The Endless Battle

When I write and finally manage to say what it is I want to say, I know it. There is moment when I nail it on the head, say it accurately and adequately enough for the expression I want to have, and I know it. I might tweak it, but I already ‘got’ it. This time I decided not to tweak once I ‘got’ it.

As the world wings round invariably
in its net, by its strings, would I be bound.
But as its tension closes in
the whirling lightness of a blade
seeks to save another day,
defending, dodging always hacking,
twirl and slash, almost attacking–
And I feel them      ever fighting      on.

Yet there’s something made
‘tween strings and blade,
‘tween mind and eye and eye and hand,
in the silent peace of no man’s land,
before unknown unmakes us all–
We live, we learn, we love,     we stand     tall. 

Edit: I might add, the basis for this poem is that my life has become a bit hectic lately with many ‘real world’ demands (the world’s strings), and  though it seems as if my life will continue this way for some time to come, I am not unhappy – indeed quite the opposite.

Compaction: Love, Meaning and Experience

I think of myself as ‘differentialist‘; I see difference everywhere, and everywhere I see it I’m intrigued and fascinated by its sheer variety of shades, tones and meanings. Yet the more I investigate experiential meaning and significance the more I see compaction and ambiguity instead, so much so I’ve begun to wonder if compaction is ‘where meaning is’ rather than differentiation, to wonder if ambiguity is instrumental and essential  to experiential existence.

For instance, I first saw that defining moment in our early relationship in terms of differentiation rather than compaction, and so I first saw the differences in our love symbols ’hidden’ there, free will versus constrain-ment . Yet of a certainty there was compacted with my experience of constrain-ment the exercise of my free will, and while this might seem to illustrate nothing so much more than relationship and love symbol compatibility, I rather begin to wonder if it’s precisely the compact nature of the experience in such a situation that makes it so powerfully and intensely luminous -numinous even. I might tend to see it better (retrospectively) when differentiated one way than another way, but only because the experience fits my framework ‘better’ that way and I’m able to ‘make more meaning’, make better and more sense of the experience in that way.

So I’ve been reminding myself that everyone (ahem, myself) can and does understand in more than one way, even if they tend to mentally grasp and reflexively use one way more than another. Clearly differentiation and compaction work together (somehow) in human experience and in the meaning of experience – I’ve even been noting the issue of experiential compaction in my own life lessons, also here and here. I’ve noted compaction in the ‘for you is for me‘ relationship dynamic: when we do things out of love, we do them for our partner and their happiness but also for our own sake and our happiness. And while it is extremely difficult to separate out which motive is which, or which one is more, often seeming so interchangeable that we’re merely assigning motivation based on relative context and our current talking point.

It reminds me of how some people desire their partner to give them the love symbol that works for them more than they want their partner to express their love in a way that works for them. And in noting this in ‘passion addiction‘, I also noted how instrumental the exact ‘construction nature’ of our mental framework is to how well and which symbols (or experiences) ‘work’ for us – that is how well we ‘make meaning’ and sense of which symbols (and experiences) based on the nature of our mental framework. (It reminds me also of how we can get ‘meaning from the puzzle fit‘, like hormones and enzymes and the specificity of their receptors in molecular biology.) And as when the symbol fix is in, serious confusion can result from ‘misinterpreting’ such experiential compaction; we can fetishistically take  meaning from the thing (act, person or symbol) compactly associated with the experience rather than taking meaning from the experience itself.

This is what I meant (and still mean) when calling this the ‘love symbol negotiation‘; not only because we try ‘to get’ but because we try to understand and to give. Not only do we do our best to give our partner love in symbols they understand (and they try to give us love in symbols we understand), but also (rather than allow our heart’s reception to atrophy upon what has always worked for us) we (‘should’, I think,) try to expand our love horizons and adjust our interior spaces in order to better intimately understand our partner’s love and their love symbols, better understand their mental framework and their interior mental (and emotional) spaces.

