Why not? The overabundance of drab surroundings and rigid corporate composure could drive any mere human to seek play in the most brief and fierce fashions. Dive in it, she thought privately.
The beginning, it was mostly a short arc: a start, enough to get one's feet wet. No hours of endless toil, sweaty and smelly for mostly meager wages. Climate control, snacks, precision: simple little luxuries. But as weeks turned into months, endless daily repetition and stilted conversation with adversarial opportunists brought her to sluggish alarm that something was greatly amiss to her person. It was as if each day began afresh at the end of the day's work: as she peeled off dismal slacks and polyester button-up blouses and became herself again. What part of herself has broken off and really inhabited the work she did anyway? Copies and email messages were the product of the better part of her labor's time and energy.
Morning, eight-something. Coffee. Fluorescent lighting taupe sanitary planes. Enter computer, launch software. Every morning, the same. Sometimes there might be the sweetness of a shared breakfast, fleeting. Perhaps the quality of the morning sunlight is particularly fine. Route: the same, the fastest. Each task she handles efficiently, checking out of thoughtful modes of consideration, or imagination, to complete. She is a completing machine.
Coming to, at home, her heart sings. At last! A moment to one's self, to order as one pleases. She thinks for a moment how it might be possible that it was okay: these few hours in the evening, when she really came alive, these were enough to get by on. It's as if she were asleep all day anyway. Yet these mindless trances produce nothing but a pitiful hypnoia. Such a way to live one's life. It slips on by, each day nearly the same, punctuated by flare-ups of frustration, or troughs of disappointment.
What of some bit of color? Some splash of sensory stimulation to trigger delight, and to keep the mind alert. These aren't distractions, they're what a child locked in a closet lacks. Juicy reds from a ripe strawberry, alternating blues of an evening sky. The brilliant green of moss. The flash of wings on a butterfly. Or even a well-paid compliment, a genuine shared laugh, an honest unusual opinion. Such depth of character and contrast in the sophisticated decor were largely unheard of. It was such a large mass of conformity to rebel in, a banal glass house. She envisions the structure built on the backs of millions of other numbed secretaries. What a vision! She wonders if it were stones they were throwing, or does she take things too seriously?
9.28.2010
3.30.2010
Love, and all the vagueries that accomanies it
I'm reading "Letters to a Young Poet" which is the letters of Rainer M. Rilke to young Mr. Kappus; and in this collection of thoughts on Life, The Universe, and Whatnot the poet Rilke lays out some of his life experience to Mr. Kappus which he feels might balm his youthful feelings of inadequacy.
In my own experience of love I find it to be convoluted, difficult, and a treasure to be born in its weight and its beauty. It's imperfect, and confounding. It's unreasonable, which is why I feel it's important to relate this passage from Rilke's work, because here is a man from over a century ago who gets what it is like to try and embark consciously on the path of love with another wholly separate human being. He says,
..."but this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: And what can happen then? What life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come..."
He goes on to say that through each encounter with love do we find our selves, and these selves are alien, and that when we encounter them they require moments of solitude in order to perceive them.
These moments of solitude are not so much selfish and "navel gazing" as much as coming to terms with the suchness of one's own nascent and developing self, which is huge and seeking wholeness: seeking its entirety.
What Rilke is advocating is that, when two lovers come together and seek unification through their mutual suchness, is that each lover respects and understands that coming to terms with one's own self is an arduous and multifaceted task that is not accomplished in the fleeting moments of our youth.
What Rilke is advocating is that love can be true if lover allow each other the necessary moments of solitude to discover erupting peculiarites of self-dom.
What I glean from this assertion and can relate to my own life experience is that lovers must be able to allow each other to grow, and this growth will entail times of solitude away from the relationship: it is necessary to be separate and to feel what it is like to be one's own self. It is a great, delicious fruit which ones brings back from these meditations: for two beings, seeking completion unto themselves to meet again and seek unity in their own fullness (found in their own paths of self-discovery), is gracious, poignant, and a mature way to approach the difficult task of relating in a path that lead to marriage (which means: for the rest of your life).
It isn't wise to rush it. It isn't smart to know what to expect. It isn't going to be easy, and it definitely isn't a "done deal". What is marriage, anymore, anyway? It is, as always, a state-sanctioned economic partnership, and in that light: why rush it when a month can change moods most drastically?
In my own experience of love I find it to be convoluted, difficult, and a treasure to be born in its weight and its beauty. It's imperfect, and confounding. It's unreasonable, which is why I feel it's important to relate this passage from Rilke's work, because here is a man from over a century ago who gets what it is like to try and embark consciously on the path of love with another wholly separate human being. He says,
..."but this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: And what can happen then? What life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come..."
He goes on to say that through each encounter with love do we find our selves, and these selves are alien, and that when we encounter them they require moments of solitude in order to perceive them.
These moments of solitude are not so much selfish and "navel gazing" as much as coming to terms with the suchness of one's own nascent and developing self, which is huge and seeking wholeness: seeking its entirety.
What Rilke is advocating is that, when two lovers come together and seek unification through their mutual suchness, is that each lover respects and understands that coming to terms with one's own self is an arduous and multifaceted task that is not accomplished in the fleeting moments of our youth.
What Rilke is advocating is that love can be true if lover allow each other the necessary moments of solitude to discover erupting peculiarites of self-dom.
What I glean from this assertion and can relate to my own life experience is that lovers must be able to allow each other to grow, and this growth will entail times of solitude away from the relationship: it is necessary to be separate and to feel what it is like to be one's own self. It is a great, delicious fruit which ones brings back from these meditations: for two beings, seeking completion unto themselves to meet again and seek unity in their own fullness (found in their own paths of self-discovery), is gracious, poignant, and a mature way to approach the difficult task of relating in a path that lead to marriage (which means: for the rest of your life).
It isn't wise to rush it. It isn't smart to know what to expect. It isn't going to be easy, and it definitely isn't a "done deal". What is marriage, anymore, anyway? It is, as always, a state-sanctioned economic partnership, and in that light: why rush it when a month can change moods most drastically?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)