consciousness and our separate obligations. Every day, now, I’m re-born like a preemie, squalling and kicking to have been ripped too soon from a secure, secret paradise and stuck in a bright, sterile box where I can be gawked and poked at.

It’s too late, but I want to hit the snooze alarm. I want just five minutes more, nestled against the aromatic fur on Sam’s chest, breathing him in. I never went for hairy guys before, but Sam completely redefined my world. That’s what happens. The ‘list’ goes out the window.

I’m finding it hard to write, now. The language is leaving me in silence…

**

The other night I watched Charlie Kaufman’s latest madcap and fatalistic opus, Synecdoche, New York. It was brilliant and depressing. Like much of the Woody Allen canon, it came from a place of unflinching pessimism about the human condition (we’re born alone, we die alone, and we’re on our own in between), and a nakedly obsessive-compulsive self-referential-ness. Kaufman’s protagonist (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) creates a massive and endless play-within-a-play, turning everything he lives into a representation. After a while this exercise made me queasy.

And it made me realize something.

What happened with Sam and me resists explication, formulation, re-creation. It was quite possibly the most beautiful, inexpressible, and real exchange I’ve had with another human.

Any kind of art is, of necessity, a way of freezing and fossilizing life. You choose what makes it into the picture; you emphasize certain aspects, and ignore others. (Kaufman’s choices definitely reinforce his bleak worldview.) For once I find that I can’t write about an experience of mine and do it justice. I can’t turn Sam-and-me into some kind of art for general consumption. I can’t even explain us to other people in a way that helps them to understand why his leaving is such a big fucking deal, and why I’m totally fucking incapacitated. But you weren’t together for very long. How well could you have known each other? It takes at least six months before you can really say you love someone.

**

My friend Elena, a circumspect survivor of childhood sexual abuse, used to speak disparagingly of what she called “instimacy.” She had good reasons for policing her boundaries and keeping her guard up. She had been cruelly invaded, at her most vulnerable, by someone she trusted.

What doesn’t follow from that, however, is to assume there’s anything inherently or universally wrong with someone choosing to fling his or her arms wide to embrace another person without reservation. To actually be as open as an undefended child.

Yes, it does take time to get to know other people’s reactivities, their sore points, their shortcomings, and the various acquired selves they’ve constructed to help them “get out of childhood alive,” as Ben Zander put it, and live in the world. Watch any given Woody Allen movie and you’ll see characters falling for one another’s personalities, tastes, quirks, gimmicks, and neuroses. It’s a cerebral exercise in attaching (and is perhaps why Annie Hall is so popular among intellectuals). When I made a list of what I wanted in a man, and Sonny came along and embodied that list, I was still laboring in this vein — approaching the question of love quantitatively, almost like a comparison shopper.

I didn’t fall in love with Sam because of his fondness for Dr. Who (even though it made him cute in a nerdy sort of way). I wasn’t prepared for everything he taught me about his night life. And I’ll admit I couldn’t have predicted how he was going to react under extreme stress, or toward my pressure regarding his brakes; that threw me for a loop.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t know who Sam really is.

**

Earlier this year, as I mentioned in another post, I lost the man I regarded in many ways as my moral and existential father.

Ron Devert became my philosophy teacher in high school not long after I flushed my Christian faith. His choice of texts, and the themes he had us explore therein, had a lasting impact on my impressionable and searching soul. He introduced us to Saint-Exupery and Pablo Neruda, Lao Tzu and Thomas Merton. We read Zen koans and Harold Pinter plays, handouts about goddess-centered societies and antiwar poems by WWII soldiers.

What Mr. Devert tried to get across to us, at the end of the day, was that our lives would be more meaningful — perhaps even happier — the more authentic, and less stifled by convention, they were. (After having rejected the plasticity of born-again fundamentalist churchiness, I didn’t need a lot of convincing on that front.) He didn’t whitewash loneliness, despair, dread, or death — we confronted those subjects on a daily basis — but at the same time his outlook was far from nihilistic. While never promising us a rose garden, Mr. Devert celebrated beauty, courage, and kindness. Most of all, he celebrated love. Like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, his central message to his beloved students was carpe diem. Seize the day.

In other words: fling your arms wide, and embrace life, and love, without reservation. Be who you are fully; refuse to live within compromise and fear.

All these years later, the lessons I carried away from Mr. Devert’s class are still etched on the innermost tablets of my being. For decades afterward, I held onto an essay by Thomas Merton he had given us entitled Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?

