Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Conditions of Impossibility and Cultivating the Awake Life

There are conditions
conditions of impossibility
that make people die before they die.
These conditions occur mostly on the margins
places where comfort has been forsaken for some by those with a lot.
Conditions of impossibility eclipse the awake life.
No one willingly opts for death before death.
People who originate in conditions of impossibility
must die a little in order to not die overall.
It's a coping strategy, in other words. And it's about survival.

But when people develop the habit of going away in order to stay alive,
they often cannot stop the habit once removed from the conditions of impossibility.
So they go away and die when they don't have to anymore.
Their loved ones cannot help but feel this leave taking happen
and if the conditions of impossibility no longer appear obvious,
the leave-taking makes little sense, forcing the loved one to make best guesses
about why death before death occurs in the bodies they love so much.
If you're a child and do not understand survival yet,
because your survival is being taken care of from the outside--which it should be when you're a child--all you feel in the leave-taking moment
is an internal cue that someone you love has gone far far away.
You can be clutching that person's body, screaming "Where'd you go?!" but physical presence is often a terrible indicator of one's whereabouts, and besides, you don't understand survival yet.
And because you're a child, naturally unindividuated and completely attached to the source of your own survival, when that person goes away, your source of life dies therefore causing death in you.
That becomes part of the early childhood experience that forms
one's sense of identity. Those you love die and you die, over and over.
So even when the conditions of impossibility no longer surround
the leave-taking person, their habituated leave-taking pattern
causes premature deaths in the one's they bring into the world.
Now once you're in the world,
if you're a good student and develop according to the laws
of your early relationships, you probably go around seeking the relationships
that die and die and die again, so that you can continue screaming "Where'd you go?!"
for the rest of your life--because good students figure out they're role in life
and take up their responsibilities accordingly.
So you see: it sets up this incredibly sad dynamic
where everyone is dying all the time in order to survive.

I want to tell you something:
for all the times you had to die and I was there, clutching your body screaming
"Where'd you go?!"...
I was not mad. I missed you. I never wanted you to go away.
I just wanted you to come back. I thought my rage would wake you up and cause you to return.
And I hated the world for how cruel it had been to you. So I raged on and on.

I want to tell you something else:
my education helped me discover the truth about conditions of impossibility
and once I learned about that, I started to rage against those conditions
with every breath and every opportunity.
People called me militant and angry and selfish,
but I just wanted my loved ones to come back to life.
I've been fighting against your death/s for a long time.
I've been embodying your rage and your desire and your grief for a long time.
In some ways, this has been my own way of dying before I die.
I vacate me in order to fight for you.
And I do it because I am loyal and I am protective, both characteristics that flow from love.
But I have not stopped the leave-taking cycle. And this morning I want to be free.

I don't want to fight. I don't want to take leave anymore. I don't want to keep dying.

I want to live the awake life.

4 comments:

Elizabeth Holland said...

"I want to live the awake life." .....may it be so.

.jrich. said...

yes. i'm tired of dying too.
although: i'm also not quite yet sure how to rage against the conditions of impossibility without dying a little sometimes...
but that can be figured out.
and what i hope is that last wednesday morning will convince you to no longer vacate you.
i don't know if you have the ability to hold on to anything from that recent awe-inspiring saturday in riverside, but if you do, i hope that you can hold on to the joye that is present in your presence. and that it convinces you to hold on to you, no matter who/what is dying around you.

Martha Lynn Tamburrano said...

this was for me...and I am so sad and sorry. let's both live now.

tenderlimb said...

So, I just checked in to Know Noise because I missed you Emily. This one got me.

I haven't read your blog in a long long time. Too painful to know you're out there and that you have not gotten in touch with me. The last time I emailed, I asked you to write or call when you were ready. I don't know if you're still mad at me, if you are going to forgive me, or if you're just way too busy. Whatever the case may be, I think you're an AMAZING writer/thinker/doer, and I love you.

Stacy