Dear FRIEND,
There are certain personalities which I have increasingly come to believe should not be left for very long without something sufficiently real depending upon them, and I do not mean that in the crude Protestant sense wherein a person must be kept endlessly working so that he might finally prove his usefulness according to whatever market is currently measuring him. I mean that some people appear to contain arrangements of force which become difficult to separate from the environments through which those forces have been given permission to move, and once that environment becomes too small, too artificial, too repetitive, too forgiving, or simply too absent, the forces do not disappear alongside it. They remain. They become unsponsored. They begin searching for somewhere else to go, and when there is nowhere else to go they will eventually turn around and discover the person himself as one of the last remaining objects upon which they can act.
I have called some of these people hypervigilant, extroverted, sensation-seeking, restless, charismatic, aggressive, creative, compulsive, funny, confrontational, unusually sensitive, physically expressive, impossible to bore without consequence, although I am not confident any one of these terms is sufficient, nor that they describe a single faculty at all. Maybe the mistake is already happening there, in naming several movements as though they originate from the same thing. Still, I recognize the configuration. I recognize what seems to happen whenever a person who is built almost offensively outward is required for too long to live without an adequate exterior. He begins to consume himself. Not always dramatically. Sometimes he only agitates. Sometimes he provokes people who did nothing to him. Sometimes he fucks people he does not love, gambles with things he actually cares about, manufactures enemies, discovers elaborate reasons to remain angry, becomes a performer of himself, or spends so long inventing situations in which something might finally happen that eventually the invented situations become his life. And occasionally no one outside of him notices anything at all because the violence has become entirely interior, which does not make it peaceful simply because nobody else can see it.
I have thought about prisons when considering this, and schools, and the many places where a person can become interpreted entirely through the visible consequences of whatever he learned to do with himself after the world had already failed to become intelligible to him. I wonder how much latent ability exists inside institutions whose occupants we are socially permitted to understand only after their abilities have been subordinated to the fact of their failure. I do not mean that criminality evidences genius. It does not. Nor do I imagine every destructive person was secretly one opportunity away from becoming an artist. What I distrust is the laziness of the causal story. A person becomes violent and therefore we imagine violence must have been the truest thing in him. Another becomes an athlete and suddenly every childhood excess is reread as competitive fire. A loud boy becomes a performer and his loudness acquires dignity in retrospect. Another loud boy becomes an inmate and the exact same loudness becomes one of many early warning signs everybody claims they should have noticed. We begin at the collapsed roof and infer the architecture from debris.
Home life, security, humiliation, expectation, deprivation, boredom, physical intensity, opportunity, rejection, praise, fear, whatever else accumulates from above, all of it eventually settles upon some original temperament which may itself have contained no moral instruction whatsoever about what its own magnitude was meant to serve. Then the person becomes blamed for the posture through which he learned to carry the weight. Of course he remains responsible for what he has done. But I find it strange how often the consequences of a life become sufficient explanation for everything which preceded them. We discover what someone became and proceed as though we have also discovered what he was. I am less certain those questions can be answered together.
Virtue has begun appearing to me as something other than subtraction. Aggression may become protection without ceasing completely to know what aggression is. Restlessness may become work. Risk may become sacrifice. Charisma may become care. Physical strength may become custodianship. Desire may become devotion. None of these are perfect equations, and I would distrust any interpretation which permitted somebody to excuse cruelty by discovering an imaginary virtue underneath it. But there are capacities which seem to arrive in us morally unfinished, and I have started wondering how often we mistake the unfinished quality of a force for evidence that the force itself is corrupt. A person capable of obsession may also be capable of unusual fidelity. Someone who is able to risk himself stupidly may eventually discover something worth risking himself for intelligently. I cannot imagine that either transformation would occur without some considerable loss, since a person may have spent years confusing a capacity with the behavior through which he learned to exercise it. And telling him to become smaller hardly settles the matter. You may punish eruption until quietness itself becomes a survival technique. You may convince him that his magnitude has been the common denominator underneath every problem he has caused, and perhaps many of those problems really were his fault, perhaps most of them, but shame remains a poor cartographer. It can tell a person that something inside him must never move again without teaching him where movement might have belonged.
This is partly why responsibility has begun appearing to me as something much stranger than duty. We have inherited a childish idea of freedom wherein freedom increases proportionally with the removal of whatever might demand something from us. No obligations, no bindings, no fixed expectations, no person sufficiently dependent upon our presence that absence begins to acquire moral consequence. But I do not know many people who became free that way. I know people who became available. I know people who became entertained. I know people who acquired options. And eventually the options themselves begin looking suspiciously alike, as though all that apparent possibility has succeeded in preserving is the individual’s capacity to continue choosing without ever having to become anything in particular.
