Trying on different lives.

Trying on different lives.  We must learn to try on different lives, lest we become too embittered with the narrowness of one.  Not that bitterness, or staying away from it, should be our only motivation in changing our spiritual clothes; there are plenty of other reasons for doing so, like adaptation, learning and exploration.  Sometimes, indeed, it’s important to change ourselves, even at the fundament of our lives if possible, because–we are already doing it!  Our lives are always and already swept away by transformations of the highest order, and to stay within our habits of our manner of being would be–dishonesty! 

            But bitterness does play a mighty role, because there are manifold ways in which life may become routinized and we may miss out on what is most important in living by our being stuck in one vantage point.  Then the bitterness spreads, communication falters, life becomes a series of faulty dead-ends; all because we failed to experiment with ourselves!  Experiment with our manner of speaking with others, our bearing in interacting with other beings, experiment with our beliefs or turn our failure to believe, our inherent skepticism, into, if not a dogma or a conviction, then at least into a temporary raft of confidence in the shaky waters of life.  The same goes for our taste in music, our reading and study, our love affairs: it’s as if, after having played with them for so long and adapted our repartee to their thrusts, we must all at once learn new moves in dealing with them, even to the extent of no longer trusting them, because we know, better than we know anything, that our trust is built on a certain pattern-finding of intensities among an ever-flowing stream of contingencies.  So the bitterness we are avoiding is not of the petty sort, rooted in envy of others’ differences and others’ lives, but is a vague sense, by which we do not want to be tricked, that, if we are not careful, we might be felled, we might finally become the victim, of what at one time made us stand!  After a while, and not only for the impatient or the unthankful, we notice our strengths becoming our weaknesses, our hammer becoming our crutch, our voice becoming our ventriloquism.  We move on–because we never once agreed, even when the thing, when the habit or when the love was most powerful, that it would remain the meaning of our lives, the way in which to best handle the multiple avenues, arenas and fights within those diverse arenas life presents to us with the only constancy life knows.  However vaguely, we sense the expiration date of the habits we have formed; even the slow erosion of the stupid rock which forms our bottom, we sense that too, and would not like to sink, yet, into that abyss that yawns beneath the ground and stability of that rock.

            This strategy, of altering whatever dress we wear so that we may be invited to the stupendous diversity of parties happening all around, of moving on from whatever form we have taken, even if it’s a well-encrusted shape that took many years to congeal, is not simply a strategy for avoiding despair.  Despair may come, of course despair may come, when we feel, undeniably, the erosion of our foundation, when we feel, without being able to do anything about it at first, the evacuation of our road or ground or post away from us.  Not so much despair but the bitterness of despairing, it is that we wish to face with more assertive negation more than anything else, that which keeps us keeping on and keeping up with the way life alters, from profound to dull, from clear to opaque, from restful to fretfully restless without staying in a particular modulation as though it were a fate, and a terrible and undesirable fate, no less.  Because there is a certain bitterness at the bottom of being stuck in despair, when the changes have occurred but something, some fragment of the life we still contain, remains and is able to look back on what it has lost as a loss of its definition, despite the glimmers or more sustained insight that whatever it was that is evaporated was bound to be lost, whether by our hand or not.  A bitterness with life, and a certain stubbornness is at the bottom of all despairing.

            Whence comes this power to transform, and how on earth, how amidst the crashing and fire and blackness of the universe, are we to find ourselves ahead of ourselves in this way?  It seems we are attempting, as though through a type of madness and complete negation of the powers surrounding us, to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, to take it as our stance that transformation is, in the end, our responsibility and up to us, that escaping despair and the bitterness of despairing is ultimately within our ability.  We are curious, so we set out on a journey; we are buffeted by forces that prod us to alter ourselves and, instead of hanging on to the old beaten thing, we give it up, and again this is our intention; we want to learn the broader significance of things, so learn to widen our horizons, not only in the authors we take in, but in our own thoughts, our own affects, our own manner and disposition.  Fate is more of a plaything than a terror and we are the child, bending it this way and that, at our whim, because bitterness seems the last thing we would want of this life, or because we happen to be just that kind of person who won’t take no for an answer, even the no of not being granted what everyone around her, what she herself at times, has said is impossible: to be something that you’re not.

            It seems this way, but let us not fool ourselves: we cannot so decide to take off our clothes and trade them in for another; nor is this spontaneous strategy a way itself of spitting in the face of life, fighting the possibility of bitterness with bitterness itself, aiming, despite life’s shaping us for one thing and one thing only, for one narrow look on the world, to rip through our barriers and become the plenum itself, the infinite outpouring of lives itself.  We accept our limitations, and do not pine after any godlike control of the course of things.  But we might try, however, however probable or necessary it is that we shall fail, because if we do not try the impossible–a different life, having the outline within us already of a different life and merely, somehow, having to spell it out, give it a shot, in the face of our life-world–bitterness ensues, the worst, the most powerful type of bitterness, that of a feeling of powerlessness, not for a lack of effectiveness, but because–we didn’t try.