What’s your #1 priority tomorrow?
Tomorrow, as it happens, is the second session of a seven week counselling session I have started to try and reconfigure a life gone awry and an emotional economy in crisis. Sometimes, you start these things with a sense of how an episode like this in your life has been triggered. It comes down, you tell yourself, to the trauma of a recent loss of a relationship of someone you loved inordinately. But I think that, once I started truly moving the deckchairs around on my own Titanic, it was clear it was always going to sink anyway. Indeed, it had already sunk and my current occupation was wetter, more salty and futile than I thought it would be. For this Titanic is not gonna be raised again.
Turn your attention then to the iceberg that was its nemesis. That floating menace with most of its ungainly bulk invisible existed long before the ship of my romantic feelings set sail, perhaps even before the hubris of its planning and building, and was, after all once just a calf of a greater Arctic whole of cold mass. And that calf is within me really, broken off from a source where it once gave environmental succour to polar bears, it is now part of the detritus of a wide wide sea’ on which it floats alone and lonely with death around it, like the Ancient Mariner himself.
My own personal iceberg is probably compact of all kind of cold associations to past loss and the experience of overwhelmed responses thereto. The latter are almost certainly ones telescoped by the instability of childish unreadiness for that experience, and possibly locked still in a frozen family romance. One thing I noticed this week is how the past list of failed loving overtures to others I have loved once continually return to haunt me, even those when I was a student in the 1970s for instance. The pain of a journey by train from Liverpool Lime Street, having been rejected by a sweet person I met at London Pride and went to visit at his university is an example.
But these events have been dealt with. They are no longer actively mourned. So why return to the moment of rejection and relive a pain that no longer needs the reparation of healing or mending. I think that is because such moments paradoxically give hope. They remind that the issue was in you not in the loved person and that it was overcome, except perhaps for that truly sunken element washed by subterranean currents, to which access may be forever lost. And they remind you, you survive – eventually.
The demons and dragons are the ones of one’s own unreadiness for the isolation of the spaces that become oneself, that aged child alone,:’alone, on a wide, wide sea’. And like the Ancient Mariner again, the worst is the wish for someone to ‘take pity on a soul in misery’. Rather like Lear one ought to embrace experience, even that of those past, and set it as a challenge in front of you. It is all survivable and, when it isn’t, perhaps we ought to be grateful as the world of King Lear is for his suffering in reparation for the vast silliness of his human hubris of asking ‘which of you doth love us most’. After all, by the end of all action, we have to remember that:
The oldest hath borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”
The weight of this sad time we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
King Lear V, ii (Edgar speaking)
Of course Edgar in the play is still young, I am not. I ought to have known better but I am not so ancient in days as Lear or Gloucester, and they didn’t, but ever so slightly in their helpless but unconscious, to them, madness. Even Lear’s truly wicked daughters are correct in saying nevertheless that ‘he hath ever but slenderly known himself’. So there you have it: my priority for tomorrow: Γνῶθι σαυτόν (know thyself). It’s a tall order but well, you have to start somewhere. Lol.
All love to you.
Steve
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