fragilekeys

Recently, while reminiscing with my stepmom Susie about an episode I had at the beginning of 2006—an episode that I interpreted at the time as a breakthrough into enlightenment; it was undoubtedly one of the most intense weeks of my life—she reminded me (or perhaps I understand it only now for the first time) just to what extent she and my father prevented the psychiatric and medical staff from administering their solutions on me—Halodol and then electroshock therapy. I had also forgotten that my father, after learning they had me strapped to a chair, insisted on staying with me overnight in the psych ward, even though he was not technically allowed on the unit. (I also now remember what a wonderful, magical night that was, explaining to him what I felt at the time was something like the logic of divine action in the cosmos; everything, every number, was a sign or symbol of it.)

Sadly, many of the details of this experience are missing in my memory. Here is a link to the first text I wrote during this episode, [bombs birth a butterfly]. Susie says I didn’t sleep, or barely slept, for about 11 days. Most of it was spent fasting, writing and trying to communicate everything to my friends and family. She and my dad took me to the hospital initially after I’d called her explaining there was an emergency and she needed to come home quick (for some reason, I was concerned that something was going to happen to her). When she got home, I was laying on the couch with a fever and a heartrate of over 100. After two nights, one in the psych ward and one at the UIHC in the pediatric wing (so many strange stories to tell here…)—during which all sorts of hypotheses were advanced: bipolar, mania, Reyes syndrome, effects of a hallucinatory drug (I had not taken anything)—I ended up back home, somewhat stabilized, but now a little confused and still not sleeping so well. My father’s solution? Benadryl. I took however many of them I needed to sleep and slept for a long time. When I finally woke up, I asked them what on earth had happened. Of course they didn’t know. It would be, and will be, a lifetime of continuing searching to understand. In matters such as these, there is no easy way through (this is the first time I’m even writing about it directly).

I’m attaching this article which references a concept I discovered in the months that followed, when I returned to my freshman year at Iowa and tried to piece things together. Here is the important excerpt on “spiritual emergencies”: “Stanislav and Christina Grof have described the spiritual emergency as a crisis often resulting in intense emotions, unusual thoughts and behaviors, and perceptual changes. This crisis often involves a spiritual component—such as experiences of death and rebirth, unity with the universe, and encounters with powerful beings. Such crises bring about the potential for profound psychological and spiritual change (Grof & Grof, 1989), but often appear to be similar to psychotic disorders. The experience of a spiritual emergency—if managed and treated under supervision—can, therefore, be life-changing and offer the individual a deeper sense of passion, wisdom, love, and zest for life; and an expanded worldview and overall psychosomatic health… If one believes in the tenet that all experiences are transformative, then it can be said that there’s something to learn from each one of them, either at the time or after comparing journal entries. But, chances are there’s more to learn from a spiritual emergency than from a psychotic episode because it might be a more profound experience. As Socrates once said: ‘Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided that madness is given us by divine gift.'”

Let me close by saying two things. First, to state the obvious, our society is profoundly spiritually immature (and all the bickering about religion is only one particularly petty aspect of this immaturity). Until we seriously begin to learn from the sages, mystics, shamans and other scientists of consciousness, we will continue to “misdiagnose” those who go through such emergencies. We will ostracize and institutionalize them; they will appear dangerous, abnormal, threatening to us; and we will set them on paths of remediation that destroys not just their potentiality and their life, but also nullifies everything they might have discovered and contributed to society, once the crisis had passed on.

I feel so lucky to have been spared the modern remedies, at the protection and faith of my father and Susie. They ended up prescribing me Depakote for bipolar disorder, but I did not take a single one of them; my dad supported me in this choice, and probably encouraged it. I believe today that horizons of higher consciousness (call it what you will) are real, at least for certain people, and that they will continue to burst in to confuse our world, which for its part is mired in materialism, vital desires, discourse, spectacles, etc. It is important that we and science learn from other traditions which, however “primitive” seeming, have advanced technologies and models to deal with these breakthroughs; without them, we will miss an opportunity for our own collective growth and delay the inevitable realization of “heaven on earth.” Truth is, these experiences are intense and terrifying, for they bring us face to face with (ego-)death, with what can feel like time’s end (Eternity). It will be a very long struggle, but certain horizons of surrender to that, and knowledge of it, are already wide open. We should figure out what it means for us to be ready for it and to participate.

