Guarding each other's solitude

This blog entry is a reply to the beckita who wrote a week ago of having lost so much. It is a re-imagining of that loss, a re-conception of that week, of this cutting and glittering set of circumstances in which I find myself. It is hoping that the process of articulating in language a new configuration of memories might become the truth that I remember.

It begins with the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, (Z - you are truly inspiring - this is also a reply to you)

"All companionship can exist only in the strengthening of two neighbouring solitudes, whereas everything that is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling."

These words might have been the mantra of my boyfriend and my relationship.
And maybe what happened to me last week was that I abandoned the person I was and lost the ground beneath my feet.

A continual falling. A falling, out of which that other person failed to catch me. And a sense of dissapointment that he had not been there and that even more so I had let myself fall. Despite long drawn out conversations about our self sufficiency, despite promises in those slips of early hours between dawn and dreaming that we were independent of each other, despite our sense that our relationship was about challenging each other and not slipping into comfortableness. Despite all of those, there are promises and claims we make to lovers that misplay the reality beneath. Claims at solitude, at independence and seperateness might not have been as true as I once thought. Indeed, now as I sit in the aftermath of a shattered relationship I consider that maybe it was all some grand illusion. And in those final few weeks our relationship rested on abandoning the people we were, in the hope of becoming closer to each other. We didn't. Instead we fell.

And now, my eyes don't smart so much at the memory. I've stopped feeling quite as betrayed. In this small cramped town on the coast I don't take a step outside without fearing bumping into the focus of my ponderings - but amazingly St Andrews seems to have managed to disappear him into the walls and cobbled streets - out of my sight. Once again colours have returned to my world. I notice the weather, how the sky is such a huge expanse of ever changing light. I examine myself in this aftermath - shake my spinning head and re-imagine what happened.

This is a choice that has been made. A decision in favour of building and strengthening my solitude. If as Z put it so well, "we are defined by our poetic memories" those slices of memories and moments that have changed,impacted and formed me, surge always through me even as their exact details fade. That relationship. That play. My grandmother.They are forever a part of who I am - the dull, the monotenous, the dreary parts are just shadows. Even the heartbreakingly torturous endings are potent and brilliant in their remembering (although maybe not at the time). We are made up of these paralyzingly difficult and beautiful moments and they do not stop or end once the original stimuli is gone. We internalise and become what we make of them - that is our choice and our freedom.

In my previous blog I wrote about loss. A sense of absence. The lonliness that is worse than solitude because it is a sense of somebody or something missing. I don't want to remember this period of my life as meaning loss. I want to reimagine it as creative and startling and invigorating. I want to imagine it as a beginning. I want to appreciate the experience I have in part shared with others. I want to appreciate those people who stepped out of my life, mourn their absence and recognise their influence and inspiration in who or what I become from here on in. It is not that things were severed, bluntly and violently two weeks ago. Instead, conclusions gave forth to a hundred new beginnings, post scripts and sequels. Maybe next time I have a relationship I will learn the art of guarding over another's solitude, sensing and respecting the distance. Maybe I will learn the art of never abandoning myself to someone else - but instead sharing and being strong in another's solitude, and they in mine. I could not have hoped for better memories of my grandmother, they are present in every new step, conversation or friendship.

We grow stronger with each falling leaf. In the natural world the changing of the seasons each year take those leaves. Once they have fallen, they rot down to become the nurturing substance of earth, ready to be drawn up again from the roots. Firmer and stronger each time.

Z, my final, final act plagerism -- just because they are too damn beautiful to remain only in a private email - and Emerson seems particuarly relevant to the publicity of the blogsphere. Thank you to all those who have guarded over my solitude these last few weeks - words just can't tell you.

"More and more the surges
of everlasting nature enter into me,
and I become public and human
in my regards and actions."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"With all your science can you tell
how it is, and whence it is
that light comes into the soul?"
-- Henry David Thoreau