Time Down for Regeneration, perhaps a Revolution

Something strange happened to me three years ago, something both terrible and agonizing and yet wonderful and liberating. It happened four years before that too, and perhaps it is happening again now.

In early January 2003 my girlfriend of just over one year, the second love of my life, broke up with me. It had been a strange, though perhaps all too common relationship, one of countless delicious pleasures. She was of Italian descent, and wore it well with her broad smile, cynical wit, and love of succulent, slow-cooked Mediterranean delicacies. With all of this and more she wrapped me (and all of my senses) in thick, buttery delight.

Yet even early in that relationship I sensed trouble, writing in my journal (in Nietzschean prose):

Oh, to be ill and brilliant! Damn this health of mind. Oh, to be tormented by life – if only to truly LIVE it. Damn my love of and joy with T., for the only good of it is (will be) the agony of its end.

And the next day, discussing my conflicting desires for family, enlightenment, philosophy, political power and so on:

…I’m reading more Nietzsche now — And I agree that the “great” people of this world are those who paint their life as an artist, channeling all energies toward one drive. Am I capable of devoting myself to but one drive? I tremble at even the thought of it. Toward what [single] end can I live? Will I recognize the means when I’ve chosen the end? I tremble again at the thought of breaking free from this stream that has carried me recently. It is easy to be carried, to be bound, blinded, unliberated. Freedom is only for the strong. Yet again I tremble.

After this, my relationship with T. became a side note in my journaling, including an entry in late December 2002 when I expressed mild discontent, but nothing more. Instead, the year I was with her left a journal filled with my own inner quarrellings, stretching the limits of my understanding of and relationship with political theory, philosophy, and Buddhism. I devised a simple theory of three levels of contentment:

• sensual,
• intellectual, and
• ultimate;

with three corresponding levels of conversation:

• chit-chat
• pleasant banter
• meaningful conversation.

Of course, now I would drop chit-chat from the list altogether and move the other two up, making ‘silent knowing’ (“you say it best/Lo entiendo mejor… when you say nothing at all”) correspond to ultimate contentment.

T. and I lived wholly in the first two levels. Silence, and the meaning it conveyed, was uncomfortable – better to touch, to smile and laugh and savor. So it was with little resistance that I accepted the finality of ‘us’. However, what followed was much less equanimous. No amount of intellectualization could fill the hole in my life, could take away the pain – at least not as quickly as I wanted. So I thrashed about, uselessly, for three months. But then, the revolution happened.

To be continued, and when completed: silence.