The other evening I was perusing a local art gallery during an opening when the deejay started playing an acoustic song by a female singer-songwriter in the tradition of Ani DiFranco (if it was not, in fact, Ani DiFranco). I was staring at some Kandinsky-esque geometrical forms and listening to this young woman keen over her strumming — making the kind of yearning-filled accusations only a very young woman with an acoustic guitar can make toward the object of her affection and fury — and suddenly I was a mere twenty years old myself again, a girl with a broken heart in New Mexico, looking at art, filled with unspeakable longing.
This sensation, achingly poignant and at the same time broader than the Atlantic, had been a touchstone of identity for me since my teen years, when I traded smug religious certainty for a sort of tragic-romantic existentialism. Namely, that worldview in which the noble speck of a human creates fragile monuments to him or herself in a vast and indifferent universe, pushing the stone up the hill over and over again, attempting to seize the fleeting day, and raging, raging, raging, against the dying of the light….you get the drift. Pretty much a no-win situation, which Camus and Thomas, among a multitude of other modern and postmodern artists, apparently considered hard reality.
Some precepts of this philosophy’s sobering conclusions are that you are utterly separate and painfully alone in the world, and that you have one brief and all too destructible life in which to try to achieve your desires and connect with other humans, against stiff odds. This lends a terrible urgency and weight to the undertaking of relationships as well as ambitions. This is all there is. The beauty of the flower, or the girl, belongs only to that flower or that girl — so pluck it! Pluck it as though you could save it for yourself and press it like a leaf between the pages of a book. In a world of only form, one loves only form, the particulars and acqusitions of an individual life that are as ephemeral as individual blades of grass. You love her delicate profile and her fondness for Vonnegut novels and her collection of vintage Bebop on vinyl. But is that the totality of what she is, really? What about when she ages, changes, gets Alzheimer’s? Ultimately, in such a world, everything you love is lost, like piles of old letters thrown in the dumpster by unsentimental relatives.
**
My aforementioned stay in New Mexico came after a turbulent and perilous year. The witty but darkly pessimistic boy I felt destined to “save” (inasmuch as anyone can be “saved” within that fatal paradigm), a lanky Argentinian actor with beautiful green eyes who turned me on to Depeche Mode and Christina Rossetti, decided he would rather rescue my endangered princess of a friend from the dragon of her controlling boyfriend than continue to be the center of my universe. Bereft of his adored particulars, his unique tale of woe and his sensual lips (as well as my life’s mission), all seemed lost, and I nearly threw myself in the river that ran behind our college campus.
I did not, however, and by school year’s end had decided upon a radical change of scenery to cleanse my emotional palate. I went to Santa Fe to live with a friend and make cappuccinos for affluent tourists and artists. But in that arty community there was still much to stimulate that pressing sense of ephemerality, that deep, ineffable longing. (No one had yet heard of Ani DiFranco, but another unknown, a young African-American Tufts graduate named Tracy Chapman, provided the plaintive soundtrack to our summer, strumming an acoustic guitar and cataloguing a host of hopes deferred.) The stark landscape emphasized my smallness in relation to earth and sky, while the art spoke to me of striving toward things that seemed perennially just out of reach, like beauty, ecstasy, knowing fully and being fully known, timelessness, completeness, belonging. This longing was never without an object — I always thought of someone specific, and always with a pang of if only. If only X and I could be together in perfect harmony, then maybe we could create a green oasis of consummate joy in this desert of boundless loneliness and certain death, and all the secrets of the universe could finally be revealed. (A tall order, yes, but it’s the “irrational” part of us that makes the wishes!) When my friend and I drove back across the country at summer’s end, I was already driving back toward someone. (Needless to say, that didn’t turn out in my favor either.)
**
I realized, in feeling those pangs of longing again, that I’d strayed from it for quite a while — intentionally. It used to be an integral part of what I thought of as my identity. What happened?
**
The shift had been slight, but it was the kind of slight shift that when made by tectonic plates on the ocean floor creates tidal waves in Indonesia. It started when I began to actually listen to those who had had “waking up” experiences that were all very similar. People who had broken down and broken through. I began to listen, because I was breaking down too. The things I had told myself about the world and other people for so many years had left me with little but layered accumulations of increasingly unbearable pain and grief. I was on the brink of losing it.