A child who cannot feed himself. A student who notices whether you appeared prepared. A craft whose material punishes false technique. A relationship which refuses to remain whatever story you wanted it to be. A promise which becomes inconvenient after enthusiasm has worn away. An animal who must be fed regardless of whether you are depressed. I find these examples irritatingly ordinary considering how extraordinary the freedom I am attempting to describe has occasionally seemed to me. But there is some requirement within each which does not disappear simply because the individual becomes bored with satisfying it. Something has to become resistant enough that agency encounters an exterior which does not merely mirror it. Otherwise the personality is left to negotiate only with itself, and the self is very good at counterfeiting necessity whenever necessity has not otherwise appeared.
Eventually agency runs directly into desire, and desire cannot be spoken about honestly for very long before the body begins making a mockery of whatever clean abstraction we had prepared. Before language teaches us how to describe ourselves there remains the animal fact. I am hungry. I want sex. I become angry. I want recognition. I notice movement. I want to win. I become jealous. I want tenderness. I want conquest. I want to be left alone, and then I resent being alone. Seek, seek, seek. There is something almost humiliating about incarnation when described without ceremony. Whatever spirit means, it has accepted for itself an arrangement in which experience must arrive through blood pressure, hormones, exhaustion, appetite, time, pain, fear, pleasure, digestion, sexual desire, deterioration, memory, physical distance and the fact that everything capable of being touched has simultaneously become capable of being taken away.
We spend enormous portions of our religious lives speaking as though this material enclosure is principally what must be escaped, but I am beginning to wonder whether I have held the proposition upside down. Courage means very little where injury is impossible. Sacrifice becomes incoherent if nothing can be lost. Restraint requires appetite. Fidelity requires the possibility of betrayal. Mercy requires the real capacity to punish. Mortality does not merely threaten meaning. It may be one of the conditions through which meaning becomes expensive enough to become meaningful.
The body enacts the soul. I do not know whether I believe that sentence completely yet, which is perhaps why I believe it more than the sentences I am most immediately certain about. Flesh allows consequence to occur. It permits the invisible to enter causal reality. An intention can become action. An appetite can be refused. Love can cost something. Fear can be crossed through. This is where sin becomes more interesting to me than prohibition. There is nothing especially compelling about an administrative universe in which some actions receive approval and others do not, as though morality consisted principally in discovering which doors have been marked EXIT. Sin interests me because flesh places us inside a field of possible deviation. Some things feel good which are not therefore good, some things hurt which are not therefore evil, and some interior forces speak with enough volume that the person begins confusing volume with authority. I want it, therefore it is mine. I fear it, therefore I should flee it. I am angry, therefore my anger understands what happened. I desire, therefore desire has interpreted reality correctly. No. Why should appetite inherit the throne merely because it arrived first?
I am not convinced the denial of a carnal impulse necessarily demonstrates wisdom. Restraint can become vanity, repression can imitate discipline, and someone who spends his life terrified of desire may remain every bit as governed by it as someone who obeys every appetite he encounters. But I cannot make obedience synonymous with authenticity either. Whatever emerges from within me does not automatically possess the authority to determine what I ought to do. I think there is something extraordinary in that discovery, particularly because a person can spend years mistaking the persistence of an impulse for evidence that the impulse must eventually be satisfied.
Perhaps this is also what darkness is for, or at least what darkness is not. We seem tempted toward two stupid extremes. Worship it because it feels honest, primal, forbidden, powerful. Or amputate it because its existence threatens whatever clean identity we have constructed around being good. But both positions allow it too much authority. Maybe darkness is material. Maybe it is pressure awaiting order. I hesitate over that thought because it can become flattering almost immediately. There are things which should be extinguished, habits which must be abandoned, injuries for which no subsequent virtue can serve as an excuse. Sometimes somebody’s destructiveness has no more interesting explanation than the fact that he has grown accustomed to being destructive. Still, I think about those capacities which may remain dangerous throughout a person’s life and which might, under an altogether different arrangement of obligations, permit an extraordinary degree of endurance. The person capable of obsession may become the person who remains beside someone sick long after everybody else has grown uncomfortable, or who studies an impossible craft for twenty years, or who prays after the prayer has ceased to feel like anything. I cannot promise that this will happen. I am more interested in why the possibility seems so readily dismissed when the very same capacity has already been observed producing an uglier consequence.
