Kneeling before the wisdom of touch
“Those whose aliveness has been trampled will desperately use others in order to enliven themselves.”
Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology
Yes. I have noticed my attempts at restoring my life’s aliveness by grasping for another’s vivacity. Please, dear beloved, burst emotional flames right through my constricted abdominal muscles, direct my trembling hands with your nod of approval, make them create a shared life out of beautified clay or erosion resilient words or uncovered facial expressions conveying a swift tempering of prejudices. Embrace this longing for your closeness, silence my isolating doubts, those doubts freezing the stream of consciousness life is.
A deep longing to merge with the other’s vibrance, an erotic attempt, not only physically, also intellectually, and much more. How intimate is a shared laughter? Behind so much of what I share, utter in words, put forth through movement or exhale automatically, is this yearning to be enlivened, and to enliven. This is not solely a romantic kind of way of looking at things, processes, life. It is a matter of fact, a matter of desire as a fact of life; why art, philosophy and science are unmistakably born out of the same source. Consciousness burns, everything is delicately interconnected, relating is what makes life worth living.
And somehow, this yearning can fall back unto itself, loosening the grasp(ing), making my skin more porous, thought more tender and permeable, transformable, transmutable; the body more receptive and the act of living a succumbing to its grandiosity on the tiniest scale, encompassing the whole in the immediacy of the moment while acknowledging our always failed attempt to oversee the whole of the matter(ing). As if by cooling consciousness we get the chance to sense the enlivening impact of something subtly heating our bodies, minds and disintegrating lives from so, so nearby. There is no end to depth.
As we try to stand in the middle of a context that is endlessly moving, a fruitless attempt to confirm order and hierarchy, to decentre complexity, we notice there is nothing that stands still; our experience of desire offers a deep insight into this fact of life. The matter of fact of my desirous a-live-ness can gracefully be an invitation for another breath to come to life in apparently random acts of humaneness, and other life forms. Here, it is not about using the other to enliven myself, it is about an intimate, endless dance of elements, to put it bold: a daily practice of both connection and dying, defying our ideas of individuality and strict borders. Sadly though, so much of what we put out there in this world feels and is so much more gross than the subtleties of experience that convey our solidarities and merging with everything in and around us. All the heavy suffering wants to make one flee from the experiential knowledge of being ever so deeply interconnected, ever so fragile. That is why grief is so potent; it teaches us how desire runs through our veins.
My hitherto privilege to occupy this reflective space can make me feel humbler, since the distance between my own safety and another’s full-blown pain demands more opening, more travelling away from all those experiences I deem to possess, fragments of my life’s story I hold on to since they seem to suggest I am immune to the potential painful touch of the other, a thousand reasons legitimizing why interconnection is nothing but destruction. But the ongoing other-ing that a reflective holding space allows me to process almost feels like a moral duty. But, wait a minute, chances remain high that my superego is intervening and boasting “shoulds and shouldn’ts” to cover up some conditionality I hold on to as preferably and particularly my own. As if I have the power ‘to should or shouldn’t’ the world. Writings and self-reflections can contain bold statements, generalizations that may sound loving, but also lay a veil over the absolute locality and temporality of my supposed wisdom. It is in the continuous interaction with my loved ones, the daily motions and choices, that I find how my a-live-ness is humbling dependent upon a world that can suddenly feel a-life-threatening, upon a bundle of differences I eagerly try to recognize – or even overpower - as familiar and predictable.
Here, for now, there is no direct threat, it is often a condensed consciousness of psychological vulnerability that is overtaking my awareness, overshadowing my surrender to my body's tenderness. If only I listen, and slow down, it is consciousness reflecting that unconsciousness is evenly one with its deemed opposite, however intense the resistance is a well-equipped mind may rightfully interject. Everything is interconnected, this life is a never-ending story of connection.
Enlivening ourselves is the practice of kneeling before the wisdom of touch. Nothing remains untouched, there is no life without the melting of the apparently minor with the apparently superior, without the interconnection between the nearby and the far away – and this is what is so beautiful and painful.