Secondly, and much more importantly, I just want to emphasize how thankful I am not just for how my dad and Susie protected me, but also for the atmosphere of openness, forbearance, and love that they, along with Maree, surrounded me with during that time. It is a grace beyond graces that they were there, listening to me, laying with me, going along and attempting to understand. Perhaps they were scared, but they never looked at me like an alien or pushed me away. On the contrary. I’ll always remember when Maree said to me, so gently, “Tim, come back.” How glad I am that I did. But I’m also glad I was given the chance to bring what I had experienced back with me—and not to reject it as a symptom of some psychological aberration.

Although I never once entertained the idea that something was wrong with me, I can imagine that in different circumstances, fear and paranoia would have set in. I might have started to doubt my own experience and believe the immature guess-work of the “professionals.” And if it had not been for the caring and curious environment that the three of them sustained around me, I would not have returned to classes the following week, I would not have insisted that the doctor remove his diagnoses from my permanent file, I would not have felt as bold and certain as I did going forward, envigorated and not at all debilitated by this trial. And, let’s be honest: such an event wouldn’t have even happened without them and so many others surrounding me with kindness for so many years. Even though we struggle with these things internally, in the corridors of the heart and mind where things are so expansive and strange that they seem nearly incommunicable, they are also always lived in common, in a network of others who have things to teach us and things to learn from us. Reminding each other that we are never alone in our unique journey is one of the kindest things we can do for each other.

So, the point is: do what you can do to make others feel at home, for this is what invites the spirit in and allows it to run. You will never know fully what it does in them or where it will move them. Perhaps it will even move them away from you, who knows. But the love you’ve shared, if it goes deep, will always go with them. It will be preserved in them, and it will be passed on, even if it remains latent and confused for years. Have patience and give comfort. Remind each other that evener days are coming, that peace is possible, and that the horizon can be better comprehended—even if the consequences of travelling toward it are not always clear.

Our world today is not well-constructed to receive all this, these experiences and messages; but this should not be a great cause for worry, only extra incentive to trust our own love, our own strategies and insights and support-structures, everything which used to be called very simply the “wisdom of God,” to which the world by definition is blind. We all know this wisdom: it is the happiness of a safe home, a welcoming environment, a space where things can get wild for a while, where it is known that we won’t be abandoned for sounding crazy or for acting strange. During this and other similar experiences, it was always the odd embracing of “me” by the universe and by those around me who loved me that brought calm, perseverance, and a sense of love and connectedness when it seemed like the entire cosmos had fragmented apart into nothingness. Hard as it is to testify to this, perhaps deep down we all know this simple power, which is realer, so much realer, than any abyss.

This post is dedicated to Maree, Susie, and my late dad Jim.
—October 8, 2017

The massive practical divide in the social could be said to lie between “small-scale” love and “broad-scale” love. The one we call love: friends, family, and romantic love. Nearly every pop song and blockbuster movie glorifies it as what makes life in the world worth bearing. The other we lamely call politics, which is represented in culture in large part as an intrigue of corruption. When it is positively portrayed, it comes in the form of the biopic, a portrayal of the courageous activity of one heroic figure.

Models for amorous love abound, but we hardly have a clue what broad-scale love would be. The politician, today modeled on the efficient businessperson or technocrat, is almost invariably lacking in it. We have no idea how to operate on that level―except insofar as it fills a “slot” at the periphery of our small-scale loves. The periphery includes: having certain opinions, supporting certain parties, arguing for certain causes, standing in solidarity with certain peoples, empathizing with certain pains, intervening in various ways by donating money, feeding the hungry, supporting initiatives, and so on. We know the result: people end up gravitating to the political ideas of those with whom they share their small-scale life. We are attractied to the ideas that we believe will benefit our own personal lives and interests the most. The small-scale retains its priority even here. We know the corruption of politicians generally has to do with their inability to sacrifice personal interests for the sake of larger goals, but at the same time this is a sacrifice that none of us really would want or know how to execute―especially not where it approaches a wholesale dedication to broad-scale love. In the cultural imaginary, that role is reserved for exemplary spiritual figures: Jesus, Ghandi, MLK Jr., Mandela, etc.

