self-reliance, again

Living alone and being a woman in a foreign country (and, in a sense, all countries are foreign), you always find yourself pondering on the issue, negotiating boundaries, lowering sights, relying more and more on your inner resources and intuition, rather than expecting much from other people or from seemingly promising new situations.

While there is a lonely tranquility, a melancholic acceptance in it all, there is also the increasing strength that comes from the awareness that if you have survived so much so far, then you can survive anything, anything, and cope with uncertainty, with the inability to solve and explain everything, to change those you wish were otherwise, to put everything into little watertight compartments and feel good about it. And, above all, there is the realisation you can only see and (thus) know where you now walk, guided by your own clarity alone. In the most essential things you are irretrievably alone (though not necessarily adrift), indeed.

Perhaps this is what Keats meant by his famous negative capability: when one is is "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"... Or, as Carolee Schneemann put it in a much rawer, assertingly feminine note:

. . . where you might expect
understanding and appreciation you must expect NOTHING
then enjoy whatever gives-to-you
as long as it does and however
and NEVER justify yourself just do what
you feel carry it strongly yourself

from Interior Scroll, Performance, 1975, in Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 157.


I couldn't agree more with the absolute necessity of this daily struggle with an intractable, merciless, stone-hard world.