Secret Hope of a Hidden Self

I knew that I would learn something important by going right into a sense of hiraeth, nostalgia and sense memory from a shared city. I had no idea, frankly, what the hell I was doing, or why, except that I have done this before, and it has always revealed something. This time, it took a couple of days for me to realize what I was after. 

The oddest thing about my psyche, and maybe yours, is that I am capable of keeping a secret even from myself. I think nothing speaks to Jung's central concept of "the unconscious" quite like this dynamic, where there is an independently operating self (he would have called it a "complex," but not in the Freudian sense) that is not even known to my waking mind. Or that only partially emerges at times and then gets shouted down, denied, argued with, ignored, dismissed, and denied. It's a form of self-anosognosia, like Dunning-Kruger but for the self. We assume confidently that, of all the people in the world, we know ourselves best, and this is often a serious delusion. 

In this case, the visit to the city of memories revealed that a dark, mostly hidden, sense memory, "soft animal" (only very, very human) continued to hold on to the secret hope that "we" would still be together somehow. This astonished me. I honestly had no idea, in my daylight mind, that any part of me was harboring this idea of a future partnership. If anyone had asked, I would have honestly said, oh, no, I've accepted the ending, and moved on. It's sad and all, sure, and it was lovely, but yeah, I got it, I'm done, I've moved on. 

This sorrowful, attached, dark human beast/man in me is far from that, however. And the encounter also taught me that I have not been listening, obviously. Instead, I have been treating this hidden shadow ful of hope the way an exasperated parent treats a hopeful child, who is obsessed with something they can't have. He's not swayed by reason, by dismissal, by exasperated frustration, by exhortation. He is inconsolable and not swayed by anything that my daylight self can bring. 

So I had to find some way to deal with this Other man, heart-centered, sense memory drenched, emotion, blood, dark and hidden, deeply bewildered and sorrowful. I sat on a rock looking out at Lake Kabetogama and realized I could just listen to him. I could leave space for him to be heard. I guess it's a little like that "inner child" work, but, in this case, an inner beastman. The soft human animal of my body, but much more than that as well. Deepest primal cellular self, resonant with the anima. 

He and I are beginning a relationship. He's requested I continue to keep his fondest hopes and wishes hidden from the world. He's torn to bits, forlorn, bleeding, and angry in a lot of ways, and it turns out I haven't been listening to him for a long, long time, not just since December 2018 or whenever. There's a very profound lack of trust. I still have the tendency to respond from my daylight mind, and be dismissive, or try to reason with him. He runs back into hiding if so. It's like coaxing a feral cat out for food. I have to practice simply leaving open space and only watching and listening. Essentially irrational, he believes, or even knows, a great many things I simply do not. In our estrangement, he's largely written me off. There's a lot of mistrust and resentment there that's well-earned by daylight me. 

But I am beginning to learn. He knows what he wants, he knows what he loves. Why do I keep exposing him to heartbreak, confusion, absence, abandonment, loss and longing? That's one of his aching questions. My daylight self jumps to strategy, explanation, reassurance, dismissal. Sometimes exasperation. He makes me feel like a fool. That isn't his fault. I even find myself asking him the same question: why have you led me into so much heartbreak? But in this fissure between daylight me and this dark beastman, I finally get a clearer picture of my complicated grief. The "complex" nature is actually a complex, tat is, twofold self: day and night. For years I have been able to "move on" by simply abandoning him, making a project of forgetting him, and vaguely hoping he would just go away. 

This is no longer a working option.  

Learning to live with it

For some reason, the welter of memories conjured by going back has led mostly, eventually, to gratitude. I'll take it, considering the alternatives. I was driving around a couple evenings ago and the fact settled over me that whatever risks and complications, tensions, nostalgia for what couldn't be, loss, frustrations, sorrow, confusion, or even outright bewilderment, all of it, 100% worth it. I think we need to find moments where this is the case, or something in us turns from blood to cinder. 