This is what keeps bringing me back toward water. I do not think I invented the metaphor consciously. It appeared while I was speaking and then became more accurate than whatever I was attempting to say before it appeared, which is occasionally how thought behaves when you have finally exhausted your ability to control it. A wave rises from the ocean and becomes visible because something temporarily gives it form. We can point toward it. We can photograph it. We can describe its height, direction, violence, beauty. It is not unreal simply because it remains ocean, yet whatever independence we attribute to it has already been conditioned by the larger substance through which it arose. The wave is secondary in form and not in substance. Then it breaks. From the perspective of the wave this appears to be destruction because the configuration through which it recognized itself has disappeared. From the perspective of the water almost nothing has been lost.
The difficulty is that we live as configurations and therefore understandably experience the preservation of our configuration as though it were identical to the preservation of being itself. I do not know how far this metaphor is permitted to travel before it becomes dishonest. A human being is not merely water arranged into a temporary shape, and I would find little consolation in being told that someone I loved had only lost his particular configuration while the larger substance of existence remained perfectly intact. What remains is not necessarily what was loved. But I am interested in what the metaphor suggests about boundaries, and about how readily we mistake the conditions which make something recognizable for the entirety of what it is. A droplet retains shape because a boundary allows water to behave locally as though it has ended. Surface tension becomes identity without becoming substance. Then another sufficient body of water reaches it and the boundary ceases to survive contact. The two do not merely touch. They reorganize.
There may be encounters in human life which work this way. Love does this. Grief does this. Responsibility does this. Beauty can. Death certainly can. God would have to, if by God we mean anything more serious than the largest concept we were capable of manufacturing. Some encounter arrives which does not depend upon our comprehension in order to remain real, and suddenly the border through which we had been saying here I end is no longer sufficient. Perhaps reverence begins there. We are very good at standing beside the ocean defining water. We can speak about its composition, its salinity, its symbolic function, the moon, tidal force, gravity, maritime history, baptism, whatever else allows us to remain perfectly dry while becoming progressively more educated about what it might mean to enter. I have wondered how much of what I call understanding consists in acquiring the ability to describe something sufficiently well that I no longer feel particularly obligated to encounter it. Eventually you have to jump through the fucking wave. Otherwise explanation becomes another border, and intelligence becomes one of the most sophisticated instruments we have invented for preventing reality from occurring to us.
Maybe this is why incarnation itself becomes such a strange privilege. To become physically alive is to become vulnerable enough for something to happen. We spend the next several decades resenting the arrangement. We resent time because it alters what we love. We resent hunger because it reminds us we are dependent. We resent uncertainty because knowledge cannot guarantee survival. We resent pain, aging, separation, deterioration, and especially the fact that anything sufficiently precious to become beloved has therefore become something we can lose. Eventually someone calls this meaningless. I understand why. But I keep thinking about seeds here because potentiality has been lied about in much the same way freedom has been lied about. We treat potential as though it were the highest condition of a thing because potential contains every possible future without yet having sacrificed any of them. A seed is clean in this sense. Perfectly enclosed. Capable. Untested. Then life occurs to it and ruins everything. It cracks. Dirt enters. One possibility begins consuming the others.
The seed cannot become the plant while remaining perfectly capable of becoming something else. Becoming costs potential. Actuality destroys alternatives. There is no life without this contamination. A thing becomes itself by losing its pristine capacity to become indefinitely otherwise. I find that thought more disturbing when applied to a person than to a seed, although it seems no less applicable. We can spend an entire life preserving the possibility of becoming extraordinary, unwilling to surrender enough of our imagined futures to permit any particular future to become actual. Eventually time takes the alternatives away regardless. The person who would not choose discovers that his refusal has itself participated in determining what became of him.
Which may be why flesh must rot. I am aware how easily this becomes poetic, and there is nothing especially poetic about the circumstances through which people actually deteriorate. Pain can rearrange priority, although pain is not automatically wise, and anyone who has suffered pointlessly knows the offensiveness of pretending otherwise. Grief changes whoever remains. Sometimes terribly. A person can lose something and become less capable of living afterward. There are losses for which I would hesitate to offer even the suggestion of a compensatory meaning. Yet dissolution does not erase consequence. Dead things feed living things. A father is absent and may still occupy more psychological territory than strangers physically sitting beside his son. A teacher dies and continues speaking through a student who has forgotten the teacher’s exact words. Civilizations collapse and leave categories inside minds which no longer remember where those categories came from. Something dies and continues exerting causality through people who remember it incorrectly. If dissolution erased consequence, every love would eventually be retroactively defeated by death. Beauty would only mean delayed decomposition. Attachment would become an error exposed by enough time. But life does not behave that way while it is happening. Nothing living remains pristine because life contaminates itself with experience, and perhaps this is not contamination in the ordinary sense at all. Perhaps this is what participation costs.
