Good Morning Dear Tiffany,
Thank you again for the kind words of yesterday. I trust you are well this day.
Reading Rilke is always such a revelation for me. I re-read many of his letters in “Letters to a Young Poet” (but especially letters 7 and 8), and I also re-read my copy of “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties” and I was humbled and overwhelmed and leveled by the thought that maybe you were healthy one in this and that maybe you were healthier than I was in approaching this. Maybe you had a better intuitive sense of things than I did. Maybe you were indeed in jeopardy of losing yourself and getting swept away by what you were feeling—though you never would have lost yourself with me; I wouldn’t have allowed it. And you know from being with me that my boundaries, where I have them, are good and solid.
But the reality is that my boundaries aren’t your boundaries. They can’t count as your boundaries. This is something that you have to do for yourself; this is something that no one can do for you. You have to create and establish and maintain your own boundaries, make your own decisions, apart from whatever I had in place, whether I like your boundaries and decisions or not, whether I agree with them or not. You have to try your own hand at drawing your own lines in the sand for yourself alone and no one else. No one can do that for you. And you have to try out different lines and live with the consequences of having drawn your lines and drawn your self in a particular way.
And of course the drawing itself is an art. Much of it has to be done by feel, intuition, chance, luck. But one’s luck can always be improved by one’s preparation. The lines are less arbitrary if there is the beginning of something articulated, something reasoned and principled, intentional and aware, behind them. The lines are less arbitrary if they have been informed by reading what Fromm calls “the Masters of Living” (of which Fromm himself is one, as is Peck, Krishnamurti, Rilke, Schnarch, Bowen. Even Marianne Williamson has her moments—but you can also see intuitively how strange it is to include her name in that list). Study, practice, contemplation, intention, awareness, self-examination, self-confronting, reading, reflection, thinking, intuition, heart, these are all things that will likely improve one’s boundaries. As will a lot of experience, likely of the painful kind.
Again, to read Rilke is always a revelation. And to read Rilke again and to try to do so from your perspective was even more of a revelation …
“Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?). Rather it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in him- or herself, to become world, to become world in him- or herself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on a person, something that chooses him or her, something that chooses him or her and calls him to vast distances and immense solitudes. Only in this sense, as a task of working on themselves (’to harken and hammer day and night’), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves).
“This is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they, who by their very nature are impatient, fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they would call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future?”
“[I]n the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away. But just think, can that be anything beautiful to give oneself away not as something whole and ordered, but haphazard rather, bit by bit, as it comes? Can such giving away , that looks so like a throwing away and dismemberment, be anything good, can it be happiness, joy, progress? When you give someone flowers, you arrange them beforehand, don’t you? But young people who love each other fling themselves to each other in the impatience and haste of their passion, and they don’t notice at all what a lack of mutual esteem lies in this disordered giving of themselves. However, they notice it with astonishment and indignation from the dissension that arises between them out of all this disorder.
“And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other, and loses the other, and loses the vast distances and possibilities in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of regret, disappointment, and impoverishment.”
“It is true that many young people who love immaturely, simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude, may feel oppressed by their failure and want to make their situation livable and fruitful in their own personal way. For their nature rightly tells them that the questions of love are deeply important questions, intimate questions, which require a new, special, and wholly personal answer. . . . —But how can they who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose lines are whose, who no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, how will they be able to find a way out of themselves if their solitude has already been shattered or if it never really existed in the first place?”
Maybe what you were doing was an act of self-protective integrity, an act of self-preservation or self-creation of the utmost and highest caliber and integrity. Maybe that’s what you are doing intuitively….
But my point always was to encourage you to see the situation or the terrain and paths in front of you in a non- either/or way, to not opt for simplification and selecting the best bad choice available, but embracing the complexity of the situation. My point was that there was (and is) always another option available to you: fusion and merging with integrity. A synthesis of the two. A relationship where there is both merging and solitude, where there is both a togetherness that is elevating and an intensification of both, and that still allows for much solitude. (It reminds me of what Thoreau wrote in Walden in his section on “Solitude” —
“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.
“We meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory,—never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. . . . God is alone,—but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.”
But again, that would be my insight, my brainwork, the fruit of my own thinking and my own living and experience. And would that have made you a parasite, a shoddy secondhand entity, if you were to have deeply listened to what I suggested, thought it over for yourself, and given it a go? I don’t know. That’s a question only you can answer for yourself, and it’s a matter of your own integrity.
