departures (5)

Nothing saps my vital energy and drains my joie de vivre more than people's inability to break the chains that bind them, to take risks, to reinvent themselves.

Emotional paralysis, self-delusion.

Hence the question returns ever so often: how to avoid yielding to terminal disenchantment and anguish when the malaise seems so insidious and all-pervading?

Yet there are times when you cannot but yield to weariness and sorrow -- and retreat from the world.

Because you have been skinned alive, left in raw flesh.

A temporary retreat, though. As when you sit in the dark, listening, listening, and one day something out there calls for you. It is the faintest of sounds, but you can perceive it only because you have inhabited silence for so long, been to the other shore of language, of life.


Illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts your heart.

*       *       *

In fatigue one senses the fields of the world no longer supporting one's position, no longer sustaining one's movement and one's enterprises. In boredom the planes of the landscape lose their significance, the force of their presence; the paths become equivalent, lose their urgencies. One feels the emptiness that is in each thing, the abyss over which the paths scurry. Fatigue and boredom give way to apprehensiveness. In the emptiness of days, in insomniac nights, anxiety clenches the heart.


In this finding oneself adrift, supported by nothing, nothing to hold onto, one's life that still exists cleaves to itself. One comes to feel the heat and the pulse of one's potential for existence. One senses in oneself powers to feel things no one has yet felt, to perceive corners of the landscape hidden from others, to form thoughts no one has ever thought and fashion things no else can make, to pour one's kisses and caresses on minute and on grand things and on bodies no one has ever loved. The shadow of death that closes in illuminates these powers within oneself with its black light. One knows there are things out there that call for these powers.


Then, under the general and recurrent patterns of the common world, one catches sight of visions offered to one's own eyes alone, appeals made to one's own heart alone, tasks no one else sees, faces turned to one's caresses and surfaces turned to one's laughter and tears. They summon one, with an urgency that is illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts one's heart. One will advance unto them, releasing one's forces for them. 


--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 232.