Let’s examine this from the vantage of private personhood, which I believe is the central issue here. First, we should understand that this concept cannot be reduced to biology (the animal fact that this is my body, my voice, etc.), even if it draws amply from the natural metaphor and, especially, from the numerous threats to our survival. I would posit, however, that private personhood is one of Capitalism’s and the State’s primary ideological operations. It elevates private life to the ultimate arbiter of meaning. It not only encourages us to act in our own small-scale interest, but the exclusivity of personal interest is cruelly and ruthlessly enforced through debt mechanisms, legal personhood, death certificates, insurance policies, and so on. Such is also the chief role of opinion: to ensure that each of us are who we are, insofar as we can be defined as an individual in the social world. After all, it is the most “reasonable” thing in the world, so goes the common wisdom, to act in our own private interest. Private personhood and its ideology is so ingrained into these practices that they operate almost without resistance. They take on a life of their own as each of us fights for our own life exclusively, thinks of it as our own and wants to “be somebody.” For a conversation to take a even step beyond this ideological sphere is rare. But let me speak as a “communist”: it is this bias that must be eradicated at the core if any revolution against capitalism is to come and be effective. This goes against everything we’re taught and traditionally led to believe about the need to “persevere in our being.” It would even seem to be the epitome of foolishness. It means “throwing away one’s life.” (But isn’t the real question how far it can be thrown?)

Because of the way capitalism imposes the need for private property and frames all of psychosocial life as essentially small-scale, the broad-scale behaviors I named remain on the periphery. They do not reach into our core being, our practice, our deepest desires, in large part because they are prohibited from doing so, both on the unconscious level and at the level of social structures (the bank, the doctor’s, etc.). What is so hard to envision is a total “inversion” of our relation to the private: to look at the private as peripheral, to view the “location” of our action and behavior as in the broad-scale, to see private interest itself as, at best, a necessary evil to keep our bodies alive while we ourselves dedicate our action and thought to other aims. Capitalism, with its magnificent state-media-entertainment apparatus, basically makes it impossible for even a moment’s inclination in this direction to take hold.

Clearly there is no leap into the “inversion” I referred to above. In my experience―if I can speak of having experience in this matter―it requires a double strategy, even a double life. There is the omnipresence of private interest and the small-scale life. The sheer force of this convention makes it unthinkable to simply step outside of it. I am called to address you as myself, and to respond to the state, the tax agency, and the doctor as myself. To call all of that outright “false” is madness, plain and simple. And to practice its outright rejection would land one without any small-scale loves pretty quickly. (Confession: I often feel on the brink of losing all these, mostly because of a disappointment I’m sure others feel at my inability to get my mind out of a contrary space. I have lost, or rather let drift away, so many wonderful small-scale loves, almost as if it had no effect on me, as if I was in different to what I’d lost. I feel the guilt of that and know it to be cruel. What’s more, I know that I have little concrete to offer in exchange. But the experiment is entering a different stage, that much I know. It demands even more cunning in the double strategy― eradicating a belief while simultaneously having no choice but to believe it.)