Having had little life experience to reinforce Merton’s words as a teen, I still felt their profound truth, and desperately wanted to live them.

I lived them when I welcomed Sam into my life.

**

But I want to let Brother Merton do most of the talking for me. I’ve said enough.

“Love is not just something that happens to you,” he writes, “it is a certain special way of being alive.” (Emphasis his.)

Life is not a straight horizontal line between two points, birth and death. Life curves upward to a peak of intensity, a high point of value and meaning, at which its latent creative possibilities go into action and the person transcends himself or herself in encounter, response, and communion with another.

This assertion, of course, is heresy from the popular Eastern/New Age standpoint, in which one is supposed to seek nothing of integral value outside oneself. As is the follow-up statement “We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.” But I’ll come back to that point.

Even as a high school student, the following passage had such an impact on me that I became determined not to live a compartmentalized life:

Genuine love is a personal revolution. Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you. You may prefer to keep this from happening. You may keep your thoughts, desires, and acts in separate compartments if you want: but then you will be an artificial and divided person, with three little filing cabinets: one of ideas, one of decisions, and one of actions and experiences. These three compartments may not have much to do with each other. Such a life does not make sense, and is not likely to be happy.

Devert and Merton helped shape me into a more integrated person, someone who “goes (her) way,” as Michel de Montaigne put it, “all of a piece,” and doesn’t cut parts of herself off from other parts. (Of course this also means that I’m rather useless at work at the moment. Compartmentalizing does have its uses in the corporate world.)

Yet it took me this long to really know the following, and to throw out my “list:”

We waste a great deal of time modeling ourselves on the images presented to us by an affluent marketing society. In doing this we come to consider ourselves and others not as persons but as products — as “goods,” or in other words, as packages. We appraise one another commercially. We size each other up and make deals with a view to our own profit. we do not give ourselves in love, we make a deal that will enhance our own product, and therefore no deal is final.

…Love is not a deal, it is a sacrifice. It is not marketing, it is a form of worship.

It occurs to me that my old friend Sonny and I suffer from the same strain of vanity. We both bought hook, line, and sinker into that whole Gen-X and Gen-Y preoccupation with fashion, hipness, indie rock, and funky packaging. While he was off literally charming the pants off statuesque yoginis in wispy Anthropologie blouses, I was running after pretty emo slackers with rock ‘n’ roll haircuts. But just because we thought we were being somehow countercultural didn’t make us any less consumerist (or shallow) than the “mainstream” kids in Abercrombie & Fitch listening to Beyoncé on Clear Channel radio. What Merton is saying is true: as long as we view other people like products on parade, we’ll always be on the lookout for a better value. We’ll always want the newest upgrade. And we’ll always be anxious about our own market worth.

Within this marketing-culture paradigm,

…the lover then becomes the beautiful glowing icon of self-satisfaction, the desirable, slick, and infinitely happy package, rather than the warm presence of one who responds totally to the value and being of the beloved.

It seems to me that Sonny is still trying to reform himself into that glowing icon, that infinitely happy and marketable package. When I read his frequent status updates about yogic bliss and transcendence, they inspire in me nothing so much as that anxious sense of ceaseless striving for an unattainable perfection. It’s so exhausting, to keep that up! God knows I’ve tried! It’s possible that he’s being genuine, and that I’m being unfair…but for me that stuff always seemed to turn into some kind of metaphysical pissing contest. I no longer have any desire to compete on the enlightenment “market.”

No, why bother with that crap when you can be, and have, the warm presence of one who responds totally to the value and being of the beloved. That line has glowed like an ember in my heart all these years. When I responded to Sam, I wasn’t responding to an icon, or a package, or even anything that might have been immediately apparent to our coworkers and acquaintances.

I think we both saw something else.

One of the reasons why love seems dangerous (is that) the lover finds in himself too many new powers, too many new insights. Life looks completely different to him, and all his values change. What seemed worthwhile before has become trivial: what seemed impossible has become easy.

As I said in my last post, “I think I like the ways in which Sam has changed me.”

The following is counterintuitive if you’ve steeped yourself in the latest spirituality and self-help literature — that “New Age standpoint” I mentioned before — most of which is aimed at alleviating suffering by teaching spiritual and emotional self-sufficiency. I embraced that rugged Zen independence for years, in solitude, but I have to admit It does taste like sour grapes now, after having tasted sweet wine:

My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their eyes; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior “package.” The package is totally unimportant. What matters is this infinitely precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person.