Of course, sometimes you have to lose the world in order to gain your own soul.
What I discovered that these people had in common was a fundamental experience of consciousness as the awareness of the seamless oneness of all that exists (which is true on a molecular level, anyway, we’re swimming in an atomic soup), and the conviction that all suffering begins and ends with oneself, i.e. one’s reactions and judgments. (Even Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argued for that kind of choice.) They also possessed the deep calm of the assurance of indestructability, a sort of non-rational knowing that they had (enviably) experienced firsthand.
As I began to afford them the benefit of the doubt, I began to afford more trust to my own perceptions and intuitions of what might exist beyond the surface forms of things. For the first time in my life, I was able to start to separate my observing consciousness from my repetitive and mostly unoriginal thinking, the running (and rather depressing) narrative called What My F-ing Life Is All About. It was freeing to approach whatever presented itself without that precious backstory, that complicated personal mythology. Almost gleefully, I tossed out loads of junk and stacks of papers, acquisitions I had been holding on to for decades. At the same time I noticed that, within those external and changeable particulars to which I always become so attached in people, there inhered something that felt eternal in a very immediate way, a sort of luminescent presence too bright to be extinguished. Within myself I felt a powerful response, something greater than my pain, my frustrated longings, and even my perfectly reasonable fears. With these discoveries came a peace and a reassurance that could be articulated as nothing you truly love will ever die along with your love will never truly die.
I would never have thought that being so “irrational” would lead me to a place of far greater sanity.
**
Within my longtime worldview, as I mentioned, almost every challenge or risk felt impossibly heavy and deadly serious, not to mention full of hazards. Everyday disappointments took on the gravitas of irreversible loss; urgent attempts at achievement or connection gave way to inconsolable grief. What an awful burden I placed on the souls whose cooperation I required for my fulfillment! Is any wonder that my poor actor opted out of trying to fill the role of my Purpose and Salvation in life? No mere mortal with a belly button and a butt-hole should have to shoulder such a yoke. Nor should he have to support a dependency so dire that a sudden withdrawal of the needed “supply” could result in blinding hatred or suicidal rage. Yet I demanded this of more than a few hapless individuals, and — surprise, surprise! — every last one fled.
**
The “awakened ones” said: your happiness can’t depend upon what anyone else does, because you have no control over what anyone else does. Find the places where you react, and inquire. What’s really going on here? Where am I wounded? Where am I lying? Looking deeply this way removes the clouds of self-deception from your heart, and uncovers the sun that shines perennially underneath, the radiance of unconditional love. (For one example of such an inquiry, you can read about Byron Katie’s Four Questions in this past post.) When you’re not trying to control other people, and not resisting the way things are, you naturally return to your original state of well-being, and are able to act in a manner mindful of theirs as well.
This made an astonishing amount of sense. That so-called radiance was the “something greater” I started to strengthen inside myself by refraining from doing the rational, usual thing and following the dictates of fear and self-preservation. By following their lead and delving inquisitively into my own reactions and projections instead of withdrawing from situations that cause me pain, I’ve begun to bring to light a great deal of unconscious behavior in myself, fundamentally shifted my orientation to the world, and opened up to greater generosity and lovingkindness. (Spiritually sensitive people frequently tell me I actually “look brighter.”) When I look at what passes for common sense about interpersonal relationships in the popular books and media, I wonder if we haven’t severely limited our experience and growth out of a short-sighted unwillingness to go through the discomfort of embracing something other than what we’d had in mind. It’s easier, I think, to blame others for their inconsiderate freedom (the nerve of some people!), and shut ourselves down, shut out the contradictory noise that refuses to arrange itself into our pre-written symphony.
Maybe it sucks to not get your way. But maybe it’s not “the soil falling over your head,” either. Is this all there is? What if there’s more to what-is than you think there is?
**
Those more enlightened than I would say that to directly access the numinous (or divine, depending on who you’re talking to) and to feel the resultant wholeness removes the sense of separation that creates the longing for it. All I know is that for most of my life I stood in art galleries and museums feeling like I was missing something. These days what I’m missing, more often than not, is the feeling of missing something.
I’d like to think that’s progress.
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