L'etat Jardin

"Thank you for this, bitter knowledge.
Guardian angels who left me stranded.
It was worth it, feeling abandoned,
Makes one hardened but -
What has happened to love?

You see above me... I'll never know,
What you have shown, to other eyes.
So go. Or go ahead and surprise me.
Just go. Or go ahead and just try me."

- Sir Rufus, Go or Go Ahead


I know what you're thinking. No, Mr. Wainwright hasn't been knighted while you were looking the other way. But I have a problem putting up song lyrics as the opener for a post in a non-ironic fashion. With the Sir in front of his name I can almost pretend like it's a real-person quote. Just imagine that it's existential poetry. Or listen to the song. It's a good one.

I don't have a lot of words for myself today. So you'll have to content yourself with some ponderings on the words of others.

There's a really smart man who once said that the tears of the world are of a constant quantity. I think for the most part I believe this is true. To make one group happy by necessity you usually have to cheat another. And the more a victor feels a need to celebrate their winnings generally so much the greater will be the pain of the loss for those who have failed.

Khalil Gibran, also a relatively smart man, was highly fond of an aphorism of his own invention that said the greater that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. I wonder if that one works the other way as well, so that the more joy you allow yourself to feel the more, one day, you must have to mourn? What then is the use of all this laughter and tears? Is it better to just stay in the middle and save oneself from both...

The Gibran quote is admittedly a little bit of a manic depressive's manifesto. And lots of people speculated about Gibran on that point. I, for my part, since I can remember myself in any real way, have always known that severe clinical depression runs on both sides of my family. My grandfather died from it. And it's an interesting paradox to be a product of such a situation. There's a constant self-examination that begins early on to test the bounds of one's own emotional capacity. I feel sad. Ok, but is this TOO sad? Am I depressed or anxious in the normal way or is this bad feeling more bad than I ought to feel? Maybe I'm being irrationally upset but maybe I'm not. I don't think I need to see a therapist, but how do I know when I have crossed the threshold and need help?

And in a way this self-psychologizing is an onus of sorts to to hide oneself from sadness. Because to constantly need to name the feeling, to box and package it and put it where it belongs, to diagnose and rationalize it often stops one from getting to own it. That if you need to label something before you even get to look it in the eye, let it hunker down and sit on your chest for a while, then you don't really ever get to know it. For a very long time I wouldn't admit to pain for the very reason that I felt if I did I'd be consummed by it.

And eventually I got to a point where I realized that the effort of holding back wasn't worth it anymore. And I finally just let go and said, if it means I'm broken, let's start picking up the pieces. It was shocking at first to let those feelings wash over me. They were very intense. I had no standards by which to judge them. But suprisingly, they came and went. In the end though the valley was lower than any I had let myself cross before, it really did mean that the mountains could be higher.

Which is not to say I'm anti-therapy, with two psychologists for parents and having been a product of it myself, it would be awfully hypocritical to be so. But in a strange way from a very early age I developed this sense that I wasn't supposed to let myself be moved by what happened around me. That rationality reigned supreme and that to let in the hurt and pain would be admitting defeat in some way. The flip side of that feeling being one that told me I was actually very broken and even more wrong for not admitting it. And that I think, just isn't right.

Back to the Rufmaster. Thank you indeed for the bitter knowledge. It comes in handy sometimes. The point being, that maybe there needs to be a constant amount of tears in the world. How can we judge what we love if we cannot also know how it pains us? What is the worth of the win if the loss means nothing? And no, you can't dig yourself in so deep you can't get out. But test your limits, see how far you're willing to let yourself plunge or fly.

So I say go. Just go ahead. Suprise yourselves.