"Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it."
The joke of "cleave," being the Grand Canyon (?), and the fiction of 'more'. Part prose poem, all reflection.
“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
- David Foster Wallace
My body. My ego. The life I did not lead.
The life I will never have.
Clawing to the achy loss & grief of a dream for something and to be someone who is not me & “could have been.”
But is not.
I am uncurling my fingers one by one from the bitterness.
The grief.
The despair.
I am so sad when people tell me,
You’re so young! You’ve got so much time!
I struggle to believe them fully. I wonder when “I’m only” will become “Shit, now I am.”
At what age do you stop having more time?
This unwillingness to believe the reassurances of others when it could provide some small moment of relief also possesses claw marks.
What am I clawing to?
To cleave means to separate and unite. It originates from two separate words that have been cloven together.
Clifian: to split
Clēofan: to adhere
They became on because there is always an adhering where there is a splitting, always a uniting where there is a separation. One is inextricable from the other.
Or someone just thought it would be funny.
Am I cleaving from or cleaving to? Am I alive in my daring to release or dying (in ego) from the parts that comprise me?
I throw up my hands and roll my eyes at my clawing.
My clinging to a dying self. My cleaving to an old self, in both senses.
Who am I to expect miracles? Who am I not to?
Who defines what a miracle is?
I feel exhausted from the circularity of my thoughts.
I should | must | can’t | could | will never be
better | perfect | seen | understood | successful | authentic.
If I only I could be myself, then I could finally be myself.
If only I could let go.
And I must, and I can, and I am. Finger by uncurling finger, inch by inch, there is the unweaving and unraveling.
Why do I cling?
Because I am addicted to the familiar feeling of “I.” Because the neural synaptic geographical equivalent of my brain is the Grand Canyon in miniature.
I’ve dug it; life has dug it; thoughts have dug it: handful by handful.
But the Grand Canyon—like all wondrous and seemingly permanent things—will disappear one day. Like life and stories and architecture and memory and history and rituals—none were built or lost in mere moments.
So why would I be?
(I’m not comparing myself to the Grand Canyon, I think?)
So this space is filling. Handful by handful.
I am eroding and clearing and growing and living one stubborn handful at a time.
I am obsessed with the familiar feeling of me. I love her and need her & I also know she is wasting her life away endlessly wishing she could be anyone except herself when she could be spending these precious moments finding out who she truly is.
Or is becoming.
But none of us does it all perfectly.
Only hindsight shows just how many claw marks we’ve left on life, just how many times we’ve had to let go and done exactly that.
I ache to cleave. I ache to live.
I tell myself I must be | earn | create | succeed | perform to … be more?
More of what?
And I believe in the earning and the doing and succeeding because I believe in the more, even though it is only a fiction.
Another thing covered in claw marks.
I’d love to hear from you.
Share in the comments:
Something you’ve cleaved from (or to) that has claw marks on it.
When did you know it was time to let go?
As a fellow clinger, I love it.
I cleave to the delusional belief that without alcohol and disordered eating I cannot be cool -> beautiful -> desirable -> entertaining. That I cannot fit the costume that makes men want me and other women want to be me. I still have my final pinky nail lodged in this one.
#1. ‘Cloven together’ is elegant and smooth like silk. #2. Jules from Pulp Fiction defines what miracles are. #3. Your familiar feeling of ‘I’ is a sensatory illusion that most humans can recognize as such in an instant. The issue is with holding on to this awareness. The perception of duality is addictive precisely because it is self-serving.
Take the philosophically driven Matrix film and its ‘there is no spoon’ cribbing of the Sanskrit Advaita, or ‘non-secondness’. The perceived world as merely a misunderstood ‘Secondness’. The ultimate reality is unborn, unchanging, and entirely without parts- is not only you, but is the fabric of all. As the Aether or the Void, it is pure energy in a ‘not off and not on’ state.
One can achieve a conscious understanding of the oneness of existence via a recognition of the illusoriness of the phenomenal world. The 4th episode of Joseph Campbell & the Power of Myth: Sacrifice and Bliss (1988) puts it more elegantly than I could ever, so watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEqR73j_oMY
It starts at 28 minutes 47 seconds- Actually one could watch all six of the hour long episodes and not have wasted any time at all. Or simply read below:
“In Hawaii, some four or five years ago, there was an extraordinary adventure that represents this problem. There’s a place there called the Pali, where the winds from the north, the trade winds from the north, come breaking through a great ridge of rocks and of mountain, and they come through with a great blast of wind. The people like to go up there to get their hair blown around and so forth, or to commit suicide, you know, like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, a police car was on its way up early, a little road that used to go up there, and they saw just beyond the railing that keeps cars from rolling over, a young man actually clearly about to jump and prepare himself to jump. The police car stopped. The policeman on the right jumps out to grab the boy and grabs him just as he jumped and was himself being pulled over and would have gone over if the second cop hadn’t gotten around, grabbed him and [pulled] the two of them back. There was a long description of this, it was a marvelous thing, in the newspapers at that time.
And the policeman was asked, “Why didn’t you let go? I mean, you would have lost your life?” And you see what had happened to that man, this is what’s known as one pointed meditation, everything else in his life dropped off. His duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own career, all of his wishes and hopes for life, just disappeared and he was about to go. And his answer was, “I couldn’t let go. If I had,” and I’m quoting almost word for word, “if I’d let that young man go, I could not have lived another day of my life.”
“How come? Schopenhauer’s answer is that this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization that you and the other are one. And that the separateness is only an effect of the temporal forms of sensibility of time and space. And a true reality is in that unity with all life.”
There is no Spoon.