I think this is where agency finally becomes clearer to me, though perhaps only because I have exhausted several worse definitions. Agency is not infinite choice. It is not the fantasy of existing without boundaries. A high-agency person may require better constraints rather than fewer of them, realities sufficiently difficult that his force cannot immediately metabolize them into stimulation. This difference between reality and stimulation matters enormously to me. Stimulation exists principally according to what it does to me. Reality retains requirements independent of me. A craft resists bad technique. A student remains confused even when the lesson sounded brilliant inside my head. A child still needs breakfast after I have constructed an impressive philosophy of fatherhood. A partner remains another person no matter how thoroughly I have interpreted her. God, if God is real, must remain God whenever my interpretation becomes inconvenient.
And perhaps the people I began with, Kaelin included, are especially vulnerable to this confusion because a person possessing unusual amounts of outward-moving energy can survive for years by finding increasingly elaborate things against which to throw himself without ever discovering what deserves the throw. Everyone around him sees movement and assumes movement means direction. He may even believe it. But there are days in which the chasm becomes quieter, and those days have become more interesting to me than whatever theory I might construct around the louder ones. What is he doing when he is not consuming himself? Who depends upon him then? What kind of work exhausts him without hollowing him? What responsibilities make him more alive rather than merely more occupied? I am especially interested in what happens after the novelty of responsibility has disappeared, once nothing particularly exciting remains about doing what needs to be done. There are plenty of people capable of extraordinary gestures when the circumstances allow those gestures to become evidence of their own importance. I wonder how many of them could endure being ordinarily necessary.
I may be describing conversion. Not conversion as ideological migration, not simply becoming the sort of person who assents to the correct religious statements, but an alteration in what a person has become willing to obey. I suspect this is much more difficult than rearranging one’s beliefs, particularly when the same appetites can survive almost any intellectual transformation and emerge afterward with an entirely new vocabulary through which to justify themselves. Someone may become more articulate about compassion without becoming less cruel. He may discover a religion capable of explaining his suffering and proceed to use that explanation against everybody who encounters him. What interests me is whether anything has actually changed in the person when the explanation has ceased to satisfy him.
The wave is not asked to cease being water. The seed is not insulted by becoming the plant. Appetite is not proven evil because it requires discipline. A powerful person is not made holy by becoming weak. But something may have to die in him, and perhaps what dies will be something he had spent his entire life defending as essential to his nature. I cannot imagine that anybody would find it especially comfortable to discover that his most familiar arrangements of thought and conduct were never the permanent architecture of his personality, only accommodations which had become so practiced that he no longer remembered having learned them. Nor do I suppose a person can always distinguish in advance what deserves preservation from what must be surrendered. Becoming costs potential. I wonder whether conversion might also cost the person some part of what he had previously mistaken for himself.
Some people need extraordinary amounts of exterior reality shoved into their fucking face. I am not prepared to make that statement into a universal psychological principle, and I would be embarrassed if it became another elaborate apology for people who have grown accustomed to making their intensity everybody else’s problem. But unused force does not become peaceful merely by being denied an object. It folds. It becomes recursive. The person eventually discovers himself as prey. I think this is why nurturing, coaching, teaching, fatherhood, building, protecting, serving, tending, making, all of these functions recur whenever I imagine what healthier trajectories might look like for such people. The world acquires requirements whose legitimacy no longer depends upon the person’s appetite for satisfying them. A student remains confused. A child remains hungry. A promise remains binding. There is something almost irritating about how little interest these things possess in accommodating the grandiosity through which we occasionally understand ourselves. I cannot reason a child into no longer requiring breakfast, however elegant my philosophy of fatherhood may become. Responsibility survives the performance of responsibility.
And if I return finally to the chasm, I am less convinced than I was when I began that the chasm signifies absence. Sometimes hollowness may be shaped by what has not yet found its adequate object. Sometimes the appetite itself teaches us something concerning scale. Flesh mistakes appetite for will. The person mistakes his own abyss for the absence of God. I would be careful here because this thought could become flattering very quickly. People love being told their dysfunction is secretly evidence of enormous spiritual capacity. Usually it is not. Sometimes a hole is a hole and sometimes destruction is exactly what it appears to be.
But there are days when someone previously organized around appetite becomes peaceful inside obligation, when the person becomes useful without needing usefulness to become an identity, when he can protect without dominating, desire without consuming, lead without requiring submission, work without turning work into proof of worth, love without converting another person into medicine. I would pay attention to those days. Not proof. Evidence. I have become more interested in what a person can sustain than in what he might theoretically be capable of becoming, and more suspicious of the extraordinary things we imagine ourselves destined to accomplish whenever imagination has relieved us of having to accomplish anything.
Perhaps the wave was never being asked to become smaller. Perhaps it only had to remember that an ocean existed.
Camigula, | 10.03.26
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