I identified hugely with this wonderful piece by Sasha Chapin about the “precious state of being” which can emerge “when expectation breaks down, and you are living in a shipwreck of your expectations”. It is a forced confrontation with “Who am I actually, in this fallen place, this actuality foreign to my hopes and dreams”. He cites the example of his divorce in a passage I feel I could have written myself, at least if you get rid of the driving and relocate it to Manchester:
This also happened during my divorce. Listen: I do not recommend having an extremely challenging marriage. It’s not good that I went into a relationship with the expectation we would die together, and we ended up lasting four difficult years. But at the end of it, there was a moment that gleamed with horrible wonder. It was the moment of being completely done. We’d tried to build this relationship that was constantly falling apart, completely delusional about how we functioned as a human system. And then, in a moment, we hurled the relationship across the room, and it shattered like a glass ashtray.
I remember driving through the desert afterwards. Not happy, but thrilled, in a mood I didn’t recognize. Blissfully desolate, maybe. Look at this open sky, pulsing above me, despite the fact that life is over. And for the first time, though we’d been living in the desert for months, I really saw the place. Not the glamorous image, but all the grit and strangeness. The tangles of amaranth, the auto body shops clinging to life somehow. The weird white shacks in the yard built by the desert-dwellers, containing scraps and cans of gas, standing despite their dubiousness, waiting to be torn down.
These moments are defined by the death of the “ridiculous idea that any of this would conform to your napkin-sketch plans of the future”. You are where you are and there’s nothing you can do about it. But this involuntary thrownness, finding yourself in an utterly different place to the one you’d hoped for, inevitably coaxes the sight and sound back to your life. All you have left in that despair, once you accept that you have to get up and start living again, are the sensations which show up with an unfamiliar immediacy. There’s a brisk realism waiting to be embraced at those points where a suffocating imaginary formulation has fallen away, if you are able to hold your own. The ruins of your past expectations can be a glorious place to find yourself, if you are willing to play in them as Chapin puts it.
When time pulls lives apart
Hold your own
When everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certainty
Hold your own
Hold it 'til you feel it there
As dark, and dense, and wet as earth
As vast, and bright, and sweet as air
When all there is
Is knowing that you feel what you are feeling
Hold your own
There’s a fleeting freedom here from the ceaseless metonymy of desire. To watch the thing you believed would make you whole crumble in your hands creates a space in which, at least temporarily, you can be without that investment in futurity. Those fantasies inevitably return but playing in the ruins can inculcate a lighter mode of relating to these investments, one more geared towards what the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander calls unfolding, summarised in an existential mode here by Henrik Karlsson:
If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding1 Put simply:
- I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.
- I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.
- Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.
If I learned anything from playing in my own ruins last year, it’s that fit is vastly more important than vision. If I’m preoccupied by a vision, an image of how myself and/or my life could be in the future, I’m immediately suspicious of it. Because my experience has been that investment in those images leads me to neglect, indeed in the past often actively override, the experience of fit: the sense of energy or lethargy, joy or frustration, which accompanies people, places and activities. The point is not that goals are bad but that predicating these goals on visions is often counter-productive. Learning to enjoy your enjoyment involves identifying and accepting what brings you satisfaction, even if those aren’t the activities and experiences which you long imagined would placate the Other:
This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s desire and contributing to one’s suffering are both relative and doomed to remain unfulfilled and, hence, that there is no transcendent meaning to be found for one’s existence, no ultimate object that will satisfy one’s desire, and no single, fundamental jouissance that will of itself make life worth living.
Lacan, Discourse and Social Change pg 72 [my emphasis]
It’s only in the face of nihilism that we can really embrace the partial satisfactions which life offers. Holding them lightly, without losing our grip and unfolding through them. Treating the fact of our wanting with the utmost seriousness, but treading gently with any one specific want.
In other words what Daniel Gaztimbide says here in probably my favourite passage from any living psychoanalyst:
I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would you want to do? Not, what do you have to do to survive, or appease the Other, but what would you just want? … It’s wrestling with that precipice of death, where all you’re left with is your own desire. And oftentimes that desire is oriented to something. I want. I want to be with loved ones. I want a tomorrow, regardless of whether that tomorrow will come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjQZaq8u8ww&t=3803s
The corollary of this freedom, the capacity to stay with the wanting rather than get caught up in what you want, must I think be giving up on the dream that things once were carefree and golden or that they could be in the future. It’s a blissfully desolate reckoning with a reality which, if things had unfolded more smoothly, might have remained forever opaque.
I do this thing where my mind travels back to the golden age
You know those times where you were carefree
And everything was Golden? The golden age
You know those times where everything was golden?
Where you were carefree and everything was golden
The hardest thing I ever had to do
Was come to terms with the fact that
That time never really existed
Mark Carrigan 