Destiny & Silence

Returning to "my muse" for the first time in a while. One of the abiding memories of that "relationship" was telling people I couldn't talk about it. Silence was the essence of the relationship. That silence is very much what broke the relationship also. Faith is only so strong and we like to get spoken reassurances to signpost relationships, or proofs that the partner is still in the relationship. This is a problem experienced by Christians where no word has come from Jesus for a very long time, and the relationship exists in total silence at the moment.

What struck me so strong about her was that from the moment we met I knew she was "the one". I can't remember all the details but perhaps that means "I decided she was the one" but in whatever sense it is meant it meant that December 5th 1997 is a milestone for me because from that day on I knew who "the one" was. And the most striking feature of this is that I was sure. Not because she said anything, not because anyone said anything, but I knew. That certainty came from no where and was supported by nothing. I knew nothing of what she felt or thought, other than we appeared to hit it off during that encounter. But before I knew anything I knew. Two days before when I first saw her I thought she seemed other worldly, she seemed somehow not of the earth. As mentioned before Shakespeare in Sonnet 130 may say "My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground" but without irony "my muse" actually appeared not to. Indeed my vision of her was always the most unironic and stereotypical. Perhaps the machinery of my mind is not so sophisticated that it can only generate forms in cliche, but there are reasons why cliches exist, and they are only cliche because they are so well worn. We may become weary and jaded of eating apples, but in reality each apple is as remarkable as the next, it is only us who grows tired of our mental machinery. With "my muse" she was the first, and remains the only cliche for me. She remains in silence.

Of course the silence become rather more profound after she died. But we lived in silence anyway, so the change was very little. The connection I felt was there whether we spoke or not, whether we met or not, and it remains after she has died. This is why I could never speak of it, and still cannot speak of it. It existed regardless of words, and so words can not construct it. If we were ever to build something so perfectly with words, then it would be no more than words. The value of silence is that it cannot be built from words. The artist may struggle to paint the sunflower, but we know that the painting will never be a sunflower. The essence of painting, the reason artists never stop painting, and art history never ceases, is because artists will never be able to capture the sunflower in paint. I was profoundly aware that i could not capture what transpired on 5th December in words so I never tried.

I have never tried to discover the real meaning of Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol:

Each man kills the thing he loves
    By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
    Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
    The brave man with a sword!

But in my mind it means the love has a life of its own. It is when we try to capture it, fix it or present it to the world that it dies. Even the flattering word will kill it.

Like the sunflower I wonder if I can really say exactly what I mean in this blog. But it is a very simple point. That love just is. It is a thing which happens in time and space. Yet it is so profound that the memory of it echoes forward and back in time. Like Carly Rae Jepsen says in that famous song "before you came into my life I missed you so bad." We know love perfectly well all our life, long before it happens. I was listening to her a fair bit some time back, she certainly knows the experience. In another song "And your eyes are lock and key" perhaps she refers also to the binding, locking quality of love here (from which I for one run), but for me it captures the experience of a lost lock not knowing of its key until such time as they meet and then in an instant it all makes sense. They both understand what they were made for. This is all in Plato's Symposium.

I'm thinking out loud on paper here. Perhaps the experience of love is partly this. Biologically we inherit from all life a tremendously ancient DNA and behaviour that evolved in rock pool billions of years ago to reproduce. When that lock and key finally meet they are literally as old as the rocks, as predestined as the blueness of the sky (oxygen was created around the same time). Only the diamond in her ring is older (unless it comes from a Russian factory). For me it felt like reincarnation however. Another idea probably as old if not older than evolution (Darwin did not think evolution he thought the mechanism of evolution called natural selection). I knew she would die soon. If I knew how it ended, this is why I wonder if there was more than just evolution creating a lock that sort a key that happened to be her.

We also don't think of pairing in the natural world being so exclusive. True many animals are monogamous keeping one partner their whole life, and I believe some not even repairing if their partner is lost (is this really true?). But do animal really have the experience of Lisa Stansfield "been around the world and i can't find my baby." In the past when populations were low and mixing was limited the world was not filled of locks unable to find their keys. It seems the lock and key may be made at the moment of meeting, or perhaps many keys will do, but when a roughly correct key fits a lock more or less it changes to fit the key exactly. Indeed this does fit my experience: I remember looking at "my muse" for the first time when we met. I asked her some question and she started talking and in that second I did a very quick calculation: the maths was "how is she?" the answer was "She is not what you are looking for". In fact she was not the key I was expecting! But then and this was the moment I binned the lock!! and asked again. "how is she?" and the answer was "over 95%." In other words there was a deeper lock and she did not fit exactly but the key made a "more than enough" match. And this was all done with data from the "eyes."

