Life lived is a life loved; a life so lived and loved is a life as monologue. I would even go as far as to postulate we become Monologue in our truer (even truest?) form when we learn to let go of the need for external verification of our own intrinsic self-worth. We need no other voice than our own to declare unequivocally “I am.” And we look out from our singularly unique point in the universe to respond to the whole of said universe, “You are.” We as Monologue create monologue, and at the leading-edge of this there is dialogue with Dialogue. That so writ …
We in the role of our minor monologues are all simpleton utterances, moments sluicing off from the next and into the next. We finish one flowered delivery only to begin again, cue cards tucked behind shirt-sleeve, prompting our way through scene after scene, play after play. We stand, light piercing our eyes, blinded into believing this our theatre full; an attentive attendance to our every performance. However, while the bill may be printed ink dry and nailed and posted even the crickets are figments, phantom attendees to our great strut upon the planks of a rose stained stage. We are neither truly heard nor seen by anyone or anything; more are we but an imagined perception of a blind deaf mute Universe. We become both actors and attendees in this, the descending arcs of our own passionate play. We awaken from undreamt dreams, a languishing sigh of eyelash on roughened cotton as we are caught glimpsing another, any other, near us. Here now we hear the more exuberant sigh of a passing smile nailed to our faces, moments later comes the fervid rustle of hair run through by crippling hands. On their lips lingers the moist scent of Lethe. We taste then we nibble then we bite and then we gorge off of each other. We offer a limb to get a limb, to cling one more day to our wandering in this our corporal hinterland. We stave off starvation, hunger driven by our transcendent angst, through these small shared mercies and these intimacies of nearness. We hunger. We hunger never knowing for what; never knowing that the feast to sate this hunger is waiting for us to but sit and partake.
I think we have it in us to spend a lifetime next to, never with, others. It is easy, I think, to let the fear of being alone—more particularly the sensation of loneliness—drive us to never sit in our own bones comfortably. The fear we often feel deepest is the fear of being alone. Let us be honest. This is an incomplete statement: “fear of being alone.” There are two words that trail along that we rarely mention in the company of others, or even to ourselves. And that is key, is it not? We fear being alone with ourselves. Because this is what being alone is. And it is this fear of ourselves that drives us to have an endless parade of dialogues with others, all are vain attempts to avoid having a monologue with ourselves. Worse, we not really having any meaningful dialogue with others. We are just having a rather convoluted conversation with ourselves, needing to know ourselves but failing to do so miserably. This is the true source of loneliness. It is not that we are alone but that we do not know (accept and love) who we are.
The universe is a cross product of an infinite set of moments with an infinite set of experiences framed by an infinite set of perspectives, these each splintering into an infinite set of separate universes. And ocean of oceans that we ultimately haul ourselves up and out of and back onto to our life’s beach, itself a sand-grained infinity of all this all over again. Here we might hear the waves, our hands no longer to carry clarion call but conical shell for us to listen to Life, it all allusion. There are dialogues. And then there is Dialogue. Dialogue begins the moment we stop having a monologue with ourselves through others. Dialogue is not mere egos co-conflating each through proximity, though. It is not an exchange of words. Or of ideas. Or even eternal sacrosanct emotions. Dialogue is the empathy of a sole soul to another. It is the cohabitation of existences, of opening up and stepping out of, and stepping back into one another. Dialogue is egoless; devoid of “I” and “you” even as this union itself then becomes its own “I” pronounced as /wi:/.
Maybe it is rare, theoretical even; nevertheless, I believe I have glimpsed it between moments in life; this thing called Dialogue. And how I do hunger for it. And how I am willing to wait for it, willing to wait for another person, we both as Monologues, in order that we might have dialogue, become Dialogue. Nevertheless, I have had enough “dialogues” in my own life to know I am still simperingly blind on stage waiting for this monologue to end and me as Monologue to begin.
Love, at its deepest and purest form, is a monologue. I come to this conclusion based on a long-held conviction that love is selfless, without expectation. Like a monologue that does not expect a response, we love because we love and not because we expect to be loved.
We love because it is the simplest, purest form of a selfless state of self-expression. We love because we accept the “what is” of the Universe; without reservation, without judgement. Love is not a projection of our desires, wants, or even needs on the external word; love is the very inverse whereby we absorb the as-is of this Universe, allowing it to be whatever it needs to be.
In some very weird ways love is even a reversed monologue; in this one might infer that love is a form of listening. But it is not merely passively listening; it is ingesting and absorbing and incorporating and integrating the world around us into ourselves. And once this integration is complete we reflect back this — an empathetic understanding — to the outside world.