No choice but to use personhood for the sake of its inversion. I cannot think of a more delicate operation. And perhaps it is absurd to construe any of this under the heading of politics, since it does not speak directly to any real world struggle. For many years, I have tried to focus my thought and critical skills on the matrix of this problem. Along the way I have rejected the spiritualist thesis, which dissolves the small I in a transcendent I, small mind in big mind, etc. (so many millions of versions of this). The spiritualist thesis retains the private under the heading of a journey into wholeness: from the alone to the Alone. Today, this strikes me as an ahistorical, religious evasion, full of magical guarantees. It is incapable of achieving the inversion I am talking about; it remains individualistic after all. Perhaps it helps along the way, but there is a step it does not take, which has to do with the dimension of work―with the double strategy, which is nothing if not an immanent process. At the same time, as much as the priviledge given to individual existence is unconscious, I believe that the ‘eradication’ (the word is too strong) of that priviledge also proceeds unconsciously. It goes a path and gets to work without consciousness knowing what it is up to. It is not a matter of a new decision, a deliberate overturning of personhood, a new sacrifice of self. It’s never about “denying” the small-scale. But it is also too easy to view the small-scale as the broad-scale (the non-dual position).

The best I can say is this: on my side, no inversion ever takes place. I’ll die me, I’ll keep talking me, nothing else will ever really make sense; I’ll even use me as a tool to advance the inversion; I’ll confess it all, turn my weak heart inside out like a glove, showing it to have been inside out from day one, destined for the other’s heart all along. Whereas on our side, the inversion pulls us all in. The small-scale love we had will never be the full story. It will never have been just a one-to-one, never quite person-to-person. A different destiny let itself intervene under the heading of “generic subjectivity.” Granted, it is painfully obvious that its operation is, at this point in history, unstable, faltering, precarious. The very instant we catch a glimpse of the inversion, something intrudes to return us to the conventionality of the private. Again, we must conceive of this as a double strategy situated, as Maurice Blanchot would put it, between the everyday and the infinite.

I started this reflection by naming a gap between small- and broad-scale love. I have progressively “abstracted” the discussion away from what anyone could reasonably call political concerns. But we must seek a thought of politics beyond parlimentarianism and democracy. A working hypothesis: Politics is the intelligence of a group committed to inverting the personal and the private property relations it implies. Politics as the pure prescription of this inversion: the work of constructing, from within the small-scale arrangements in which we all inevitably find ourselves, a beyond of private interest and personhood. As I have said, I believe this is the most delicate, long-term battle, since (if we’re honest with ourselves) ‘eradicating’ in thought, word and deed our complicity with those relations―with capitalism―is in most circumstances not only hard but forbidden. It takes a group committed to the possibility of this inversion, this radical unbinding from the conditions that support capital (which also support law as we know it, the university system, the employment system, etc.). Because every time we look each other in the face, every time we exchange words, the great temptation is to slip back into the personal-private view, which sees us as mere individuals arrayed in an “intersubjective” space. It takes intense group support and collective dedication to bear with the failures and regressions of this work and with the bold experimental leaps in expression and organization it demands. Without ridicule, the political group will always be looking for how this inversion can be readied or advanced, without ever believing that it demands they get lost in the group or lose their own singularity as persons in the process.

Forgive me one more hypothesis. Small-scale love―which works on the model of the Two, the one-to-one―is not capable of teaching this inversion to us. Why? Because it is precisely small-scale love in its intimacy that teaches us the ultimate value of our singularity. Small-scale love touches us because it is so personal. Without it, we would probably never learn the value of compassion, empathy, patience, and so on. Without it, we would have no basis from which to invert it. It seems to me unmistakeable that politics is an extension of love in the direction of the generic; but this extension is at the same time a cancellation and metamorphosis.

We should stop trying to find echoes of amorous and familial in political love (the mistake of “brotherhoods,” “nations,” collective “unity” in general). One sees again the necessary interplay of a dual strategy, a cognizance of levels and of the different interventions they require. Small-scale love is not a game, or to be taken lightly or less seriously. “Politics” in the sense I have defined it would have to cut across it diagonally. It would have to become capable of reorienting it, of giving it new trajectories that are paradoxically anti-privative, anti-possessive. One could say: this is precisely the fulfillment of a love that now knows no jealousy, no partiality, no unkindness, no exclusivism. But to raise the banner of that type of love―in the fullness of its genericity―we require a real strategy that goes against the grain of all concern for personal-private existence, though of course without falling into the trap of sacrificing ourselves for the whole (which is just another ploy to recoup the private, to make the small I die into the big I, etc.).

