today while minding my own business, that is, wrestling with a self imposed deadline in a attempt to preempt total panic later when the real deadline falls, the phone rings. i pick it up and on the other side is one of my dearest friends, colleagues, lovers. you name it, he is it to me or has been at some time. because he spent five weeks in a de-stressing therapy clinic and i have myself been up in the air quite a bit, it has been a total of eight weeks since we have seen each other, or so he tells me. for my part i have not really been keeping books.
a couple of weeks ago i buzzed him on email and got an answer with contents that roughly translated that he was not yet ready to talk to me. i mailed back that he should take his time, after all, that is all that is really his, his time. not having an expectation or anticipation as to how much time he needed for himself, i also put the whole to rest. i love him dearly, intensely, even passionately but i also have the same attitude towards my work. when he rang today, i was both surprised and pleased.
he told me about his experience at the clinic and that is a story that is not mine to tell. i shared with him the events of my last eight weeks. it was on sharing those events with him that i became aware of how very much has happened in this life of mine during the past eight weeks. that feeling that i had four weeks ago after returning from a week over-there-somewhere attending to matters close to my heart, is not a feeling, it is an attitude, a way of being and living. it is relatively new, change has taken place in this life of mine. that bit about me not recognizing my life since is real.
roughly one week ago i met with a dear soul who this summer populated my carnal distractions and when the animal who i am decided that also good affairs must one day come to an end, he decided that i am a cold blooded bitch. in our most recent meeting i could barely recognize the man, and i wondered who that person there talking to me was, he seemed so foreign. i cared so very little for his troubles and tribulations. i wondered why on earth i had even bothered to call him up when i passed his office. yet, i remember well one moment earlier this past spring when this man touched me, and i ingested a wonderful drug. i knew that it was a drug, it is a drug that i have taken before, it was the abysm of falling in love. we do fall in love with our own neurosis, and so it is also with me. the love affair with the own neurosis, is however therapeutic, if not narcissistic. what a delightful choice the psyche gives you, you fall in love and then you may choose therapy or narcissism. the choice is yours, it always is. on occasions i forget this so very basic bifurcation in every day life.
it was in my week away one month ago that i faced that choice once more. i went for therapy, and i felt like a total fool. imagine me having this man whom i very much like, and whom i admire, right there sitting next to me. imagine me sensing his presence, imagine me feeling insecurity. mine or his, it really did not matter. then i feel him pulling back and away, i turn around and tell him exactly what all of his tossing, doing and bending activates in me. then imagine the two of us alone in the privacy of his kitchen a few weeks later. imagine him calling me yesterday with a wonderful stratagem just to talk but having not much to say. it takes so little to make me happy. our call lasted less than ten minutes, and i was delighted, even satisfied. satisfaction sounds perverse now; perverse is the very idea that the seducer is now being seduced. yet our egos are so very delicate and brittle. shattered egos make for very deep neurosis. being the fool whom i am, once more i wrote to him again... and again i felt like a divine fool. i like being a fool at this point. i have given up all pretense of wisdom, enlightenment, or for that matter common sense. i am as i am so be it.
at the end of our phone conversation today my friend and i were bubbling. while we were not looking for it, we have found a deep friendship. he told me about his therapy, his falling in love, his needs, his life's errands. i shared with him my struggles, my falling in love, my fascination with the muses, my passion for life. we concurred on the matter of sharing a bed with each other.
Showing posts with label animal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animal. Show all posts
Saturday, 9 December 2006
Sunday, 5 November 2006
the trouble with us
first let's be clear who that us is. it is you and me, it is us or how we relate to each other as humans. the trouble is that we are animals, and we are the kind of animal that does not want to be one. in short, the human condition is about being an animal, and wanting to escape it.
what leads me to such brash, rash and abrupt conclusions?
in the absence of some form of relating there may be you and i, but there is no us. so it was that a week ago i sat next to a man and he proceeded to behave in a way that i would call oscillatory. he went from deep personal confessions to bad jokes within a short period of time, and then back to the deeply personal and intimate, and so on. now this man is wonderful in my eyes exactly because he exhibits such behaviour that makes his doubts palpable and his fragility evident. other than oscillatory, he behaves like the prototype macho. he seems very real to me, and he feels very far from the idealized utopic view of what a man ought to be; and he struggles with his ego and whatever will and drive he has. he remains animal and he keeps on censoring the animal as though that animal had no right to exist. this is how i chose to describe this man's fragility.
take for instance his smoking. he says that smoking is not a good habit, yet he confesses to not being able to stop. i get that, i certainly get that he feels like he can not stop smoking. i also sense that he is making some progress in coming to terms with his own limitations, he has stopped counting how many cigarettes he smokes in a day. this knowing and not acting according to the knowledge is the kind of behaviour that i find in many around me, and certainly one that i know well enough from my own experience. i know what i ought to do, i feel a craving, ignore the good intentions, and do give in to the craving that the animal whom i am commands upon my rational illusions. but not always, not on all of life's little issues. the animal is simple, and the animal is not linear.
last night my son gave me the key for what i was looking for. i had been thinking about self-confidence, however he pointed me to self-esteem. yes, they are not the same. one being can have loads of self-confidence and zero self-esteem and the result is the animal being out of control. the animal me that is, not necessarly the man. that man from last week is one whom i admire and one that has me being grateful that he ever showed up in my life. he showed up at the right time, with the right attitude. it has taken me years to see him a bit better for who he is. my delay residing in the fact that he seems so much like me, that i end up hardly ever being able to distinguish between what is his and what is mine.