These many entries found herein are written openly to anyone–you–who wishes to listen. I have no reservations that few read my words. It is enough that I write what I believe. It is additive and precious that some may read and even respond. But I also write to a very specific person: You, if you are that you. It is enough that I love the way I do. The former is of the more literal and literary sense of a monologue, the latter more of the sense of this very entry. As with this entire site, I write as much between the lines as I do on the lines; I write as much to you and to You. In both cases we have a monologue void of expectations of a response from you or You.
I go to knock on doors neither knowing or expecting you or You to open them.
I write words neither knowing or expecting you or You to listen.
I love you neither knowing or expecting you or You to love me.
But I knock; I do.
But I write; I do.
And I love; I do.
We should caveat, as always that this is what I believe love is, this is who I believe I am.
I recently watched in it’s entirety “Arrested Development“. The simple critique: the first season is an elaborate set of “jumping the shark” story-lines that quite ironically move the story toward a surprisingly humane treatment of of the species Americana (dysfunctional) familia circa 2001. Even as good as the first season is, I found the second season to suffer from an ailment other such similar species share: a loss of self-reflection upon the very internal processes that once moved me. And in so losing touch with this core defining element there is nothing that remains but what is crudely writ large. And without a healthy dose of self-awareness and even self-deprecation, the patient transforms into a caricature of itself. Whether it is swift or prolonged under this malaise, death nonetheless comes in the form infinite loop of banal parody: Americana (dysfunctional) auto-parodic familia [sic].
But it is not only the churned bastard children of Hollywood that is susceptible to this disease of the soul. This particular virus is equally found, and more tragically the case may be, in we Homo Sapiens. We suffer, too, to become a parody of our image of ourselves. We no longer are able to grow as human beings, and instead from one day to the next we repeat ad nausea our yester-self. While this disease manifests itself often in the twilight years of life, the vector for infection finds ample opportunity during times of comfort-ability. But before I go too far in trying to claim more than you might infer from reading what is to proceed, permit me the small courtesy of inoculating you from any inductivist claim of universality and with similar severity of a surgeon general inform you, dear reader, to remain calm and not panic as the disease I have is not transmittable by any means other than via auto-inoculation. I am sick and have lived a life in a state of arrested development for much of my life.
I have found in my own life that the best diseases, as it were, are the ones that progress you rapidly out of good health; with these diseases I know I am sick. I know all too well with aid of softened memories what it feels to be healthy for it was only yesterday I felt spritely, this weakness now in my limbs an enemy to be despised and fought off. But what of degenerative diseases, those sicknesses that grow slowly so that their shadow goes unmarked by us under our noon-day sun? You believe you are healthy and everyday you grow sicker you merely re-normalize yourself to this new state of a gradual decline toward collapse. I only now find myself recovering from one such degenerative disease, one that started farther back that I might wish to admit. But like a lot of diseases there is no known cure, only remedies to tide you over till the next outbreak. My apologies to be the bearer of this news, but to be honest, I suspect we all suffer from arrested development. The only distinction without any real difference is that we suffer it to different degrees along different dimensions during different times in our lives.
For myself, this disease had an innocuous enough beginning. At a very young age I was indoctrinated into the belief that I was a “young man”–an adult living inside a child’s frame but with all the mental and emotional capacity attributed to someone much older than myself. I grew to and grew up to believe I was a mature as the adults around me. I saw myself equal to adults both in intellectual and maturative terms. This was, of course, the farthest thing from the truth. I was a child with all the fears, uncertainties and ignorances that are natural to being a child. I may have been at times precocious, but more so I was supremely naive. This ailment became enforced in large part from an upbringing epitomized by hearing (too) often: “What I do is wrong, Ward. Find your own way.” And so I found my own way. And while I am largely reticent to say my way was wrong in so much as there is no other way I can attribute to where I am now expect for the path I took; nevertheless, the way I did ultimately take lent itself to arresting my development in my mid-twenties. It was not that I was a child, but I was a child believing he was an adult.
Not to scale.