I have never been as naked with anyone as I was with Sam. I left all the lights on, and I didn’t scurry to hide when daylight came — as deeply ashamed as I usually am of my marbled, old-lady legs. Sam never seemed to give a shit about that. And I discovered that the wholly superficial ideas I’d held about what I thought would turn me off (like hairiness!) were totally irrelevant. Shedding those beliefs was like shedding a parochial school uniform I’d mistaken for my own skin.

In accepting Sam just as he was, feeling accepted by him just as I was — rejecting that whole stupid consumerist paradigm, for once — I found my terror of aging was significantly lessened as well. I now actually see, the way children see (als das kind kind war), that it’s not necessary, nor does it mean much, to keep trying to present an eternally cute and youthful package to a capricious marketplace. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. I feel less like I’m bailing out the sinking boat of my desirability with a slotted spoon.

When people are truly in love, they experience far more than just a mutual need for each other’s company and consolation. In their relation with each other they become different people: they are more than their everyday selves, more alive, more understanding, more enduring, and seemingly more endowed. They are made over into new beings. They are transformed by the power of their love.

Together we really were different people. I was a version of myself, probably one of the most original versions of myself, that had never been given a chance to run around free. The unabashed and devoted lover inside me had been wanting out of her cage for a lifetime. For his part, Sam was an indescribably sweet, unarmored human being none of his bullshitting bowlsmoking homeboys would have ever recognized.

In reality, love is a positive force, a transcendent spiritual power. It is, in fact, the deepest creative power in human nature…it is a living appreciation of life as value and as gift. It responds to the full richness, the variety, the fecundity of living experience itself: it “knows” the inner mystery of life. It enjoys life as an inexhaustible fortune. Love estimates this fortune in a way that knowledge could never do. Love has its own wisdom, its own science, its own way of exploring the inner depths of life in the mystery of the loved person. Love knows, understands, and meets the demands of life insofar as it responds with warmth, abandon, and surrender.

As an adolescent, I had little frame of reference to go by, but I believed this fervently, as if it were my new religion. And in a way it has been, ever since. Funny that I should finally find it out with someone not long out of adolescence himself…

When I feel old and weird about that, I remind myself of Anaïs Nin, who met her second husband Rupert when she was 44 and he was 28. She was never one for convention, either. And they made it work for thirty years, until her death.

Sam and I made it work for a little over thirty days…but every day felt like an inexhaustible fortune. At least to me.

**

It’s too bad she won’t live…but then again, who does?

– Edward James Olmos’ character Gaff in Blade Runner

My emails are still unanswered; I suspect I may not hear from Sam at all. Every day that goes by, communication feels less likely. (When I worried, at one point, that he was blowing me off, the way so many other men have, when he didn’t call, he told me “Never worry.”)

You may find the prospect of my possible abandonment at this juncture cruel or incomprehensible, especially given all of the above, and I may be overreacting: I’ve been left crying in the dust so many times, I expect men to disappear. But I also know that Sam felt in a certain way abandoned by me. I know how much being with people sapped him, and how sorely he needed to get away from everything and everybody. And there may be still more to it than that.

Even if I do hear from him, there are no guarantees of any sort of future. Even if it were possible for us to construct our own unconventional happily-ever-after, it finally hit me — after his departure, and like a ton of bricks — that his chronic medical condition is, however slowly, killing him.

There are frantic moments now when I wonder whether he didn’t make the whole middle east job story up, after his last trip to the doctor, just so he could go home to his parents and fade quietly, away from our concerned and watchful eyes. Or whether he didn’t deliberately place himself in a “hot zone” overseas, counting on some insurgent bomber to make things fast and easy.

These and other dire possibilities go through my head daily, knowing nothing, hearing nothing.

But I have got to stop, or I will drive myself insane.

Whether our time is over — or can ever resume — don’t think I’m sorry about having started this. No. I let Jonathan slip away without ever having given him all the love he so amply deserved. If you recall, I resolved not to make the same mistake with Sam.

I’m glad I took the chance. And grateful. For what we had. For the most beautiful thing I ever allowed to happen to me. In exchange for that first night together alone, I’d suffer the fires of hell.

Loss is inevitable. Loving is optional.

Carpe diem.