Like I said, this has all caught me off guard in so many ways—first, just meeting you, just the fact that I met someone like you. Then there was the intensity of being with you and connecting with you (at least that was clearly my perception, that we were connecting; you did say several times that I got you deeply. I assumed that meant we were connecting. Physically, emotionally it felt like we were connecting, that you were totally into me and that there wasn’t a place on this earth that you’d rather be than getting to know me and getting more and more into me. But in hindsight it is clear that it was never mutual, that you never penetrated or got me. How could you comprehend or grasp me? What in your life and past and experience could have prepared you for me?). But I was also caught off guard by how you pulled back, that you said that I make you feel undone and less than equal, that you feel undefined and like Jell-O. I didn’t see any of that coming.
But anyways, back to the labyrinth that we’re lost in. Rilke’s point is good and right. If our current level of thinking and perceiving and feeling is what has gotten us into a certain situation, a very conventional situation, then how will it be able to steer us out of it, how will it do any better at directing us out of what it has led us into? The way that our conventional mind will devise will itself be conventional; it will not be not complex, not systems, not integrative …
“… even if with the best of intentions they try to escape convention, they will just fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For everything around them is—convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused and turbid communion, every act is conventional. Why even separating here would be a conventional step, an impersonal, reactive, chance decision without strength and without fruit.
“Once there is disunity between the two, the confusion grows with every day. . . . Alas, they are scarcely able to recall any more what they meant by happiness and what their happiness was. In this uncertainty, each becomes more and more unjust toward the other; they who wanted to do nothing but good to each other are now handling one another in an imperious and intolerant manner, and in the struggle somehow to get out of their untenable and unbearable state of confusion, they commit the greatest fault that can happen to human relationships: they become impatient. They hurry to a conclusion; to come, as they believe, to a final decision. They try once and for all to establish (or terminate) their relationship, whose surprising changes have frightened them.
“That is only the last error in this long chain of errors linked fast to one another. For how can what is living and alive be treated definitively, once and for all?
“Self-transformation is precisely what life is, and human relationships are the most changeable of all, rising and falling from moment to moment. And lovers are those in whose relationships and contact no one moment resembles another, people between whom nothing accustomed, nothing that has already been present before, ever takes place, but instead many new and unexpected and unprecedented and inexplicable things.
“There are such relationships which must be a very great, almost unbearable happiness, but they can only occur between very rich natures and between those who, each for himself, are richly ordered and composed; they can only unite two wide, deep, individual worlds.
“Young people, it is obvious, cannot achieve such a relationship. But they can, if they understand their life properly, grow slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget that when they love, they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love,—and must learn love, and that like all learning time, requires patience, great openness, and composure.
“Whoever loves must act as if he had great work. He must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work, he must do inner work, he must become something! For whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey. For believe me, the richer one is, the richer is all that one experiences.”
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“To speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. But that is all. How much better would it be to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy, for all points upon which our eyes have been accustomed to rest would be taken from us, there would be nothing near any more and everything far would be infinitely far. It would be analogous to a person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range. He would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible that would almost annihilate him; he would feel himself failing or hurled out into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces. What a monstrous lie his brain would have to come up with to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!
“For him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change. Of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and intense feelings arise that seem to be greater than our ability to cope with them and bear them. But it is necessary for us to experience these too and not shy away from them. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of and unprecedented, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most unique and rare, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter; the unknown. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them have atrophied. Not to say anything of God.
“But the fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; it has also narrowed and cramped the relationship between one human being and another, as if it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, where nothing new or real happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably and unspeakably monotonous and boring: it is timidness and shyness before any sort of novel and inconceivable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope or deal with emotionally. It is shyness before anything that challenges us too much.
“But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.
“For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people live not only in a very small room, but learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. And thus they gain a certain security.
“And yet how much more human is that dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells?
“But we, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten, intimidate or worry us. We have been placed into this life as into the element to which we best correspond…. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors? They are our terrors. Has it abysses? Those abysses belong to us. If there are dangers, we must try to love them.
“If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
“Perhaps everything that frightens us or undoes us is, in its essence, something helpless that wants our love. “
Maybe I am a dragon in your life? Maybe that is my place and my role in your life, for now, whether I want it or not. Maybe that is my work, to just be me, and in just being me that will unsettle and undo you in a way that maybe you need to be unsettled and undone. I don’t know.
Warmest regards as always,
Your John-John
