La pietà :: Joseph Robertson

A human love is not a fetish, not a ritual item nor a stone tablet to be referenced and stored in secret jeweled casings. It may at times seem so, even seem appropriate to paint it as such. It may be treated that way openly or in secret, but not without its true form being put at great risk of disintegration and disappearance.

She now viewed the whole sweep of events in one light, highly monochromatic, with few variations in shade : the time shared had been a kind of deception, through and through, it had been enthusiastic, even compulsive, but it had been principally about the hollowing out of people and experience, not about their being filled or affirmed.

She had lost her ability to see that her part of the story was as much about giving and about asking for the giving as it was in any way about taking or fleeing or changing or doing harm. Now, it was becoming a story that was laced with little shimmering encapsulated beauties, but which was full of denial and deception, aggression and the near deliberate unraveling of what mattered in each person.

She felt honestly that everyone was better off if those little floating bouts of beauty and harmony remained encapsulated, each in isolation, manageable memories that could reflect a fairer light on any awful sadness in the deep unknown future, but little more would be saved.

This was genuinely best and most fruitful. Kill the beast, the organism of desire itself, the living body of the affair, because in that way, you could keep the best of the love but go back to what had previously been a life lived in wholeness, however imperfect.

What was pure novelty, trust and excitement, appetite and the trembling of appetite falling away, eyes locked in sea-eagles' characteristic spiral plunge, of necessity, slipped into codes for living in the density of the everyday forbidden, for sustaining the inexplicable and the unforgiveable.

And those codes channelled something bigger than prior experience into a web of tense constraints, a network of inhibitions and deviations that made of honest love a kind of delirium of momentary disappearances where it became almost impossible to keep hold of any particular selfhood. So that, even as what took place was an eager and all-pervading love, graced with the patience and selflessness it would need to survive this and many other trials, this itself was what she could not savor.

She lived what she adored living, and she struggled to keep it alive long after she had begun to feel it could not remain genuine, long after she had come to the dark awareness that the underlying realm of old promises, neither fulfilled nor abandoned, and the too-drawn-out splitting of two close-knit lives from a cherished center, had become the atomization of all that was good and giving in her.

Where she had passionately loved a new life, a new lover, where she had —perhaps rightly— suspected her future happiness, she came to see the deep betrayal of a still incomplete long-running romance that in her most honest assessment, did not deserve a sudden death. And that sudden rupture in some sense would be necessary to save the new love.

Where the quaking ground had broken apart and she had found a leafy grove on solid earth where she could get her footing, remember the gravity and release she needed in her own heart, trust again in that gravity and in the loving ground and the roots that could keep it stable under her feet, she had come to be haunted daily by an awareness of steep precipices that seemed now to make a world that was falling away on all sides.

The process was hard to name and even harder to describe. It was easier to say that it had ended or it had never been there. They had always been aware they were not a couple, that they lived a separate cosmos that existed, as thankfully as it did unhealthily, only between two people, but that it was not precisely a single, well-understood story of a couple in love and free from over-arching restraints on knowing one another.

It was two lovers struggling to get close to something very luminous and deeply necessary, but who could not escape the corrosive effects of a basic situation in which she was not his, nor could she, out of decency, allow herself to take possession of his love, completely. Because she belonged to someone else, and part of her never stopped willing this.

The now buried truth of things was that she had not moved away from her life's love, in the moment of their most promising entanglement, and toward someone else. She had been alone for some time, and withering, and she had found life again, and was restored to her own capacity to feel love, to give it and to feel it coming over her, the taste of generosity, the sense that one was whole because one could be more than what one felt disappearing from all the corners of the living world.

She was not guilty, and she did not feel guilty, at that point. On the contrary, she tried to keep everything open and honest, and to take a pronounced and forthright step into a life she wanted more than what was then available to her. But something she could not put into words impeded this taking the step she wanted.

For many reasons known or unknown to herself, she blocked herself against the many perils of that honesty... she was blocked by the way her life's love was distant, living a separate existence sometimes parallel to hers, but not always... she was blocked by the way her new lover waited for her, as if his passion was not love bathed in fire and gold, but a kind of quiet admiration, not demanding to be recognized as transcendent.

She felt a choice, any choice, was an injustice, and her own sense of her loving self paralyzed her will. She waited, believing the moment was wrong, not just 'imperfect', but off its necessary foundation, and that it would improve. And then there would be all at once love and clarity and justice, and a good feeling impervious to doubt.

She lost touch with the pervasive beauty of the beginning of the departure from her known life, because she chose to believe the moment was improvable. So she let it slip away from its own integrity and fullness. She let herself slip away from the joy of desiring, and took on wholeheartedly the impossible task of explaining the nature of it all, of each person and their respective positions in this undanceable dance, categorizing each aspect of her new fragmented self, and in that: impossible at last to feel the wholeness or the integrity of anything.

With the daily pressures of time and consequence, what was harmony was becoming hysteria, what was a dream was becoming a problem, what was the most fortunate solution was becoming dissolution, and she found herself fighting to keep alive, to remain intact, to have anything left to give.

And, it was not her story alone, it was not even possible to say, within herself, that her own emotions were at the center of everything. She did not want to be ego-centric, she did not want to hold herself up above those who might love her. She wanted to love, as she knew how, to push her efforts and energy deep into the fortune and meaning of another, to be rekindled and freed by the act of giving love.

With an old love sleeping next to her, broken by his own success in pushing her away, unraveling the tight-drawn threads of her constant embrace, lost in the endless constriction of having to guess what happened to her love, to whom it was being transferred, if that's what it was, and in what circumstances...

with a new lover who promised her eternal trust, offering her his light and warmth, but who could not light the difficult way for her, patient from dire necessity and wanting only to achieve the strength and self-knowledge needed to be strong enough to be there still when the time came, patient to the point of provoking only incredulity and dissatisfaction...

she again withered and fell into the disarray she had not actually healed before, and this, in many ways, was more desperate than what had been a clear and hard-fought withering of a single thread of deep excitement, and which had seemed, at the time, resolvable by various, now seemingly failed, means of escape.

All the while, her deepest need is unknowable, to herself as to the two men that try feebly or heroically, in one way or another, intertwined and infinitely distant, to love her. She senses that alienation and guilt are her crisis, not love and not love lost. She senses that she has stepped over the precipice and can only go back, by memory, to the foothold of selfhood she once knew, before the split road robbed her of clarity.

Kill the beast, the wrongdoing, the love that should not exist, the face that looks at you from an intimacy far too full and viable to fit into the hairsbreadth niche left it by propriety. Move away from the gentle, the comforting and the new, because in that, there is the gaping anguish of having betrayed something in yourself. No other way.

And if there were anything other, anything besides this need to be more than the act of splitting off or coming apart? It is now alien : part of an alien time, a criminal departure from the true self, a vastness that means loss and agony : she moves away from that knowledge within herself that she had been building a very good, very enduring love : she moves toward the true crisis, the one that never left her, the soft tragedy of what she herself had long ago refused to let go of...

WRITING & NAMING: the medicine of acquiring knowledge
Joseph Robertson

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such...

Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. [Keep reading...]