Vulnerability

“The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

If I am not a participant, I am what I have been for a long time, a prisoner within my four walls. This morning on my walk around the water, I looked at the Harbour Bridge and wondered if I might choose to venture outside, to the bottom of my street, or to one of the foreshore parks to watch the fireworks on New Years Eve. I wondered if I would ask someone to accompany me.

 

“Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.”

Robert Browning

 

I am going to two performances this week for the Sydney Festival. One is an outdoor performance that will take place during the city rush hour home in one of the busiest transport hubs (buses, trains, ferries, cars and jet cats). I have always liked playing the role of the anonymous, silent observer.

 

“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”

Ovid

 

I would sometimes like to play a different role, where I am involved and so I now am starting to experience some tension. I find it hard to let go of the comfort of my old structures, rituals and stories. Then I experience some inner disagreement. I want to dare myself to do things differently, to take some risks, with the hope of experiencing some pleasure.

 

What is the source of my fear? Am I ready to let another person in to do what others have done to me?

 

What is the worst that could happen? I let go and allow someone to get close, allow myself to get close to them. I let myself fall out of my private sanctuary that is unscathed by risk.

 

“Naturally, love’s the most distant possibility.”
Georges Bataille

 

One of my resolutions this year is to challenge the faulty thinking that has made my heart hardened by cynicism. People are not all the same. I am not the same. I have had experiences that have made me hibernate and reflect. I now have the momentum of desire, which will drag me out of these four walls.

 

“It is much easier to suppress a first desir

e than to satisfy those that follow.”
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

 

Is it possible to find another person who wants the same things out of life? Will they make me smile at some secret innuendo we share? Belly laugh? Lose self consciousness? Is there anyone out there whose values and intelligence I can admire? Is there a person that I can trust with my intimacy, raw emotion, our nakedness and vulnerability? Is there someone who wants to understand, to be trusted, and to be loved? Is there someone equally committed to working on a friendship and relationship?

 

“Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.”

Theodore Roethke

 

Both of my grandfathers, my father, my brother, my male friends, my partners have all openly admitted to me that they had committed adultery or would, given the right circumstances. For a long time, I thought that was true of all men and so I would always be on guard, never fully letting go, never fully loving, always silently suspicious. This is one act of betrayal I could not forgive, given the trauma I experienced as a child as my father relentlessly wounded my mother.

 

I lived with a partner for a long time. When he stopped communicating with me, and sleeping with me, I wondered what I had done wrong. I would try harder to please him, to accommodate him, to care for him. The harder I tried, the more he retreated from me. I didn’t realise but he was feeling guilt. After some time, it became unbearable, I became suspicious, I stopped trusting him, asked him too many questions. He told me that I was going mad. I felt as though I was going mad.

 

“Jealousy is the injured lover’s hell.”

John Milton

 

Then, I was confronted with the evidence; he had been lying to me all along. I found out that the adultery had occurred precisely at the time that I started to feel something had shifted in our relationship. 

 

“Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.”

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

 

When I finally discovered that he had been unfaithful, I packed my clothes, books and music, I left everything else behind and I moved away. I cut all contact with him and promised I would never let anyone do that to me again. He came to see me once and cried and begged me to have him back. I closed the door in his face.

 

“How often you, spurned, will run to my door, when your strong words shall have fallen into a sob, and a trembling horro

r will begin from your sad tears.”

Propertius Sextus

 

I regained my power. I had stepped inside a coat of armour, shielded from all further possibility of being hurt, living in a fortress surrounded by a big dirty moat. For a long while after, I had been with many other people but saw it as purely a physical transaction, and yet I felt diminished.

 

“I gather speed, from you fucking with me. Rear view mirror.”

Eddie Vedder

 

I then met two people with whom I felt that I could let down my guard down. The first I fell hard for but I had already chosen to travel. Given my faulty thinking, I thought that it was inevitable that he would abandon me in the end and so, I left him before he could leave me.

 

The second person had become a slow burn (8 years) long distance attraction. I remember a friend back home contacting me to ask if anything had happened the night I arrived. My sardonic self answered, “No darling, not that first night…I had jet lag”. I was in one sense heart broken about leaving behind the lover in Australia but determined to see whether anything would come of my connection with my friend in Canada.

 

The second night and for months afterwards, we had an intense time together both emotionally and sexually. I had thought about staying there with him in that interminable snow and cold. However, I did not trust him to be faithful and decided that I would leave to continue on my journey. I didn’t look back.

 

“I don’t know. When my lover comes to me and says such loving things, do all my parts become eyes or ears?”

Amaru

 

I wish that this was true for me, that I could be paid a compliment and not think perhaps that there was an agenda, or that it was a decoy for bad behaviour. In fact, there have been men who have been genuine with me but I hadn’t finished feeling bitter and hardened and walked away from them as well.

 

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
Roland Barthes

 

Writing a diary fills me with promise. I can re-write my character, one that is still flawed but more human, and one whose vulnerability is lovable. I am not contracted to an unhappy ending. The possibilities are endless. Then my vivid imagination runs away with itself, allowing myself to create a future that experiences pleasure and desire fulfilled.  

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It also exposes me.

 

“To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.”

Roland Barthes