i remember that when i first became aware of his interest in me, i could only feel the attraction that admiration catalyses. i felt that and i felt my own confusion about being attracted to the man and at the same time seeing a father figure in him. at that time when this had happened i had not yet gone through deep psychothereapy and i had a few unresolved conflicts floating around in my mind gnawing at the very essence of my being and paralyzing any expression of what is mine. the idea of engaging in sexual interplay with a man whom i saw as the father that mine was not, was at best disconcerting, it was incest. impossible was the overwhelming feeling of the whole encounter and our interactions that followed, totally impossible. my immediate reaction was to send him a letter in which the tenor was that he was to keep away from me. imagine desiring him, and imagine not being able to imagine anything more than to be held in his arms as though we were both asexual. for months, years, i censored my desire for him, i wanted him to be my missing father. the psyche had censored the animal, and reason was beyond hope then.
then we fast forward to last week and his admissions of his own daughter's sexual advances towards him. at that point i felt like i had fallen victim to my own fiction, and that my madness was the only reality keeping me sane. within seconds i had a whole tempest of feelings back on my lap, and i had invited none of it. we were sitting next to each other, and my immediate thought was how very much i did desire him, and how good it would be to forget all social convention, pierce through all the barriers, and experience the complete sexual beings that we are with all our weaknesses and strengths. yet, i did nothing and said even less. i offered good, reasonable, sound counseling. the coward whom i am, retreated, my animal's cravings for his body were censored and discarded.
the day after this rather intimate and personal exchange there were a few moments when we could have met, we both were in the same building, however between the many floors and the crowds, neither made much of an effort. the next day we exchanged emails and i returned to being my very intellectual mask, a real mask as effective as a man's macho mask, and once more the animal got to take a back seat to that very much in command intellect.
it could be that one of these days one of us will be foolish enough to grab the other, and just let the natural animal satisfy its cravings away from psychology and concepts of propriety. it could also be that nothing ever happens, and that we are left with the assurance of the knowledge that nothing outside ourselves can cause any trouble.
what leads me to such brash, rash and abrupt conclusions?
in the absence of some form of relating there may be you and i, but there is no us. so it was that a week ago i sat next to a man and he proceeded to behave in a way that i would call oscillatory. he went from deep personal confessions to bad jokes within a short period of time, and then back to the deeply personal and intimate, and so on. now this man is wonderful in my eyes exactly because he exhibits such behaviour that makes his doubts palpable and his fragility evident. other than oscillatory, he behaves like the prototype macho. he seems very real to me, and he feels very far from the idealized utopic view of what a man ought to be; and he struggles with his ego and whatever will and drive he has. he remains animal and he keeps on censoring the animal as though that animal had no right to exist. this is how i chose to describe this man's fragility.
take for instance his smoking. he says that smoking is not a good habit, yet he confesses to not being able to stop. i get that, i certainly get that he feels like he can not stop smoking. i also sense that he is making some progress in coming to terms with his own limitations, he has stopped counting how many cigarettes he smokes in a day. this knowing and not acting according to the knowledge is the kind of behaviour that i find in many around me, and certainly one that i know well enough from my own experience. i know what i ought to do, i feel a craving, ignore the good intentions, and do give in to the craving that the animal whom i am commands upon my rational illusions. but not always, not on all of life's little issues. the animal is simple, and the animal is not linear.
last night my son gave me the key for what i was looking for. i had been thinking about self-confidence, however he pointed me to self-esteem. yes, they are not the same. one being can have loads of self-confidence and zero self-esteem and the result is the animal being out of control. the animal me that is, not necessarly the man. that man from last week is one whom i admire and one that has me being grateful that he ever showed up in my life. he showed up at the right time, with the right attitude. it has taken me years to see him a bit better for who he is. my delay residing in the fact that he seems so much like me, that i end up hardly ever being able to distinguish between what is his and what is mine.
i remember that when i first became aware of his interest in me, i could only feel the attraction that admiration catalyses. i felt that and i felt my own confusion about being attracted to the man and at the same time seeing a father figure in him. at that time when this had happened i had not yet gone through deep psychothereapy and i had a few unresolved conflicts floating around in my mind gnawing at the very essence of my being and paralyzing any expression of what is mine. the idea of engaging in sexual interplay with a man whom i saw as the father that mine was not, was at best disconcerting, it was incest. impossible was the overwhelming feeling of the whole encounter and our interactions that followed, totally impossible. my immediate reaction was to send him a letter in which the tenor was that he was to keep away from me. imagine desiring him, and imagine not being able to imagine anything more than to be held in his arms as though we were both asexual. for months, years, i censored my desire for him, i wanted him to be my missing father. the psyche had censored the animal, and reason was beyond hope then.
then we fast forward to last week and his admissions of his own daughter's sexual advances towards him. at that point i felt like i had fallen victim to my own fiction, and that my madness was the only reality keeping me sane. within seconds i had a whole tempest of feelings back on my lap, and i had invited none of it. we were sitting next to each other, and my immediate thought was how very much i did desire him, and how good it would be to forget all social convention, pierce through all the barriers, and experience the complete sexual beings that we are with all our weaknesses and strengths. yet, i did nothing and said even less. i offered good, reasonable, sound counseling. the coward whom i am, retreated, my animal's cravings for his body were censored and discarded.
the day after this rather intimate and personal exchange there were a few moments when we could have met, we both were in the same building, however between the many floors and the crowds, neither made much of an effort. the next day we exchanged emails and i returned to being my very intellectual mask, a real mask as effective as a man's macho mask, and once more the animal got to take a back seat to that very much in command intellect.
it could be that one of these days one of us will be foolish enough to grab the other, and just let the natural animal satisfy its cravings away from psychology and concepts of propriety. it could also be that nothing ever happens, and that we are left with the assurance of the knowledge that nothing outside ourselves can cause any trouble.
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