Maybe We Did
Dear Eugene,
Paper and pen, I suppose I know how they work. I wrote a note and put it in the fridge, to indicate to my daughter which lunch is hers. The lunch is fresh and well preserved, but my idea of paper and pen, notes and words might not be.
As compared to when? When I first knew them.
The power of doodling, a child knows that. Pen goes around in circle, never ending: nothing on paper makes sense; everything is made sense on the paper. Like the secret of oneself is somewhere hidden in the layers of overlapping circles. Parents often claim their four-year-old can paint a Pollock. Well, maybe they did.
Maybe we did.
Maybe there was a time when we were free to give away a part of us without fear and shame and couldn't see why the Other, the receiver of, the witness to our giving would refuse our gift or take it to mean something else.
It's childish, of course, to expect that, we then grow to understand.
To believe there is an Other who could and would "totally get" us is childish. There might still be a bridge between people, we struggle to believe, but that bridge is in very bad shape, and it takes too much work to repair it and we know we will likely do more damage to it if we attempt to use it more than necessarily.
So let's forget about the bridge, we say. Let's just stay where we are. We think that would be the safest option until one day we realize we don't really get our Self either. We used to be happy with our life as a Pollock painting but now it appears to have zero explaining power to help us make sense of what goes on outside and inside of us.
We hate to love ourselves so much, showering our Selves with all them products and stuffs and makeup and money and power and glory and selfies and pity and praise and 24/7 attention when we know we are not that lovable at all.
At the end the only feeling in us that we can properly call "love" is our love to hate our Selves.
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise, fears his death
Who would admit this should be the epitaph on his tombstone? Just scatter my ashes at sea, he says. If I can't have an honest funeral I might as well not have one and save everybody the trouble and the pain to commit words to stone.
Why write on stone anyway if there is pen and paper?
Yours, Alex
Dear Eugene,
ReplyDelete“Paper & pen, I suppose I know how they work... The power of doodling, a child knows that. Pen goes around in circle… Like the secret of oneself is somewhere hidden the layers of overlapping circles…”
On the week of New Year this past winter, I was asked to write the most difficult speech in my life: a eulogy for my mother-in-law’s funeral in Hong Kong. What would be the right words to memorialize another life on paper? How could paper & pen work best to capture the vitality of her every breath subsequently lost somewhere in the hyphenated gap between her birth & death dates?
On the day before the funeral, I joined the family’s private ceremony in expressing our final farewell before the closure of her casket. Memories of her swirled within & among us in perpetual “layers of overlapping circles”. She was too passionate about living, yet in her dying from cancer, she found Life in the encircling arms of Jesus.
Together in a circle, we stood while gazing at her in the casket, entranced & embittered by her silence. Like a child’s doodling in the spirit of Pollock, time & space of the past & present twisted, stretched & compressed magically into streams of our consciousness, compelling us to question: how could each of us have loved her more when she had dwelled among us?
Then I noticed something inexplicable to me at the time of the ceremony: I saw tears like an avalanche overcoming all in that room, yet I could not cry in spite of my grief.
Now several months later, in reminiscence, I realize I have been too horrified, ashamed & obsessed with the secrecy of hating myself to have wept for anyone. I have been too indulged in “products & stuffs… pity & praise” such that at last, in my mid-age crisis, I see a monster in the mirror!
“At the end the only feeling in us that we can properly call ‘love’ is our love to hate our Selves. Who passionately hates his life & likewise, fears his death.”
So my dear Eugene, I want to love life with the undying passion of a child’s doodling in never-ending, overlapping circles. And to live in truth & freedom, I need to understand death so that I may know precisely the words to be carved on my epitaph in stone, not pen & paper.
Yours, Kate