everything is different when it snows. you are forced to move in and through the world in a different way, everyone does, slowly, carefully and it affects the relationships between the humans.

i had to be out in it because i had to get someone from the station. i can never get someone from the station without experiencing waves of affect because of the times i … oh never mind.

i parked the car and, waiting inside the station, stood watching the humans. i didn’t feel seperate from them. i felt neither hate nor desire. and i was moved by them, their innumerable different shapes and sizes and attire, their ways of moving through the world, their coming and going, their need to be somewhere where they were not, and their emotions, as they were reunited with an other or separating from them, their coming together and their coming apart.

i’d been thinking on and off about separation and the state of being seperate, which is also about the state of a relationship which no longer is, say when you are not yet divorced but separated. the relationship is no longer, but one’s current state is still defined by it. and nearly four years later i am divorced but i still experience the state of being separated.

becoming separated is something that overcomes you, it happens to you, you are subject to it. your agency disappears and something which was rock solid, a building of a complex construction and architecture, with many spaces and doors you could open, other doors which were still to be opened, crumbled in front of your eyes. and there was nothing you could do about it.

once i was not seperate from someone and now i am. i’ve spent a lot of time and energy since trying to undo that feeling of separation, by becoming joined to something or someone else — and now i am thinking, is it also possible to not be seperate in a different way?

i’d been thinking about separation becomes somehow or other a text fell into my lap, as they do, which referred to the yoga sutras. they date from the 3rd or 5th century, opinions differ as to when exactly, which seems weird. they can tell from the bone of a dinosaur that it lived 170 million years ago but they can’t tell you when a text was written? i suppose when you’re talking dinosaurs a hundred years more or less makes no difference.

apparently in the yoga sutras there are five truths.

the buddhists also have truths, although they only have four, but they are noble! mind you it’s somewhat of a sleight of hand since the fourth noble truth is actually the eight-fold path. i don’t mean to be picky but that makes 12, or 11. also, not all of them are interesting. ok we suffer because of the ego, and because of desire, but how? why? and what is the solution? this is why they have the eightfold path which can essentially be summed up as ‘do the right thing.’

one set of truths is more or less a variation of the other and no one knows which came first but for mine the yoga sutra’s truths are of a much higher standard than the buddhist ones : in brief, one, humans forget as soon as they are born where they have come from, which is the oneness to which they also return after they die. two, they are born into a split, dual world where they have to develop an ‘i’ in order to survive. three and four : when they are separate, from each other and from the world, they suffer, from hate and desire. you’re getting two truths for the price of one there. hate is what they want to get out of their system and desire is what they want to put into it.

beautiful!
and the fifth …?
ha ha well the fifth truth is your old friend, and mine, and it is as old as human consciousness itself, it is the fear of death.

blixa bargeld 2015

 

a year ago or so when i was in the deepest darkest depths of a depression which was caused by … well it’s complicated. i could write a book about it … hey, now there is an idea! … i joined a little group of people in the town where i currently live who were regularly getting together and talking about all the ways in which they suffer from … well being human … and i found it interesting and i thought it might be useful in some way.

one day in the group we were floundering for a theme and someone (you know who) said to me (because they saw me writing something in my notebook which coincidentally has a dinosaur sticker on it) if i had a suggestion for a theme. i immediately said, separation. how do we become seperate/d? and why do we remain seperate, from the world, from each other? and, if i may be allowed to say it just once more and then i will never mention it again, seperate from the ten to the power of five hundred universes and the eleven dimensions.

and how come every single human without any exception, is, was or will be alone, and is, was or will feel lonely?

and how come every single human without any exception is, was or will be full of hate, for the world, or for other people, or both, or full of hate for themselves? or full of desire, which is another way of saying greed — greed for sex, greed for love, greed for attention, for money, possessions, power, food, alcohol, drugs, adrenalin.

and then i added in a bit of local colour as they say, with my own story, about how i was abandoned by my father when i was 4½ and how i was bereft during my entire childhood and into early adulthood although perhaps it was helpful in a way that he died suddenly of a stroke when i was 19 and he was 45, two weeks after elvis, because it meant that it was finished the project of him being my father and me being the son that he had abandoned, but to this day i can’t even see the words ‘aged 4’ or ‘5 years old’ without welling up inside, or outside, or both.

there was another child at school, called frans whose father was dead and at the time i thought, well at least my father is not dead so i’m better off than him. what i know now is that actually he was the one who was better off, because my father abandoning me was an act of free will. he made a choice for a different life, one without me, and as long as he was alive i was always looking at him through that lens or filter.

my narrative, or the narrative as i am telling it here and now, for reasons unknown, is that this has continued to happen to me my entire life. time and time again i have been abandoned by people that i have loved or tried to love — and i have abandoned people who have tried to love me.

and more than half a century later, when i finally felt completely safe, apart from the recurring dreams in which it happened again and from which i would wake up going, phew woohoo! it was only a dream! for 12 years i was safe, secure and whole. and then poof! it did happen again.

some version of that i told, in part.

and i said, perhaps we have all experienced this, that we trusted someone, and we felt safe and secure, and then we were betrayed, they abandoned us. and now we are either desperately looking for someone we can trust and feel safe with, or we hold everyone at arm’s length to prevent them coming too close, because if they come too close we might be tempted to trust them which would only lead to disappointment, feeling betrayed, and severely doubting our self worth and/or filling us with self hate.

and there are also those of us who have never felt safe and secure and have only longed for it. i wonder who is worse or better off.

better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, some wag said a long time ago (and by implication, better to have been loved and then not loved anymore, than to have never been loved) but i am not so sure.

what do you think?

---

 

archive

---