Relationships, the Past, and a Course for the Now

I’ve Been Thinking About My past: a bit of historical reflection allows course correction for the future. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my past relationships. I am aware that the one constant in all of the failures and successes that I’ve had has been me. There are things that I do very well in relationships and things that I have not done as well.

Six Feet Under
Lately, I’ve found myself hooked on Six Feet Under. There was a scene when Ruth and her new husband are making love. They are celebrating their union with carnal bliss, lust that filled their cups and overflowed down the halls into the rooms where their adult children were sleeping to be disturbed by the sounds of geriatric orgasms. That began my thinking: there were relationships that I had where the sex was the stuff that gods only dreamed of, carnality elevated to a point where flesh and spirit merged into something well beyond either. SL and I enjoyed this sort of lusty life. So did LA and I, though less frequently, so did DP and I. But the problem with all three of these relationships was that the passion was explosive and also spilt over into other parts of our lives that could have benefited from a more prosaic and detached relating that would have been a bit more boring, but certainly more peaceful.

I am a passionate person: not simply a sexual person, but a person that is full of emotional dynamite that is easily set off. The emotional connection that translated into free and experimental sexual expression wanted also to be translated into paying the bills or taking out the trash. It was the living together that I found so hard, the daily minutiae that needs must be attended to in order to have a stable and orderly household. Emotional dynamite is not stable; by its very nature, it is explosive and highly unstable. And that instability became the undoing of several of my relationships.

Hear me well: I am a committed person that is hardwired for monogamy. I will quickly plead guilty to a period of prodigal excess, but in my defense would note that this was an aberration, a deviation from the self in an attempt to numb a pain that was too deep to bear. I am responsible for the choices that I made. I did them – no pun intended – and nobody forced me; I masked my own wounds from the explosives that I handled by fucking any woman that would have me. Monogamy: my dream was to find one woman and live with only her, to have been only with her, to have known only her flesh, to have given myself totally to her and to be totally hers.

Needless to say, my wires got crossed: I short-circuited and would burn with dark oily smoke that concealed the searing heat that consumed and destroyed what I cherished and wanted to be. Having been married three times and having had more partners than I can number I know what a joke that became. My history betrays the intrinsic conflict that I have lived, an existential inconsistency that leaves me here, looking at the past and hoping for a future.

The First Day
We live, we do our best. We do our worst and spend a life recovering from the harm that we have caused and hoping to be as good as the best of what we are most deeply within that cries for the light of day. From the very moment of our birth, when we draw our first breath, we are pushing free from another person and laboring to be. I am a child of the seventies: I came of age in the halcyon days of guitar rock and narcissism. We were aware that “Today is the first day of the rest of my life.” I was never sure what that meant. I assumed that it was an excuse for more excess. While I was decidedly out of step with the cultural memes and mores of my time of coming of age, I still maintain an imprint of that time. Today is a new beginning, but it is never divorced from the course of my personal history.

The irony is that every beginning brings an ending, every birth brings a death. But the opposite is not necessarily true. Endings do not require beginnings. Death does not require birth. Some things simply become extinct; they fade away and fall into oblivion. Some things should become extinct. We all will. Our time is only a moment, one of an unknown quantity of moments that stand in connection each to the others, all that push into the light and fall back into the darkness.

Rage Against the Dying of the Light
We will all burn out. It is our choice to burn brightly and to bring light to others or to dwell in darkness, either of our own device or our being eclipsed by something else. Like a child pushing out of its mother’s womb, we gasp for our first breath and our fist fleeting glimpse of the light. So, what does all of this hyperbole have to do with relationships?

I look back at my history and see a dance of darkness and light, great good and deep darkness locked in struggle each with the other. For me it is learning balance, to be passionate and yet to find peace within that allows me to be the best that is within me, to be a midwife to my own birth, to my being me. And not going gently into that good night…

Ah, but I am only a fool.

New Year - 2007

I can’t avoid the reality that I am going to be fifty this year. There are birthdays that have some culturally ascribed weight; fifty is one of these. Half a century old – who would have thought that I would be so old; yet, I see grey in my hair. I shaved my goatee because of the grey. I still feel young. But my body is beginning to belie my deception of youth. Aches and pains greet me in the morning; it is my back that is stiff in the morning now.

Time Passes
I remember how horrible it was when my father turned fifty. He cried out against the injustice of the gods and threatened to take us all down with him. He was always given to violent outbursts and his aging has done little to curb this tendency toward hyperbole. I’ve decided to walk more gently toward that good night. A favorite poem by Dylan Thomas comes to mind:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might
have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they
grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse,bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It is the dying of the light that is the object and the occasion of rage, not the son or family. So how shall I rage against the dying of the light except to live in the face of death?

MS and AIDS
I’ve given serious thought to doing the MS Tour or the AIDS ride to celebrate my birthday. I would have to raise at least $2,500 dollars in donations to do the ride, but what the hell? I can do this. It is just a matter of planning and making it happen. I would rather raise money to spit in the eye of death than go down in a whimper or worse a misdirected bang. I have lost several friends to AIDS and had a serious scare with MS several years ago (I had symptoms that looked like the onset of MS, turned out to be anxiety).

I believe in living in this moment and not worrying about an afterlife. I am dubious about afterlife and wonder if this is not simply a means to soften the blow of our own mortality. Religious claims about heaven and hell all seem to be ways of justifying our own prejudices and softening our fears: we are small in this world, but will be great in the next. Best not to worry about that, just to live in the now.

New Year Resolves
I have made several resolutions in the past. I am not doing that this year; for me resolutions seem to be exercises in futility. I have goals and lifestyle changes that are more important than my so-called “resolves” for the New Year. Most pressing is my weight (I’ve made mention of that in the past, enough said).

I think that if I have any resolutions for this year it is this: I will turn fifty gracefully and enjoy the new chapter in my life. Enough for now.

Happy New Year.
- tDF