In the end, it is perhaps not right call politics broad-scale “love.” I seems that, in practice, it proves to be a somewhat cold procedure. I have felt this myself, personally, awkwardly. Politics is a killjoy when it ruins the personhood grounds. This coldness has become, in some areas, a political necessity because of how capitalism has co-opted love. The joy that our coldness kills, however, is just the false enthusiasm of politics as the circulation of stances, and of love as the justification for the capitalist system (a slavery of the heart, a slavery to self-desire-bound love, as one song puts it: “You got me in chains, you got me in chains for your love / But, I wouldn’t change, no I wouldn’t change this love”).

We should also entertain the hypothesis that the love of romance, family, and friendship is the only thing actually supporting the continuance of capitalism, because these are the only things with the power―a very real power!―to sustain belief and hope in our own singularity, which capitalism requires. For, as we know all too well, where that love lacks, belief in the strong singularity of the individual falters; the result is isolation, depression, and suicide. This “strength” of personality is however immensely contradictory, since love itself requires weakness, vulnerability, openness, forgiveness―all values that capitalism, as a system of protection, accumulation and competition, denies. In that capitalism leans against love for its own continuation, it can have the effect of degrading small-scale love, turning it into just another calculation of private interest. Couples know the danger that money constantly interjects between them. Only loving communication gets them through and makes it bearable. Today, if I had to venture to name capitalism’s most heinous evil, it is that it is unashamedly parasitic on human love, drawing sustenance from it while draining it―demanding of its subjects that they not only fight capitalism directly (debt, employment, finance) but indirectly: that they not lose faith in love, that they not forget that love exists in the world altogether, lest callous calculation trample them.

If we want to save love from its co-optation by capital, we need a double strategy―a politics that balances warmth with coldness, amiability with caution. A politics of personhood daily strengthened by love, but strengthened for the sake of executing an inversion. A “cunning” double strategy of immersion and restraint, binding and unbinding. An uncertain procedure drawing from singularity to construct the generic. A thought, an address, a life-practice, no longer dedicated to this or that specific one, nor to the one who thinks, addresses, and lives the practice. A politics of nobodies, slowly ‘eradicating’ the belief that they have a personal life to live at all, thus liberating themselves into strange new behaviors, strange “communities” in total dispersal and unbinding.

I do not mean to advance a bottom-line for politics or redefine it per se, no more than I wish to banish amorous and familial love to the margins. What I am trying to dig toward is the basic intelligence of the social, the power of generic human constructions, insofar as they escape any small-scale measure and can circulate toward the utterly unforeseen. I believe we are already practicing it constantly. As I said above, inverting the personal is less a deliberate act than a parallax shift in perspective that, nonetheless, has the power to redirect or “communize” what we do. For those who regularly bring their ideas and inspirations to bear in the public sphere know what that means and the bonheur it brings. What I would like to offer is a thought that enables us to go to these extremes quicker, that can encourage others to turn themselves inside out, to “throw their lives away” to the greatest extent possible within the parameters set by survival in the capitalist world.

Alas, since anything can always be looked at in the traditional way, perhaps I have just explained to myself my own project of self-abolishment, which has brought to my heart more confusions and conflicts than I would ever know how to count; perhaps I have just attempted to justify my own moodiness, silence, withdrawal, and nonsense. But I believe the double strategy demands something of the absurdist risk, since there is no guarantee whatsoever that anyone will ever come to meet us in this forum. Although all this must issue from what Paul Celan called the mystery of the encounter, the meeting place is anything but assured. There is no bar, no forest, no house, no bed prearranged, no more than anyone knows what comes next for those who meet in that non-place. All we know is that it is an infinitely multiple meeting, never just a one-to-one, and never really small-scale. It is never just love―unless it is the most just love that ever existed.

Work, write, trace a trajectory―yes, but for who? This is the question that, pivoting on the immanent inversion, generic-politically, no longer even needs to be asked. The intelligence of the committed group takes its stand, and we all go under―without ever even needing to know, each other, who we individually are.