Let me jump to the end of this story and work a bit backwards. While my second marriage was a great gift and one I still cherish, I levy–for wholly selfish reasons–the greater merit upon it is its demise and eventual dissolution. The second divorce gave me solidly what I needed, which in the great lexicon of our times is summed up as a “massive, earth-rending kick is the arse.” And kick in the arse–and ass, too–I needed. I needed it because my first divorce decidedly kicked me in a different way: I allowed it make me into a victim. Granted, at the time it seemed like the perfect cocktail to pour myself at night along with the real cocktails I gulped down: I, a man, who gave up his dream job in order to remain in Seattle to support a wife going back to school only to have her deliver my “Dear John” via an AOL IM while I was away for three weeks on a business trip. And I returned home a week before Christmas, a day before my 30th birthday to an empty house. Yes; it seemed a great tragic comedy and I worse treated than King Lear’s own coxcomb fool. I did not stop to reflect on the hows and the whys of where the water went or that I was the one who drained the water of trust; I only remembered that final swan-song dive of a belly-flop into an empty pool. So I sat, quite literally, on weekends on the edge of my bed with my empty-headed pals Benny and Jerry and three-buck Chucks convinced of a truth whispered to me from childhood and now found deep root: I was a fundamentally broken human being. Not even really human, something less; a devolved form, a Darwinian step backward or sideways in the genetic nature of things.
When I married the second time we were both escaping from failed marriages, two victims grappling hands together as we ran from the bombed-out cities of our past. But ironically, we did not have the foresight to see far enough into the cockpit of those bombers bombing us to see our own grim faces sitting in the pilot seats. So we married each other and built ourselves a new city convinced that invading armies would never overcome us. We knew how to build our walls against the sieges from without, never understanding the enemy was already within, waiting. We had only had to be patient; our city would be razed once again to the ground, consumed by forces beyond our comprehension but sadly not beyond our control, albeit I would not understand this till too late. When I finally walked from the ruins of the second marriage there were no such illusions as to who the enemy was, though. And on the way to gallows to commit my own execution I found the courage to forgive my oppressor and even to love him in all his imperfections and mistakes. They very auto-inoculation that spread the disease was also the remedy albeit the cure: love thyself.
It is not that I am happy to have divorced a second time. For the record, I do not believe in divorces albeit I recognize their necessity in the extremes. But regardless of this tempered principle, I also recognize that more than the second marriage I needed the second divorce. A second thorn to dislodge the first thorn: one divorce as parry to the first divorce. And once the first thorn was removed I threw away the second thorn. I am only warily trying to connect the allegory of thorns and “all is illusion” in Buddhist text, but there is maybe a worthy footnote in paralleling my illusion to myself that I was a whole and complete adult by the time I reached my mid-twenties. I set myself up to fail because I no longer had the capacity to allow myself to fail. My ego was both too fragile and rigid as to not allow myself the chance to just admit I did not have it all together. We all make mistakes–some of them fairly egregious. But without a sense of imperfection as an adult, I left no room for myself to grow up and into. I victimized myself by believing that I was fundamentally broken as a human being as it allowed me believe my mistakes were a priori unavoidable. How can you blame the sinner when the sin is itself its existence? I sought pity in my victimization and effectively removed myself from my most important role: forgiver; which is to write “healer.”
In the past year I have found my sense of myself and my own age changing, too. I no longer feel like a person in their mid-twenties trapped in the body of person in their mid-thirties. My sense of my internal age is growing quickly to match my physical age. My second wife was ten years my junior. And while I have dated people my own age both recently and in the past, it seems I am often attracted to people in their mid- to late-twenties. Some of this I attribute to the simple fact that I feel I am (still) at a point in my life where all my options are still worth exploring. I do not want to settle down (yet); the world is a place worthy of discovery and exploration with a soul-mate at my side. I am attracted to the idealistic energy that one (mostly) retains till your thirties when life’s realities temper your wild-eyed determinism to change the world toward a more pragmatic (and sadly at times jaundiced) outlook. But I also attribute some of this attraction to the simple fact that my current emotional development is more closely akin to someone in their mid-twenties than my actual age of 36. There is another matter of some mild amusement to myself as look back on myself even a year ago and relive those memories wondering how I could be so immature. But even to wonder at my immaturity is a form of immaturity, is it not? There is maybe another way to look at the matter, though. It is not so much that I am more mature, just less immature? And I raise a statement as a question as I honestly have no clue what it means to be mature. I worry that it is just another glass ceiling I am hanging over my head: like the excuse of being fundamentally broken absolved me from growing, believing myself mature is just an opt-out clause for admitting I am subliming ignorant. Because the entire point and lesson (I believe this is the fifth time I have relearned it in recent times) is that we are never done learning; we are never done growing; we are never done “maturing.” And if that is the case there is no meat behind being mature (or even immature for that matter); that we might believe there is any importance laid to how mature we are is itself the ultimate in arrested development.
There are times in my life where I believe very much that Gary Larson drew me in the above cartoon–proof positive of my stoopidity [sic]. I find myself–in a self-amusing way–pushing on things meant to opened by a different means. That is to say, some places can only reached by the person on the other side letting you in.
