Hiraeth UND Herzlandschaft

 WHY NOT BOTH?

Autumn rolls in, even here in the City of Angels, with, finally, cooler nights and less smoke from fires, and cloudy, overcast skies. Autumn is always a season of remembrance for me, nothing special there, I think it has this effect on many people. It's in the shortening of days and cooler temps and the approach of the Day of the Dead and Halloween. The natural cycle is to look back. Or to be back in one's imagination. Herzlandschaft, a landscape of the heart (pace Rilke) und hiraeth, the grand Welsh word for nostalgic homesickness, which, apparently, can also apply to homesickness for a place one has never been. I love that connotation especially, and especially these days. 

Cherokee Regional Park, St. Paul, three years ago on this date

The magic of changing leaves for a desert dweller cannot be overstated. 

Connected with hiraeth for me these days is a sense of surreal falling. A constant fall, not to be too metaphorical. I've been alternately beating myself up for "being bad at letting go and moving on" and working to reframe, in a more generous and kind, self-compassionate way, "being really good at valuing and honoring certain experiences I have had." There's a very sharp, bloody difference between those self-perceptions. It's a distinction I have been "working on" as we are fond of saying in America, for years. It has taken a lot of self acceptance to get to a place where I realize just how I am wired, and what comes naturally to me. In regard to sentiment, well, I am sentimental. I hold memories close. I am not a forgetter. I am not remade in each new experience. It's a dialectic where each new experience contains all of the other experiences. I get closer to being able to live when I accept this. And along with it, the realization that I live with my past. I do not move on. I live with. This is how I work. 

It does no good for me to feel hatred for myself around this attachment. It does no good for me to judge myself as a fucking clown fool sucker. It does no good for me to compare myself to the ability of others to forget and move on, and paint myself as a weak, foolish idiot by comparison. Think of any other struggle against acceptance that you can imagine and I have done it, and it does no good. It's more and more clear to me that what interferes with my ability to live is not how I am wired, but the ways in which I have hated how I am wired. Or even have allowed the judgments and perspectives of others to try to get me to change myself. The tension is not a natural result of being in love and having feelings and being immersed in memories. The tension is in trying to kill myself so that I look good for myself and others. Be strong. Not care. Get real. Move on. Forget it, Percy, it's Chinatown. 

There's a beauty and peace in surrender. In taking back the power of who I am. The people who have not been able to hang with who I am can go fuck themselves. The sign of same is when the response is to try to prune me, push me into a container, recommend "therapy," run away, avoid, ridicule, dismiss, or belittle. I can very easily go back and do an inventory now of all of the exchanges that I have had where the objective of another person was to kill me. That may sound extreme. It is not. Negate and erase who I am, is fancier language. Because let me tell you motherfucker, I am fucking inconvenient. I am not low maintenance. I have tried to be tough, strong, and low maintenance as a good, strong, normal man is supposed to be, and it is fucking stupid. For me anyway. 

It is also instructive to look back at all of the ways I have tried to do the same to others. How often I was incapable of simply radically validating women, in particular, but, instead, sought to diminish, prune, reduce, and shame them. I have become much better at holding space for others. A much kinder space has opened in me with much less judgment. It is not always operating, but it feels like, as I become more spacious and self-compassionate, there's much more room for others. 

Now it seems I am learning how to make space for my own stuff. It is astonishing how cruel and dismissive of myself I am capable of being. How much I rush and pressure myself. How much I hate myself. Again, it is not anyone else's choices, decisions, or behavior that threaten me, nor is it my natural responses. It is me, trying to kill me. Hating me. Hating my heart. Hating how I am. So now in this later stage of life where it feels there is not much time, and time goes very, very quickly, it feels like it's down to a duel to the death between me and me. 

Oh te dramas! But srsly. It goes back to the idea I have been musing over of a type of therapy for people who are all too well adjusted. I have been tentatively calling it "Disintegration Therapy." Being sane and functional in an exploitative, insane system is no virtue. Disintegration Therapy would seek to make clients completely dysfunctional, and proudly so. I guess there would have to be a waiver, and significant material support, and a lot of grant money. "Have you been Disintegrated?" would become the big question at parties. Would disintegrated people go to parties? Not sure. 

The simple promise in step 5 in the book Alcoholics Anonymous is that "we will no longer regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it." This is love. 

A friend's Abramovic/Ulay tattoo