I am feeling worn down to the bone today. I taught a demo lesson for one school, via Zoom, and then was in four hours of Zoom interviews with another school, yesterday. I went out afterward to a place that held some sweet memories, had a huge dinner, watched the Minnesota sunset from a dozen different vantage points on the way back to the hotel. The school for which I taught the demo is recommending that I be hired, but it has to go through the university HR department, as the faculty of the school is adjunct at the university. My fingers are crossed that there won't be any hitches, but it means a complete transformation of my life over the next three weeks if so. 

I think most accurately the truth of the past many months has been that I am learning to live with all of it. I don't move on. It's not in my nature really. It makes it challenging to be getting older, since all of what I've been stays with me. But I am learning to accept it. I don't get over things, I don't move on. I learn to live with. Trying to force forgetting or getting over or moving on is futile. It's not in my nature. Letting go looks like accepting that I'm going to learn to live with whatever has happened. 

I've seen that going back and learning to live with are intimately connected. And no matter the anger, sorrow, confusion, chaos, bewilderment, since I'm going to be living with the reality, I'm charged with truth and reconciliation. It helps to use the tools I have for perspective. One day, sometimes one minute, at a time. 

Owning and taking responsibility for all of my own choices, decisions, all along the path. Letting blood stay blood. Washing the grit and cinders from the torn and slashed places. Praising whatever was possible enough to honor it with grief. Plasma is 90% salt water, so, basically the tears that platelets swim in. Learning to live with it. 

Going Back

I think I've probably written about this tendency of mine before, here on this blog, but I'm uncharacteristically too lazy to go back and look for it. I recall a visit to San Diego, during which I went back to a restaurant where the ex and I had had our fifth anniversary (and my birthday) dinner. I simply stood across the street from the restaurant, and remembered the occasion, and felt sad, felt sorrowful, felt the weight of the time that had passed between that celebration and the night I stood there again, and simply...was. In that space, with the reality. 

Last summer I had thought of going back to St. Paul and Minneapolis (I've been resisting "the Twin Cities" because my experience is distinctly different in these two cities, and they feel distinctly different, culturally, in spite of their seeming proximity). But it was clear, from the vantage point of Duluth, that I was nowhere near ready. It felt like it would be altogether too painful. 

This summer, at a remove of two years from my last extended visit, which surrounded a huge botany conference down in Rochester, I decided it was time. So, here I am. On Kellogg Street, within walking distance of 4th and Wabasha, where I stayed a few times. Last night, I had dinner at Cosetta, ice cream at Izzy's (sadly, the St. Paul location is no more, but it was only about 15 minutes to the one in Minneapolis), made a quick trip to a place on Hiawatha that held some of the best memories, and to Minnehaha Park and Falls at sunset. Then, back at the hotel, a quick walk to Wabasha, The Grey Duck, and the general area around the Wabasha Street bridge. 

Today, lunch at Key's Cafe on Robert. 

I will be here two more nights, but tomorrow is fairly full with a demo lesson for a school in LA from 1-2, and interviews with another school from 2-6:15, all via Zoom. 

I know why I am here. I lived it, and I need to honor it before, or while, moving on. I don't move on the way other people seem to, or the way I have been advised to. I tend to move on by going back. I need to feel it in my heart, and own it. I don't do well forgetting, or "detaching," or even just letting go, without some kind of cathartic encounter. I have learned this much about myself. 

Looking north up the Mississippi from Ford Parkway

One of the places

I've never missed anyone more than I miss someone through this process, but that's just one part of it. The larger part is that it is a way of memorializing a past and remembering the gifts of it, and showing up for where my heart actually is. There's a truth and reconciliation aspect to this kind of side quest through Hades. I have known, from other times that I have done this, that it may be excruciating, it may be so dark and sorrowful as to be nearly unsustainable, but the end result is a much greater integration, acceptance, peace, and serenity. 

In recovery, it's called no longer regretting the past nor wishing to shut the door on it. Being here, and grieving while celebrating, and remembering that grieving is a way of saying: "something was worth the praise of being grieved," I am especially made aware of how closed off and protective I had become. Brittle, expending a lot of energy on pushing away the reality of my life at this time and in the past. I'm reminded that it is okay to stop that. It won't kill me to be sad, to miss someone, to remember, and remember, and remember, and to grieve. 

It's not for everyone, I get that. But I know myself well enough to know that, if I want to make peace with the truth, it is one of the steps on the path. To go to the heart of the past. To bear witness to my former self and what he was able to do. To honor the truth of it. And to not be afraid. 

To hold a tender place of praise for what was possible and is no more, but what is still possible nevertheless. I think we underestimate terribly the great value of staying tender. 

Not Knowing the Half of It

My father's interment was Monday, and it's been a weird week. I drove over to see my best friend in Jersey for a little bit, and hang with his amazing DAWG, named Luna, and then went to Long Beach Island, quite intentionally to grieve the death of my father, as he was at his happiest on our vacations there. The Vivian Maier photograph featured here had reminded me of this, a couple weeks ago. The man in the photograph looks almost identical to my father—same clothing, shoes, hair, body type. 

Vivian Maier, August 22, 1956, Chicago Man on Beach

The interment, everyone masked and distanced

Lovely Luna

Several other themes coalesced around the Long Beach Island jaunt, haunt, and tumble. I stayed in the Holiday Inn in Manahawkin, that I had stayed at way back in 2011 on a really weird day where I originally started driving as if I were going to just drop in on an ex of mine in Rhode Island, but then almost the whole way there realized it was a stupid idea, and turned south, and ended up driving through New York City late at night, and all the way to Long Beach Island. This was after a brief family visit, and I just felt insane with loneliness, so I guess that's why I figured "just dropping in" on this particular (married, problematic) ex would be "fine." So I was recalling that odd chapter of my life and feeling some heavy codependent energy. 

Then I went onto Long Beach Island proper and had some incredibly good seafood and went to a little place called The Custard Hut, where we used to buy frozen custard cones when I was like 7 years old. 51 years later the place is still up and running. So a whole flood of memories of my family and my father was coming up. Down to the end of the island to photograph the sunset, which then reminded me of the night before a decisively fateful day, a little more than three years ago. 

The southern end of Long Beach Island, sunset, June 29th, 2020

In short, Monday the 29th was like a Proust novel packed into one day. It turned out, when I woke up Tuesday, that I got a dozen referrals from a private secondary school headhunter I am working with, so to make things even weirder, I did a full job interview with a school administrator on the way back to my sister's, pulled over on the side of the road. 

It's a lot to try to unpack. The switch to looking for a secondary school teaching job was not easy to make. I console myself that I can still search for postdoctoral or college level jobs as time goes on. I feel like a failure, though. It's odd, because I love teaching secondary school. I just had this secret hope that those days were gone. The job search for postdocs or college has been a total frustration, however, and secondary schools are jumping all over me, so it seems like the universe is speaking. Who knows. I'm just done trying to figure shit out. I'm just letting go of every single hope or expectation I've had. It seems like it works best. 

It is the three year mark since a life changing experience that I didn't even realize I was having, at the time, until a little bit later. It's interesting from where I am now to consider that, on July 3, 2017, I had no idea what the next 10 days were going to be about, nor that July 14 on would be so significantly different from my daily experience prior. I think this is always true anyway, but it lends an odd perception now that some surprising thing could be right around the corner. Like, who knows? I tend to think that ten days from now, I'll feel like shit, exactly like I do today, but we don't even know the half of it. Of course, the surprise could also be unpleasant. My sister, for example, who went to bed on March 3rd and woke up a widow March 4th. 

And the estimation of what occurred is always subject to revision. I wish I didn't have a mind that tells and retells and figures and reconfigures so ardently. But, well, if wishes were horses, etc. 

More wilderness and solitude, please. I will probably be on the job hunt while traveling. For this very reason, I switched to the Verizon network, so I'll have a lot more coverage in more rural areas. The tempting feeling in my heart and on my mind is to disappear. To get somewhere perfect for remote hermit life and sink into monastic silence. I had the weirdest dream the other night, where a mysterious woman lived in a shoe box, and she was saying the famous phrase: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," and I couldn't keep from laughing. A buddy of mine reprimanded me, saying, "Dude, that's Julian of Norwich, show some respect" and I just laughed harder.