I am always reminded that life’s obstacles fall under a few classifications. Brute force: you can go through the wall. Overcome: you can go over the wall. Undercome: you can go under the wall. Retreat: you can go all the way to the other side by taking the longest route around (we assumed a closed space-time). Search: you can go to the left or the right seeking an alternate entry point. Now all of this assumes that the obstacle is worth overcoming. And of course, we are first presuming it is an obstacle let alone an obstacle worth over-coming. And that is maybe the crux of it all–so much of how we decide to interact with our world is predicated first on how we perceive it.
Getting back to the topic of my stupidity, it is interesting to see in myself repeating similar patterns and motifs, as it were. Some of these patterns are ultimately a part of who I am. It is not a matter of changing how I perceive or interact with my world, but accepting that this is just my nature; namely, that it is okay for me to push on the impossible, the infeasible, the implausible–I am not a person of practical inclinations. But at the same time the fact that the “door” in un-openable itself implies that my perceptions of the “door” are incorrect. There is no door but a wall–and the best means to respect something is to perceive it for what it is to itself. So having the courage to see a door (passable) as a wall (impassable) is a deep act of respect. And so I find it fascinating and humbly rewarding to encounter so many “doors” that I have no ability to open no matter how I might “push”; and yet, here I am yet again at another door that is in reality a wall. And maybe, just maybe, this time I realize that it is a blessing to honor it for its true nature, accepting it as it is and without concern for what is on the ” far side” (sorry, I could not resist the pun). And if not an act of deep learning, it minimally a good reminder that this “gifted” kid is more the idiot savant–emphasis on idiot–discovered at the door pushing when he should be pulling.
It is a funny thing growing old(er). This requisite activity called life has convinced me of one thing with every passing moment; and, it is this: with every passing moment I grow ever more certain I know less than the moment before.
As of today the count-down to my financial resolution to my last “adventure in love” has reached its final tick and tock. First emotional, next friendship then legal and now financial ties been severed: there is nothing left but memories to reflect upon. I look back on those years that have lapsed by from when I first met Erica to now when I no longer know who she is other than as a shadow cast under the noonday sun of my waking mind. In a similar manner of unknowing her, I realize that I barely recognize myself but in a backward sort of way. In this I mean I think I know more of who I am than I did those few years ago when I started this all; but, whereas then I was certain I knew myself and my life at the time I met her, now I know I know nothing. Even in discovering I have zero grasp of the world, others, or myself, I believe I know myself with a deeper sense of certainty by the sheer fact that I know I know little of great import other than that I know nothing — and that is maybe the only “something” worth knowing.
When Erica showed me through herself the consequence of not forgiving, she gave me the greatest gift ever: the courage to turn the key to the door that lead to me forgiving myself. And when I opened that door I could only but step through and fall from the heights of ego that led me astray. Plummet I did, but instead of crashing I instead found myself floating in a piece of sky that resembles something like a peace, a joy that comes from knowing that life is an illusion. I am an illusion. Illusions are two-way. I cannot impact the world around me, but equally there is nothing more that can touch me than what I allow to touch me . If I am mere illusion–a concoction of culture, shared histories, external perceptions and a universe beyond my control–then I also learned my ego serves no purposes than to try to–unsuccessfully, I might add–manipulate and control a universe beyond my influence. At least for myself, I came to realize I lived in my head, not through my heart. And what I mean by this is that I came to appreciate I can no longer think of the next moment, but only embrace this very moment. And because this moment in its entirety in its raw form is infinitely larger than my intellectual capacities then the only thing left me was to open myself up to this moment. Where intellect drowned me in details, I discovered that surrendering myself to that ephemeral thing we call love allowed me to become buoyant in the very flow and ebb of this moment.
I babble; it is late.
I regret nothing. I am honored to have loved and still love and cherish Erica albeit in a different capacity now than then. I was honored then as I am now to have been married to her, too. And without a bit of irony or sarcasm, I am equally happy to have been divorced by her. It is maybe with a simple matter of anthropic principle at play, this has been my path with her.
With a frankness that maybe hallmarks this entry as one of my own, I confess I still have my fears for the road ahead of me. I fear being alone for the rest of my life even if I am not afraid to move forward alone. It is a strange, subtle, sublime this road I have been on thus far. None of it I would have foreseen so few short years ago when I thought I would die old with Erica–a life lived well and lovingly with a lovely person. And I will–but with me.
As with so much I knew I was right but not in the way I imagined:
