I’ve been reading Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, the astonishing series of poems he wrote about Sylvia Plath… to her? To commemorate her? To make meaning of his life story as it intertwined with hers? All of those?
I am struck by one line: "your worship needed a god." Hughes captures here something I’ve been buffeted by through the end times of my life story co-written with B – we only are what we are as we are seen to be that by someone else -- what we make in relationship. (Stephin Merrit got it so well: “you need me/like the wind needs the trees/to blow in/like the moon needs poetry/you need me”). This is a deep and profound truth to me, and the essential focus of my academic work on relational identity. B reviles it, seeing in it an erasing, an obliteration of an essential her. Our subversive loop.
Yesterday, in a writing workshop, my lumpen stuttering paragraph about this core idea was critiqued in front of 20 or so colleagues. I realized with simultaneous placidity and sharp recognition that I do what Judy pointed out, wind my core ideas round with tangles of cord like the abrasive string I use to tie newspapers for recycling, the kind that breaks if you pull it too hard the wrong way and leaves rope burns in your palms. I rewrite. We make and remake ourselves and each other in our relationships. We make and remake each other most profoundly in our intimate relationships.
In the airport today, I realize that this is the first trip since B and I broke up where I haven’t been dragging a metallic, unbearable yearning for my home and life lost along with my always-too-full suitcase, the bulging swiss army bag she called my Red Buddy. I’ve flown seven times, taken the train and driven the 401 multiple other times on my own since last April, and this is the first time I haven't, in the silent liminal space, found tears.
Walking across the (vast, of course) parking lot on a truncated quest for tamales last night, I realized there was no one I needed to find a little trinket for (replaying the ritualized "I was thinking of you" that marked my grandparents' return from every trip, the floppy cloth sunhats with little wicker dolls on them from some sun spot, the grey T-shirt from Raffles in Singapore that conjured up Sahib Grandpa as post-colonial industrialist and which made me sweat in a nasty manner). No one to coordinate with about airport pickups, with the inevitable miscommunication or delay on either side. This was something I just noted, with no yearning. That there are people who are glad to see me home, with whom I sing forward into connections -- and, there's no One Person in the World whose home is incomplete without me. I can be remade in multiple smaller spaces... and today, tomorrow, this is just fine.
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3 comments:
I have trouble with this idea of 'need'. I always have and since I read this post, I've been trying to sort through what it means to 'need'. All of the romantic songs and poems that talk about needing a person leave me cold, because to me it seems completely wrong. No matter how close you are, no matter how much you depend on the person, you never really need them. You can always go to others, you can always find those resources in yourself.
I'm finding a deeper understanding of needing others since I've been single. Outside of an intimate relationship, I can see more clearly the things I need from other people. If I try to frame it as needing one other person, I balk, but I'm coming to understand how others' perceptions of me help me to know myself and how I need to express myself to be known and how I need to listen to know.
I'm getting used to the idea of not being known by one person. Much more comfortable with it and as a result, see myself depending less on my online forum.
This is hard stuff for me to express. I don't have the language or framework for most of it. I hope this comment makes sense. :)
I think, in this context, "need" means that until we have someone to reflect against, those qualities aren't "really there" -- like you can't be a person who loves unless there is someone to love. We are inherently social creatures -- and we can have a strong self-concept that doesn't "need" anyone else -- but we don't really "live into" it until we enact those characteristics in the space between people.
The moral responsibility of this is pretty immense -- if someone wants to love you, and you don't let them, you are positioning that person as not the loving person the person is asserting.
That, in essence, is the distinction between relational identity and more "traditional" notions of psychology. (Which, if I can sound pedantic for a moment, are pretty traceable to what the pomo types call Cartesian dualism, which has its roots in the Enlightenment).
I'll shut up now :-).
Love is a mysterious beast. Need, even more so. More surprising is the fact that they are sometimes mutually exclusive. I've been trying to find that amazing quote by Alice Walker (from The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart), to no avail. Essentially? It talks about experiencing heartbreak and becoming more open each and every time. Open to what? Another mystery, the kind that is - seemingly - crafted in the wee hours when I can't sleep, or perhaps discovered in the first kiss from someone new who makes my heart flutter ever so lightly. Perhaps when I write, too. Through tears when alone. Something I've tried to express on my skin with the broken heart's drop of blood re/creating the hope of a lotus flower. I am continually amazed at the tenacity of the human heart. Its darkest depths. Its magnificent and lyrical sorrow. The roots of it which miraculously grow buds in the springtime when perchance an encounter caresses its tendrils.
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