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[...] That summer weekend, I was floating at one end of her pool, looking at her big yellow house and watching her, beautiful in her black-and-white swimsuit, taking care of her two little girls at the other end of the pool with patience and her characteristic disarming silliness. She makes motherhood look as fun as a Saturday night at my local, which is to say, very fun. The joy I felt about her life with these daughters, the good husband she’d managed to keep, the poems — it was so material as to make my heart feel stretched; I felt a different but equal joy about my own life. This witnessing of another’s life with genuine pleasure, even or especially when its different success might threaten your own personal philosophy of life — I’ve been thinking this is true friendship, or a part of it.
This is massively unhelpful, of course. Since even if there is a universe for each possible version of your life — the one in which you make a singular marriage, the one in which you’re restless and wild and free, and all the others — you’re trapped in this one; knowing they’re happening, right now, might even make it worse. In this world, the moment you commit yourself to someone or something you change everything that comes afterward, and live inside it, or so it feels. You also reject or ignore the people who might have been better off if you’d chosen differently. Life feels less like a multiverse and more like the kind of endless sacrificial negotiation Jacques Derrida describes in his little book The Gift of Death:
Let us not look for the examples, there would be too many of them, at every step we took. By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention . . . I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don’t speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read [and so on] . . . thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my sons, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.
While some of what you ask is native to bisexuality and polyamory — to sex and the working out of what you desire — the problem is so deep and so familiar to us all that Derrida calls it “our habitat.” In every moment we want it both ways, even when we decide how to divide our time among family and friends. We feel it tragic to choose among competing and equally valid beliefs in order to live our one singular life. This problem of desire and commitment is, for Derrida, also an ethical question, perhaps the ethical question. The moment we pledge fidelity to another person or people, we make an unethical choice with regard to others.
There is a world in which the story is this: you commit yourself to one person after another, a man and then a woman, a woman and then a man, for balance, and when you are with a man, you cheat with a woman, and when you are with a woman, you cheat with a man. And then you find this woman, and something about her stops you. You get to know each other in the way one can only do with another person when there’s no one else for you. You see the world through her eyes, and it is like you live in two worlds, yours and hers, rather than one. You learn what it is like to be with her when she is bored, restless, just trying to exist on a Sunday afternoon when she doesn’t know what to do, and neither of you has anyone else to run away to, and your own long restlessness helps you to understand and quiet her. In this story, you realize that the cheating, for you, was not so much about bisexuality or ambivalence about monogamy but a way of escaping how embarrassing it is to be seen this way — just trying to exist, yourself. Because you’ve stopped enough to know her and be known, this ends some loneliness in you. You have the girl-girl true-love story.
Maybe it could be a problem of narrative. I was living a story and now the story seems to have stopped and I don’t really care, that’s what it feels like. Like an old ship rusting in a bay somewhere. Or maybe more accurately, just a car accident. I’ve come to a stop, metaphorically. That’s what it feels like. What it looks like is also very much like a car accident.
I don’t know what to do, is the point. What should I do, Kristin? Everything’s all unhooked and I’ve become a hazard.
[...] “Is God Dead?” If the question, put this way, is less in vogue now, Camus still describes so well the way the world feels when it rubs up against our nostalgia for the old meanings: silent. And empty; the “God-shaped hole,” we called it in Sunday school, assuming this must be what the hearts of nonbelievers always felt like. In your case, I guess it would be a war-shaped hole. There are other names: closing time, the end of the party, the desert of the real. Because whatever the story was about — the God you’d get to be with later in heaven, the cause worth fighting for, your country, your art, your masculinity, your heroism (I don’t know what you did those seven times at war) — it always runs out.
YOU WANT A PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLE to give you some motivation to get out of the bay in which you’re an old ship, rusting. You want the clarity, the rigor, and the strength of philosophy to give you a reason to do what you have to do next. But ever since I read your letter I have been thinking about poetry — specifically a poem by Mark Doty called “Visitation.” In the poem, a man hears that a young humpback whale is stuck in a nearby harbor. The man is depressed, grieving something or someone. What he is grieving is unnamed in the poem. The world is “dark upon dark, any sense / of spirit an embattled flame / sparked against wind-driven rain / till pain snuffed it out.” He assumes the whale is experiencing the same pain; it is stuck in the bay, helpless, its ability to navigate its way out confused by sonar or who knows what human technologies and environmental atrocities. [...]
. . . even I
couldn’t help but look
at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.
And the last lines, which I have been wanting to write to you since I read your letter:
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?
I understand, as much as a coddled civilian can understand anything — my rocks are pebbles, kicked up the slightest slope — that it must feel the most compelling thing in the world to continue to choose violence, to your drug dealer, your friends, your mind, your own body. But sometimes we have to do things without knowing. With the body, at least for me, you have to take a leap, have faith that if you can hold on and make it one or two weeks without a constant hangover, you will know things you don’t know now. There is a feeling in the body that is just the feeling of physical well-being and it connects you to all humans and other animals and maybe even trees. The war will always be there, but you have a choice of what to give your attention to. The familiar story, the car crash, or the thing more radical and more frightening and wiser than strength: to grieve, to renounce the story and that paragraph you can’t get past, to make peace with your contingency and interchangeability so you can see the other side of it, to the connections that make it a joy, sometimes, to be alive.