Yet there is no single story here. I already saw that she did not walk on the earth when I saw her across the shop floor two days before. She was already unusual. Perhaps this was factored into the "more than enough." Decisions presumably had been made based on chemistry and pheromones and lots of unconscious signals. It is interesting that the key conscious signal was how she looked (as if that's a secret!).

So supposing all this amounts to the body gearing up for breeding. The mind changes its lock to match what it has found, so that we experience the "I've waited my whole life to find you" moment. The experience of "destiny" then is possibly then much more generic. The destiny lies in the fact that will under take reproduction and breeding, but who with is much more flexible. That destiny is ancient. The lightening that flashes within us is an actual echo of the primordial lighting that created life in ancient seas. Who it is with however is much more conditioned and flexible.

And yet for me the lighting flashing from the mists of time was so powerful as to eclipse the contemporary, conditioned. I felt it so strongly and certainly that I did not need to speak of it, did not wish to speak of it. It would be like someone talking through a film, you don't so that you just watch it silently. It also reflects that this experience was quite unlike normal daily existence which does not share this spark of destiny to it. There is nothing destined in my life except this and possibly some progress in Buddhist or Christian enlightenment.

Now perhaps once we make this profound inner orientation to someone then the psychic stuff starts quite naturally. Knowing she was going to die and developing a connection to her so that I knew when she was in danger even after not seeing her for many years. The latter is a common thing I hear about all the time. Perhaps this is just normal when you take the time to deeply connect with someone. The fact she was the only published poet I have ever met, and I was just at the critical moment in my own life where poetry was central to my writing development we can put down to coincidence. Unfortunately losing her killed off my writing, perhaps this is the other destiny i should reengage with. And then there was the fact she is the only person I have ever met who can speak with ghosts. A few can see, but her psychic strength was extraordinary. It does suggest she was an extraordinary person and my lock chose well/badly depending how you look at it. Not the person for a simple straightforward life for sure, but the person you might know if you wish to develop spiritually. But then she told me she was still as school and my inner voice said in simple terms "you are doomed." And indeed I was. 17 going on 18 is not catastrophic, but it is if you wish to embark on the spiritual journey I was engaged with. So perhaps then it was not supposed to be. My lock took me exactly where i needed to be: an experience of poetry, love and a psychic awakening... but of breeding this part I still struggle with. Did the lightening flash in silence to bring forth life again as it did 4 billions years ago, or did it flash to open the soul to the greater spiritual reality?

Last weekend I spoke to a monk about my problem with Buddha's insistence of either monk or lay person. It appears if you have no family then the committed path is monastic. I consider this, but am not good enough yet to do that. I am a layperson, yet I don't like possessions or material existence. No chance of breeding with that mentality - women like nothing better than to nest it appears to me. But just because we don't wish to take up a domestic material place is the world does not automatically mean we are ready for the monastery. "My muse" was somewhat on the fence also, but she was young and I don't doubt she would have accepted the domestic path eventually. So have I cut myself free to pursue the monastic path? I don't know yet. Right now the silence isn't telling me anything.

== addition

Its funny how words have a mind of their own. In all that I didn't make the point I wanted to make. Silence is the best state for Truth because what is destined will happen, and what is meant to be will be. Therefore if one is destined to love then one will love, and if one is not then one will not love. There is nothing to do and nothing to say. And so it seemed to me.

However I have wondered since in the conditional, biological state of affairs whether women in particular need men to do things, and loving is not enough. Sexual love is after all part of the process of breeding. Much has been said in social analysis about sex and gender in recent decades and it is all wrong. What one is born with, the preconditions are what we might call sex. Why in social circles do we even bother with sex? If I had a choice I would not give it any thought at all. It is a demanding and time consuming activity that if it leads to breeding becomes even more demanding and time consuming. I believe if anyone had a choice they would not chose sex. But we are born with sex, and we are born with a destiny to be sexual. The reason that a 2 year old does not go around trying to get into relationships is because they do not yet have the sexual. When they are 20 that will have changed. One needs only spend a year looking at the natural world to see this writ large. This is a misunderstanding of the social.

The social is what rules we adopt to express our sexuality. What customs and learned behaviours come down to us within which we interpret our sexuality. You know the social because it changes from society to society. You know the sexual because it does not. It is true the dancer and dance can be hard to separate, but no one ever said they were the same. Sex and gender are quite separate. Male and Female is sex, masculine and feminine is gender. Sex is binary and confusion in this is a growth industry. Gender is choice.. well actually not really since what do we chose but what is available to us?

But perhaps I digress. If what is meant to be is meant to be then we may as well stay silent and let it happen. Yet as someone said to me: you cannot win the lottery if you do not buy a ticket. In which case we have choice over even that which is destined. In which case it isn't destined. And if it is not destined then we may also just as well stay silent since it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen.

It remains a personal quest to discover the destined. And one that must always be conducted in silence.