Love’s Gravity (Passion)

Perhaps the motions of our relationship solar system are powered by the gravities of our desire, and in our love for each other our individual enjoyment can no longer be full without (or separated from) the other’s enjoyment, no matter whose pleasure is ‘active’ and whose pleasure is ‘passive’. The center and soul of our relationship cannot be summed by any one word or phrase; it is a nexus between us, a matrix of our combined gravities, a complexity of love we can know only by its direction on our individual interior compass rose. ~Octopus Heart (from here)

In the early stages of my relationship with my wife, there was a point on my interior where I turned from ‘playing it safe’ with her to ‘openly listening and interactive playing’ with her.  At this point and moment I said I felt I had to change, that I felt forced to change, making the ‘force’ behind this change of prime significance.

There is rock solid hardness to my wife, a part of her that doesn’t change, a part that is what it is, that is what she is, and is as unrelentingly as anything can be. When she first took a stand on that part of herself I discovered what “my way or the highway” really meant; and when faced with a choice of ‘her way’ or packing my proverbial bags, I realized that for me this was no choice at all. And ‘having no choice’ is what ‘feeling forced’ means, is what ‘having no power to do anything different’ means, is what ‘feeling disempowered’ means.

And the thing that prevented me from simply taking ‘the highway’ in that moment was the knowledge of how deeply I loved her. In that moment I could not walk away (or walk anything different than ‘her way’) because my passion, my desire, my love for her was just as equally rock solid and unrelenting as the stand she took. After entering her solar system, I might have merely changed direction to freely travel the highway between the stars again, but I didn’t – the hardness of her gravity and of my passion constrained me to trace whatever orbital path might result.

I think at that moment the confluence of ‘constrain-ment’ (as I would rather call it than ‘disempowerment‘, also here) with my love, passion and desire set up the felt ‘need‘ to adjust my interior mental framework in order to openly listen and interactively play with her, rather than playing it safe. I think for me this nexus, this confluence of constrain-ment and passion, is what began the ‘female led relationship dynamic’ that eventually resulted in my uxorious erotic truth, when I feel as if I am getting to safely stand on the sun and revel in its glory, and in the manner of the female led garden hose this is for me what being an uxorious man in what is ostensibly a ‘female led relationship’ continues to be all about.

Forced to be Happy

Ben and Jerry’s doesn’t have ‘liver and onion’ ice cream; and it’s not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, “Yuck”. ~Dan Gilbert

Of course, the reason is no one would buy it, although I suspect they probably did whip some of this up and somewhere in Vermont there’s a daring person who was quite unexpectedly made very happy by it. But the reason most people wouldn’t buy it is because it sounds horrible, and a good guess as to why so many people think this sounds horrible is that most people who might have thought this would taste good are already several million years dead from eating some other thing they thought might taste good – but was actually quite poisonous.

Regardless of one’s view of evolution, if it is true we have co-opted our ‘expectation of safety’ and adapted it for our expectations of happiness, we shouldn’t wonder how we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy. I already discussed how people will often define themselves as a person who doesn’t do or like something they have never tried; perhaps doing this is just as convenient for maintaining safety as attaining happiness through valid self expression.

But all this might also help explain something I’ve been thinking about for some time – I said before we were married my opinion, my valid but ‘safe’ self expression, was that my wife was wrong about many things but she wouldn’t listen to me. YET, once I gave up trying to change her, change her mind, change her opinion and really started to listening to her (even though I at the time I may have felt helpless and disempowered against the sheer force of what she wanted and the strength of her personality and the power of her sense of self), once I realized I couldn’t ‘play it safe’ anymore, and I had to (read also “felt forced to“) ‘interactively play‘ (see also here and here) with the person that she was, only then did I move out of my ‘safe zone’, get on a path to an uxorious erotic truth and end up happier than I ever thought possible.

Agenda as Love Symbol

I was just talking about “tell me what you want me to do” and “tell me what to do” as love symbols. Recently my wife and I have organically developed a system in which she’ll regularly give a written or verbal list of a few things for me to do. Sometimes she’ll even phrase them as a kind of command, “Dust!”, although we both understand these are ‘merely’ things she would like me to do, because if I don’t get them done, she is always very understanding, often she won’t even mention it, and it’s no big deal.

But, and a very important ‘but’, this is one love symbol that works for both our interior frameworks: she sees me as maintaining free will, free choice and individuality, and I see her as understanding my passion constrains me to her whim, wish and desire.