The moment you knew

The moment I knew – well, the first one – was at a good old fashioned proper funk-ska album release party in Ballard.  She had been talking for awhile about wanting to go out dancing – not big band swing dancing, but proper dancing, she wanted to smoke up ahead of time and then just let go – and while I didn’t need to smoke up to dance, I went along with it.  It was a great band, locals, Blacks and Whites together, the Whites mostly on horns but not exclusively, the Blacks on vocals but not exclusively, and two drummers that were clearly on something.  Three hours of funk with a ten minute intermission where we went outside and had a cigarette, and in between, just dancing – release, full on, full out, jump up and up and get down, and take it down Timmy, and originals and James Brown and you couldn’t have stopped me with a blackjack and a shiv.

But she was awkward, and at the end of the night she was totally not funky.  I was funky – every meaning of the term.  I was sweaty, my khakis and t-shirt were soaked through, but mostly my entire being was ringing with funk, with hard syncopation and the resonance of muscles and feet and arms and body that had been joining with others, including her, in rejoicing to the notion of music as an aerosol, of bass as a kind of seismic force, of the earth telling our feet how to move.  But she was not.  She was sweaty, yes, but also just simply not aware of the nature of what we had been through.

I should have known then, but she was – is – beautiful.  Beauty and glamour plus James Brown makes anyone think it’s all good, even if it’s not.

The other time I should have known, she told me she couldn’t ask for forgiveness, and wouldn’t ever ask for forgiveness.  It was by Lake Washington, and I told her I understood, but actually I didn’t.  I didn’t understand the inability to acknowledge one’s own mistakes, and I couldn’t fathom the idea that one couldn’t say “I’m sorry”.  Because our faults exist not because of original sin, not because of some biblical fault, but because we’re incapable of understanding the complexity and the completeness of the world; we make mistakes because of our finiteness in the presence of the infinite of everything else.  And it’s not like others are infinite: they are also finite and therefore wrong more often than not.  It’s not a cause for fault, it’s a cause for forgiveness – for seeking forgiveness, for revealing our own failings to those we have hurt.  But she thought asking for forgiveness was an acknowledgement of failure, as opposed to an acknowledgement of humanity.  I should have realised it then.

Of course I didn’t.  She was beautiful, and also, she wanted something beautiful for herself, and for more than her.  And beauty is so enticing, is so convincing.

I still knew, though.  So now I’m reading Martin Buber’s Ich und Du, or in the English translation, I and Thou, and simultaneously I’m reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, and simultaneously I’m trying to explain to someone how I love them in terms of both but without actually saying it, without actually writing an essay about it.  And I look back on the last moment with her and when I told her she was intentionally, with force and with meaning, trying to push away from what I described at the time as the connectivity of the universe, of the connectivity of all of us, and which I now realise was stated by Buber fairly succinctly (well, not that succinctly; he took 120 pages (in English translation) and frankly could have done it in 60).  What I really wanted to have said to her in Lisbon was that the Thou, the connection, the entirety, can only be avoided, but it can’t be ignored.  And the more you avoid it, the more the moment of connection will create pain.  And that our connection, and her avoidance, were joined, because of that sharp pain.

We connected through the Du but she didn’t want that – she wanted to avoid it.  She attaches to a physical, a word-driven connection, an intelligible structure which will enable people to simply mechanically connect, even though the connections we seek are neither mechanical nor are they romantic.

My son and I watched a movie and while he laughed and giggled at the toys and the spork making funny jokes, we both went silent for a few minutes as the spork and the toys realised something about their own existence.  “How am I alive?” she asked.  “I don’t know,” he responded, knowing that she was asking the exact same question he couldn’t answer, but had moved past, because he was alive, and the question no longer had any meaning, in any language, in any sense whatsoever.  He was alive, and that’s all that mattered.

What I really wanted to say, over this past day or two, was to someone else, that I finally got the joke since we first met, since we first talked.  It has nothing to do with what you think I want, or with what people think is supposed to be.  I love you – and in loving you, I give up everything, I give up every expectation, every thought that there will even be an “us” or even a “you think of me.”  The whole point of loving is to give up everything and just live surfing through the wake.  Once you drown yourself, it’s all good.  You’re still alive, you’re still there.

And even if you drown yourself in someone who, the moment afterward, you know isn’t there, you still drink in the water, and rise to a new surface, and drown again.  The moment you know is the moment you declare at full voice in your own heart, to the whole of eternity, I’m ready to plunge again.