Liza
Do you feel it, too?
From the inside
In fragments
Voce
Tango
Living without consequence
Recovering the pain
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Living without consequence
“You become responsible, forever,
for what you have tamed.”
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
My relations with others seem to reiterate the same bewildering truth, that for a moment they would be willing to experience what feels real. They would laud the experience “sacred.” The “most important,” in fact, in recent years. But they would not be willing to integrate this experience—and the one with whom they shared it—into their reality.
Suddenly, there is no answer. There is not even the dignity of a response.
I begin to wonder, what is real and what is a performance, are any of my relations real? Who is there for a poetic moment and who is there to stay? But more importantly, how can you discern who is honest (first of all, with themselves) and who is a fraud?
I have never been in it for the moment. And I could not imagine how anyone could be given the stakes, not least of which is the struggle for connection.
It is not that the others did not want to experience the real. But the situation was only ever experienced in tangent to reality. It was phantom for them and life for me. They wanted the experience on their own terms, as if an experience (and a person) is something one could “possess” at one’s convenience. They were ready to take what they want and have done with it. And when the feeling got “too real,” they abandoned it without remorse. They let go, with limp hands. Integrating what was felt to be intensely profound into reality—acknowledging that it is and continues to be real—would trigger an existential “danger.” I could only speculate that it would require not only a radical recalibration of their reality, but their finally being alive.
Yet others buried the feeling. Burial, interring something that is still alive, is the grossest kind of emotional fraud.
*
In these relations, there is a distinct moment when “everything changes”: the instance when it is discovered that one person has, embarassingly, been taking the connection seriously. Over and again, I find myself alone in the experience of caring more about what happens than the other, my interest in what is outside the poem, after the dance, and off the stage apparently something to be retracted and apologized for. I never managed to avoid reality (nor did I want to), while the avoidant became consumed with questioning the parameters in which the experience could continue to be possible, if those parameters could still exist at all.
Why would anyone deliberately turn from what makes them feel most alive? Why is it that “the important” never earns a place in reality, is never enough to be fought for?
It is not at all the importance of the experience that is in question. The experience is supercharged with meaning especially to the person who fights to avoid it.
*
Experience is not the difference between a person living with consequence and a person living without it. Responsibility is.
It is probably true that there are two camps of people, those who take accountability and those who do not. I am not speaking of situations in which two people feel differently. I am speaking of the situation in which one person betrays the real, mutual desire for the sheer fact that reckoning with it would be too difficult.
Despite my “busyness,” I have never managed to use my robust calendar as an excuse not to find the time to answer another person. Has it to do with emotional reserve, with a fight against egoism? Or the fact that I have lived the personal experience of waiting for someone, the noose of “maybe” clasped around my neck.
Integrity, integration in relationships involve a real physical risk, words literally aligning with acts. The avoidant person knows there are a multitude of ways in which “the feeling of the real” could be experienced without consequence: an erotic dance, a nostalgic photograph. What reason have they to alter their reality for the feeling? They benefit generously from a split life and from an experience that is totally sublimated.
And here I find that poetry is not fully real. A lot can be said in words that never translates into action: poetry rarely takes life seriously. As an “artist,” one gets off scot free. One can live in a compromised reality in which there are “times” for profundity, for erotic experience—usually hidden, banished to the covenant of secrecy.
What is the point of a commitment if there is an exception to it? What is the point of an experience if one does not intend for it to last?
One who wants merely to have an experience with you, but has no intention of revealing the relation that necessarily forms to broad daylight or honoring it in duration, is making instrumental use of you. One who appears only when he needs you has no mercy on your needs. One who does not find the time to answer a plea of desperation is enslaving you to expectation. Abuses like these are hidden, they arrive in the form of a gradual discharging, a phantom pain. The incredible feeling that the person was never actually there, or somehow managed to “detach.”
And here is where a difference in value seems germane. For the great majority of others, it seems that avoiding discomfort (and likewise, maximizing pleasure) is the most important “value” in relations. I doubt that pleasure is a legitimate value at all, in the moral sense of the word, since the regard that something is held to deserve has almost nothing to do with how easy it is to tolerate. And for a distinct few, it is meaning that matters over and against pleasure.
For me connection, even corrupted, is the meaning of and reason for living. And I am pretty much willing to endure any discomfort to experience it. Not out of desperation, but out of an understanding that discomfort should not prevent me from living an examined life.
Too often, the poetry that formed the initial relation attempts to live on without any real life consequences. Too often, I discover that two people can experience the same moment differently.
There is no dignity in making art out of deprivation if one’s real life is a fraud. What a tragedy to feel one thing and do another—indeed, for me, art (the business of making promises that never materialize) ceased to count as “doing” a long time ago.
*
If words any longer had consequence, one might consider acting in accordance with the poetic phrase “you are important to me.”
One who respects the weight of his craving does not bury what is in his heart. One who is not merely playing does not love with a cautious regard for his own safety. Or was it all a game after all?
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Composed in Jerusalem, with gratitude to the conversations vital not only to my ability to write but to my desire to go in the world.
27 May 2025
Jerusalem