we're all a little mad, you know

the meaning of...

“‘Freedom’ cannot avoid combining, in a unity that has only its own generosity as an index, the values of impulse, chance, luck, the unforeseen, the decided, the game, the discovery, conclusion, dazzlement, syncope, courage, reflection, rupture, terror, suture, abandonment, hope, caprice, rigor, the arbitrary. Also: laughter, tears, scream, word, rapture, chill, shock, energy, sweetness….Freedom is also wild freedom, the freedom of indifference, the freedom of choice, availability, the free game, freedom of comportment, of air, of love, or of a free time where time begins again. It frees each of these possibilities, each of these notions of freedom, like so many freedoms of freedom—and it is freed from these. … In sum, these bursts are all the possible determinants of freedom to the extent that freedom expends itself in the withdrawal from every determination…there is no freedom without some drunkenness or dizziness, however slight.”
--Jean-Luc Nancy, Experience of Freedom

...
I read somewhere recently that freedom is (something akin to) “the absence of awareness of one’s physical body” which makes sense only in the ungraspable sense of an idea I comprehend but have not necessarily experienced.
In essence freedom, from this perspective, is a way of abandoning oneself—but only to oneself—not in the absorption of an other, not to another tense, not to imagining but to being in the truest sense because it is not conceived, it is not reflected upon, it exists: electric, ephemeral, explosive and transcendent.
And we can only know that this freedom even possesses the aforementioned characteristics because they are what we feebly associate with a kind of gap—a tremulous movement between that one can only ever look back on and never fully know— of which we have a kind of hallucinatory memory: it can never be recorded as it is happening or it wouldn’t actually be what we conceive it to be.
In this very elusiveness, therefore (because aren’t the most elusive things those which we cannot make manifest at our will simply by desiring them?), it becomes the prime commodity. Which is why you find the practice of emulating it: fumes inhaled, liquids imbibed, tricky sticky things injected and perpetually flowing through blood streams, and therein creating a contradictory and illusory “possession”—because in their physical reality and intentional onset, the objects’ ability to produce freedom from oneself is flawed: the release is internal, scientific, rooted in the physical. Dancing, sex, spiritual rapture, and even some kind of artificial flight, are madly-sought engagements since they are means to “lose oneself” momentarily—only to the pure exhilaration of being in and of oneself—as though one is able to cut ties to all physical manifestations of reality, and not only from the grounding earth, but from the containment of one’s mental landscape. Don’t we, ultimately, want to lose ourselves in order to unloose the finite constrictions of the mind and the things we think we know, that marry us to expectation? (Which, in being human, is inherently limited).
You might say, then, that where one expands the limits of one's being, therefore, one engages the possibility of merging oneself with the giant candle-light source of the divine infinite; by losing too much knowledge of ourselves we can therefore briefly, breathlessly, inundate and permeate ourselves with the flow of the world—and, because in that boundless moment we are lacking in awareness or intention, we are fully in it for that single instant.



So. I want to lose my mind to my body. And How. Forget that theory where’s that action.

La Vie, L'Amour

After the Movie
(Marie Howe)
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come
to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what
is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded
night—and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action,
I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to
look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are
doomed to live in purgatory. Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.

I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just
bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck
the stuff from the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You
are a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think
these things of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer
and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.



I think it's Levinas who talks about love as being this possessive grasping, this attempt at consumption of another person--another form of "being's move" to take in all that one does not comprehend of the Other and assimilate it--i.e. the other, unknown, perhaps unknowable person--into the self, as part of the self. Not the prettiest picture.
Is love ultimately selfish? I think most people probably imagine that one's best self exists in the state of loving another person (and experiencing reciprocation)--is this the projection that makes love so appealing?
Surely when we are loved--oh, when another person has chosen us, when we are worthy enough to be fully, unabashedly loved, then will we have somehow reached some new plane of existence? Some enlightenment? Will we then be content? Fulfilled? Happy?
How much should one person depend on another person as a resource of happiness? Is needing someone actually good for a person? Maybe it's a new kind--a different recess--of strength to surrender to the knowledge that we need, that we need to be loved, sometimes to be helped up when we fall, to be told that as we are, we are enough.
But if you cannot go to yourself to call forth this same exclamation to the universe, maybe that means something is missing.
Because it is awfully nonsensical, if you think about it, to think that people can complete one another successively--what with the constant collisions of desire and fracturing identity and (un)willingness to give of oneself.
To what extent can one ever truly give of oneself? (And still maintain one's self as separate from the thing loved?) I supposed we have to individually know whether or not we want to retain separateness in the midst of the absorption of love.

what is satisfaction? fulfillment? being in each moment?

Unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind fantasies; every separate fantasy contains the fulfillment of a wish, and improves on unsatisfactory reality.
Freud ("The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming)

Most of my life has been spent enriching as well as I could the long, long waiting for the great events which fill me now so deeply that I am overwhelmed. Now I understand the terrific restlessness, the tragic sense of failure, the deep discontent. I was waiting. This is the hour of expansion, of true living. All the rest was a preparation. Thirty years of anguished watchfulness. And now these are the days I lived for. And to be aware of this, so fully aware, this is what is almost humanly unbearable. Human beings cannot bear the knowledge of the future. To me, the knowledge of the present is just as dazzling. To be so acutely rich and to know it!"
Anais Nin ("Henry and June")

But this is literature--it isn't mine.

synonyms long, yearn, hanker, pine, hunger, thirst mean to have a strong desire for something. long implies a wishing with one's whole heart and often a striving to attain . yearn suggests an eager, restless, or painful longing . hanker suggests the uneasy promptings of unsatisfied appetite or desire . pine implies a languishing or a fruitless longing for what is impossible . hunger and thirst imply an insistent or impatient craving or a compelling need
MerriamWebster

the gypsies have left

"Christ you know the moon is full tonight
I’d like to run out wringing wet
and shake my hair loose under it
instead my nights stretch beneath this tent
balance balance got to keep
my wits and invent new tricks
to knock them dead
I am a tightrope walker
trapped in a carnival
they will never let me go. no.
I have a long-term bond. oh
balance balance I got to keep
and should you pass while I’m rehearsing
please don’t startle me
I’m not one to use a net
I might fall for you
I might give it all to you
and the crowds would bleed
I’ve been theirs for as long as I can remember
but Christ when the moon is full
I’d like to get the hell out of here
Step light like their angel
then shimmy like evil
And you sure look good to me
And you know I’m willing to come down for you…Save my circus soul"

P. S.

Patti used to release her poetry at St. Marks Church. When I went to one of the lastest nights of that same St. Marks Poetry Project, there was little else in the bare, bony church but a sense of chill. The few attendees were barely awake. Once upon a time things were exploding all over the place in that very area of the City--fragile capsules bursting just as they were unburied.

It seems New York's soul is asleep. Of her own volition--stubbornness or sleeping pills or maybe she drank herself to a mediocre-death.