The Perpetual

Seoul. 07.09.21

I am too tired to be eloquent. But I’m thinking of “the perpetual”, as I’ll term it here:

From Namsan Tower, I watched couple after couple saturating the wooden decks take pictures together, hold hands, stroke aside long black hair and caress a neck, gently, thinking, more deeply, of the yearnings we fall step by step into and deeper and deeper to the point that we can be anywhere in this immense expanse of never-ending alleys and beating hearts and blood clots and aching feet and young kids clambering up parents, and, you, you alone, here, will be thinking of that caress, that stroke, those hands, that whisper: and you are sustained into a place where you are everywhere and nowhere at once. Where you are sustained in alien lands by the strange moles and hairy legs of someone very far away, such that even if you are yearning, you can be quite whole. Even if this is idealised, still, as you watch lights stretch truly to every mountain top and in every direction in this expanse, how can you not help think of the typical Platonic? (Yes. Here. The Other Half.) dictum of far-flung lovers who search for each other until they are found, too powerful otherwise (that was a nice touch, thanking Google…: “Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves”), and so powerfully sustained by this love (I’m mixing myth and feeling, but ultimately, who cares and are they so different in any case?), and at least I — if not you — just imagine these strokers and hand holders and whisperers thinking of one another from towers and mountaintops and lands elsewhere, and how worlds are created in love. In lovers, but also in loved ones. In grandparents’ hands. In embraces. “The perpetual”.

From the banks of the Han River, having returned again and so feeling on some level that I could know this place and its flowing water, I realised that the gargantuan skyscrapers of this city which felt as if they were assailing me at every tube exit in repeated, undifferentiated patterns of colour and commerce, undifferentiated, loud, demanding, smoking, dusty, were slowly disentangling into a city that also could be known. Mapped. I imagined at the same time at the point of this ‘knowing’, the basements and the broom cupboards and the laughter and the fears that were being felt in this swirling mass, and the city at once became unknowable again — through this meditation on the expanse and multiplication of broom-cupboards and basements all far too numerous and abundant for me to enter into each one or know — just as I began to sense that the world was finite. “The perpetual”. Oxymoronic? Not quite…

I’m tired so I’ll also say: what I’ve come to realise about being away is what a powerful thing it is to be known and to love. That even in moments of growth, and introspection and boldness, we can trip across and into and be assailed by the cracks. Again, this is an unread ether…but to feel the struggle of some of the most beautiful souls that I attempt to carve mine by, the struggle that is born of a world which will not make space for their beauty and abundance and thoughts that run in riffs and define joy and which is of the colour and quality that we try to paint and write of and emulate. Who are so giving, who will not settle. To hear and to feel that pain makes me furious. To hear of their overcoming and of their strength and their shunning and of their rebellion is a beacon-light.

To end today feeling that the trips of my thoughts, and the circles I run in and my attempts to see the light in the cracks and drive past the pain “perpetual”, to feel jagged, and wrong, and tiring, and to have my very known worries thrown back at me for their depth, and to be told by other words that the feelings were to felt, and the deep was too deep, and to be asked if I thought past one eventuality as if it had been decided that I live in a world as black and white as that assumption itself…: to be so assaulted when the maps and the roads and the mountains of my past, my mind, my feelings, my care and my fears are ones which have had their craters and their bounty and their ring-roads and their round-abouts and their dark pits and shadows round the corner which coincide deeply with the sunlight…made me intrigued by this slip of mine from feeling another to feeling myself. As if I were jagged. Not quite this, but, suddenly, you realise that the discovery is not one simply by you, but one into you, and this feeling of being written so wrong (especially a wrong so convinced), by hands which are impatient and which deem you confusing and have no care to follow the riffs and the struggles of your search for the right term, and which stretch you in five directions at once remind me of a fear someone once expressed to me of. They most deeply feared being misunderstood. And I feel that I will attempt to ask you if this mapping is correct, as we discover together, and as you ultimately decide how today you will carry your fortitude, tomorrow your pain, the next day your unstoppable joy…Whatever. It is just a strange and painful and jarring experience to have your personality laid out on the table and wrung and quartered, as if this and not the misunderstanding (a product of facts, time, and space, and place. Mappable. Locatable. “The perpetual.”) were choosable, dissect-able, tell-able, malleable (by another), judge-able as worthy or not (by another)…Anyway. Moments which amplify the fears you’d been holding in the pits of your belly or had been writing through…well, me, I guess?

And I’m sure, and I found out there was a lot of beautiful kindness in this conflictual-ness. That this is what happens to the living. That endings are not so finite. That tomorrow the city will have roared on even if the walls of the room felt small, and the desire to escape the aftermath of ‘what will be’ post-conflict sink into fast heartbeats and deep into your chest, as if there will be no release.

But I guess even here, these are moments which are unto lovers stroking necks and holding hands. We are humans who are turned on by the same and the wildly different. We can love close and from afar. Just as we can trip into the same offences and become the offended…and maybe the journey is becoming a map-maker who allows herself to feel the mayhem and the depth from the top of my head to the tips of my shoes (and beyond, and below), but that can read the countervailing narrative with a calm and unassailable heart, such that the harder mappings of hostile jungles et al. becomes less frightening, less impenetrable, and less up-ending too. Who knows. “The perpetual.”

We seek.

At least its into the ether.

What a blessing to speak conflict for the purpose of overcoming. Not daily, god forbid. But a lesson again that to find and to be and to experience is not always so simple. But I wish, like I wish for my friend I love so deeply, that she realises that there is space in the world for the entirety of her abundance. That her soul reverberates into this world like sun-rays. That her existence is a longed for, thought of, deeply loved one. And that I think of her from towers and mountain-tops and sitting on wooden decks watching the sun go down. And that she is that light that draws back the shrinking room as a map-readers compass goes down hard the wrong way and tells me this is how it is. (Though it is not so simple). More than 4-legged things, I think perhaps we should think of us all as carrying the weight of another. But as in the weight you feel in a sweet caress, when you’re cupping at night, or resting your hands in those of your grandfather.

And how to make this world such that everyone may fearlessly know love. Love that may trip and falter, but is never truly breakable. I know we must start with ourselves and find it in hard wind and the sound of rain. But I think, too, of empathy. My friend said to me: “to cry the tears of another”. To feel their joys.

An older man who said he was 87 and reminded me of my grandfather said that life was unidirectional. ie. to seize it, to feel it deeply (but I understand, too, the question of how I felt in this conflict I wrote of, maybe (and maybe certainly, actually), was gentler than the assault I felt: more a, let yourself go!, and so, in honour of this, too…) let go, and simply (…much to be said here…but,) live…and more importantly, make of this world one in which every other (not merely the ones we yearn for) may feel at ease, feel peace, rest, home, loved, full, et al.

Perpetually