Encountering one’s void
What did I learn about love? Field notes from the frontlines of unlearning
Seven things I know. Over the next four days or so, I will be recollecting on lessons learned by experience or reflection in 2024. I want to engage with the hardest personal subjects I manage to. Please bear with me as the process is turning out to be harder than I thought. These are field notes from the frontlines of unlearning. Maybe they'll spark your own uncomfortable conversations!
Day 4 — Encountering one’s void
What did I learn about love?
I can’t even begin to answer this question. I don’t have words to describe where I started from, nor where I landed. What was I wrong about? Most likely everything.
This year was a long flight on an silent jet I boarded while I was asleep. Dreaming. Sleepwalking in my fantasies.
In July, I could be hugged by four people telling how much they loved me and feel absolutely nothing. Words of affirmation would leave me cold like frost. I skim through my journals.
Jul, 2. I cry the imaginary tears of a faraway child. He doesn’t know when to call off the prank and come back home. He’s lost. He can’t see his mom, nor a friendly shadow.
He has no roof for the night. I can pull it off. The city won’t kill me. I can stand it. I can sleep anywhere, even on the dustiest mattress. But it’s not dust stinging his eyes. It’s the awareness his mother is dead and won’t be back. I can’t breathe. The chest contracts. The tummy is bruised.
There’s an old man with a white beard at the end of his path he can barely see. He has a blurry face and a deep dry voice. He’s waving to him to come closer. The child cries. He is afraid. The old man approaches slowly.
Their hug is long. It lasts until the boundaries of the two souls melt. The child doesn't want to open his eyes anymore. Remembering the world around him would be too painful. What good remains? (trans.)
This imagined encounter of the homeless child with the wise old man reflects an inner dialogue that I feel I’ve been having often. The task is to recompose a split soul. I am unsure of why I have to reconcile this sense of pure infinite grief with plush and stealthy wisdom.
I know I’ve promised not to borrow unearned insight in this thread. Nonetheless, if there is one thing I’m learning about love, it would be along these lines.
It’s less about what we desire, and more about what sets (our) desiring in motion. It’s the blurry borders of the void we carry, the paper cutouts someone crafted with the pages within our heavy binding.
The original question of desire is not directly “What do I want?”, but “what do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?” A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations; he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him: his father, mothers, brothers and sisters, and so on, fight their battles around him, the mother sending a message to the father through her care for the son. While he is well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom what object, precisely, he is to others, what the exact nature of the games they are playing with him is, and fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am to my others.
The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek, p. 9
May the subtle dance of imagination deciphering desire, of seeing and feeling seen, accompany you in 2025.
Meet you on the other side.
