No one can survive anything like this; we can only adopt the way of letting die and wait for a new one, just as the nameless one knows from Deionarra what will change the nature of a person -- regret. It is not that something should have not appeared in the first place, but that we are sorrowful for the same thing we once actualised on others when it comes around and hits with such profound effects …… and a belated consciousness of one’s overall ontological update.
Not ironically, I used to think I would choose another answer that looks nicer like love or faith. They are not wrong answers, but I once considered them only in a one-dimensional span.
This morning I walked on the broken patches of snow, breathing in cleanness of cold air in Montreal. The lakeshore did not mean to take me anywhere. Now I’m sitting here at a Cafe. People are marching for a protest in front of me through the window. But I don’t know what exactly for, with their every slogan written in French.
The moderated winter with the tantalising smell of grass gently wiped out all the ruthless words and my excessive feelings. Peaceful in the great nothingness, now that I am downgraded to the smallest scale, where the flowy aura illuminates around only me myself, I still recognise the pains of which I don’t want to even recall a single word. So I have been distracting myself to the street, the lakeshore, and the old port, to make an insignificant detail of truth that suits an uneventful day: Luminescence refers to only cold light. But the warmth needs to shine inwards.
I linked my mind back to what I saw and it said: “You have all the makings of a suicide, but you lack” ...... the will to sacrilege. I modified the original saying of Vampilov, replacing the alleged theoretical backup from the list of literati. I don't know how I'm up to resonate with such a Nietzschean phrase one day. But it is not necessarily Nietzschean; what I want to accentuate is the more unvisible side of it.
If I have to start my own withdrawal because I feel yours (more broadly speaking, I feel how this world is withdrawn from me because of yours), I might believe that I could leave more for your lifelong reminiscence if I just do it first, not for other any reason. Not because that I want to become active or agentic that way. Never want that. All I wanted in this world, the intimacy of knowing each other to the deepest, of being interdependent by clinging our lives onto our inseparable closeness, the absolute prayer…… has now turned to a requirement for a tough mundane exercise in self-responsibility, something I haven’t learnt (and don’t really like so) in my past life. I’m used to living on other like I hang on to them. I have been thinking that people were meant to be so attached to the closest, and I disdained the classic boundary talk couple of times…... It is hard to say that I can set these lines for whoever and myself only to go back to the atomic world. Then it must be even more impossible to have such a distance from the one I already connect the most and deepest in love. What hurts me most is not the upsetting thing I need to confront, but is that I have to be the absolute outsider from others and face all such things on my own. Any other one won’t help but hurt. The distances between hearts show wounds of the real order. But in this realm the Godlike moments were made by the God inside me -- the love that carries me, not as reversal as people think. So how come all the ugly dialectics in the self-claimed unfolding of the Absolute Spirit start working against it? I just can't accept the world if what we can hold, at the end of the day, is this lonesome.
No. We can’t work it out from the opposition. We should turn back to the dead side, femininity, this very traumatic being of us. -- She's always a rejection without a preexistent affirmation. The reason why the feeling was written as a ghost in my Master’s thesis is that something of absolute femininity (not as the gendered dichotomic juxtaposition, but that dark matter of the cosmo, that Yin of the trigram) was a complete exterior rather than a constitutive exceptive, if I might borrow this phrasing.
Reason is proven to be based on feeling, as the same reason is received and produced very differently in different perceptual experiences. So don't reason with me in this survivalist mode. Like everyone else I surely know how to reason.
We first confirm that either acceptance or production of reason is a second order phenomenon, because the conception is not the transcendental essence we can somehow “upmine” (Zizek’s term, not sure if I use it here properly but whatever), rather, it is built on experiences of feelings. Then we’ll know reason must not be the ultimate goal, instead, the ultimate goal is how people can keep living with this great, unavoidable sorrow. This is not to tell people that they'll be happy in the future or that there'll be more happiness than sadness; such are oversimplification of utilitarianist calculation. Nor by telling people that it's all subject to a foremost concept, because the innate possibilities and contradictions of the heart are infinite, while contrarily the limited is the conceptual territorialisation. Even one were to study and pray, it would be self-deception and impiety, if that conception were the focus.
When Weil wrote "Nothing else to devote, unadulterated concentration is the prayer”, she didn’t purport to concentrate on an idea of rationale that encompasses all, but rather indicated the sorrow. The sincere adherent being true to sorrow of themselves, however insane, is the wisest and purest of all, as she termed “the Madness of Love”. Therein one should affirm love’s nature of sorrow, much more and earlier than giving over to reason; and to affirm the sorrow via suffering is exactly a rejection of everything else. This is femininity in this sense - what is the opposite power to the affirmative, positive force. It rejects by affirming only oneself as a negated one. The representative interface of the immanent sorrow, the wound of the world’s self opening up. One can only be sure of oneself as this wound, which evinces the ontological essence of love. That’s what we see all this love flipping over and drifting about to the same end of sorrow.
Likewise, femininity as both the rejecting and the negated is confided to the apparition: Ghosts don't make up this world; they manifest the other hidden world. And yet they don’t revenge; they just remind. I want to be that reminder in the futuristic backlash. The old self will have gone already in the torment to remember you and me when we were close to that extent, so there will be no such things as revenge. The ghost of it will grow into a self outward to remind us of the reality of love, the essential suffering, the will of the world projected at the interface of wounds in between our hearts.
It’s four pm in Montreal. I will run into the sunset in five minutes. I now affirm my own pains, on the spectatorship of others’ suffering too. If this hurt were to be too abusive, my letting die would also be justified as the will of love per se. That’s the truthful form of the overcoming will. At this point I have all the power to love others and myself, however unjustly negated. So many times I went to a storm and went it through, didn’t I?
March, 2024
Montreal