wine + night = sentimentality

Ever go through those old journals? I know you know the ones I'm talking about.

I just went through an old, old backup CD of writings from before I moved to Ireland for good. I had already spent the summer in Ireland and was back in the States, and I was undergoing some sort of deep inner journey. God knows why I subject myself to these periods of searching, coupled with intense periods of writing, but in a way I'm glad I do it from time to time. To go back and read what I've written, much of it incomplete, most of it stream-of-consciousness, makes me almost proud. Alright, so I have wasted monumental amounts of energy worrying about people who had nothing to offer me. But all that wasted mindfullness of those who are undeserving were productive periods for my soul-searching. I spend loads of time cranking out what must be some of the most lucid crap I've ever written.

I was still in university and I was taking a philosophy course entitled "The Philosophy of Love and Sex" and we were reading about and discussing the idea of the "I" and the "Thou" or "You". Here is some of what I wrote in response to our reading, which is not necessarily an example of "lucid crap"... but is interesting on a sort of auto-archeological level.

"This is not my paper.

"I struggled to find reference in Buber to an abstraction of an idea about the I and the You that made sense to me. I had the flavour on my tongue and I thought I got the taste of the idea from this book. The idea resonated with some recent events in my life. However, to be able to find the content of the book that gave me that taste and to be able to point to it and write about it proved troublesome for me. I think now that perhaps I was just trying to fit what was foremost in my mind with what Buber had written. Perhaps there really was no correlation or argument to be found in reality.

"I come to the object of my desire, my You, and record what I think is important, all the while my You remembers things differently. As years pass, as my You and I are separated, we make different realities about each other… and they are both correct (a bit like measuring objects relatively from different frames of reference). And yet in my memories of my You, I am guilty of ignorance. I have made my You into something that he is not. I try to be objective about how I see my You (and perhaps I have gotten better with my objectivity as I separate from him) but I will always ignorantly live on with a perception of him that relates more to how we WERE than how we actually ARE. But when it comes to objectivity on my part, I will forever Love my You and this illustrated it best for me:

“Jesus’ feelings for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one “has”; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the feelings that he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.” (Buber, p. 66)

"The longer I know You, the more I know about You. I can feel the passions and imeadiacies of longing, of sex, of wanting and perceive them as being “in love” and when all that goes away and my You is no longer in that role to me, I still love You plainly, simply, wholeheartedly. Love occurs. It’s something that I do. I told my You that I loved him and elementally it was true, however stripped of all the added niceties between two people.

"I still don’t know where to go with this. I’m all over the place. Perhaps I’m not getting it. All I know is that I attempted to express walking one’s path as I knowing You, dodging the pitfalls of confusing where I ends and You begins in the process, and refrain from burdening You with my life, my own existence…. Ugh. I failed."

Sometimes reading what you've written years ago feels alien, like someone else who lived on another world was writing an account for you to read in an attempt to relate to their way of life. I remember I was hurt at the time, sad, and unsure about where next to turn. But this university paper, along with a mine of other things I wrote as simple self reflections too raw to share in public, make me sit back for only a moment and feel pride in the fact that not only did I write a few things that sound totally unlike me but entirely readable, but I also survived.

Thank the universe for small favours, because I know now that there was plenty to survive for.