The ache that makes us
Resonance, risk, and hearing what remains
I have had moments where I feel neatly knit inside the smoothness of some universal flow. In those moments, I can understand why some people say “this is fate” when the feeling of moving in concert with something that isn’t you is intensely strong. However, I am not convinced of fate—at least not in the “everything happens for a reason” vein of thought. I could perhaps be convinced of something more along the lines of Sam Harris’s argument against free will which, in large part, is an argument against individual autonomy and the illusion of being fully in control of our lives. Nevertheless, it seems to me possible that in these moments of cohesion between subject (you/me) and object (the world), the structure of that entire apparition dissolves and what emerges is the presence which precedes the distinction between subject and world. In his book, The Uncontrollability of the World, Harmut Rosa works to build upon his sociology of relationships in which our interactivity with(in) the world “assumes that subject and world are not precondition, but the result of our relatedness to this presence.” Words are going to fail us a bit in this essay. Because we are talking about lines that curl in upon their own wordiness, about pitch that is so high it breaks our eardrums and resumes a harmony we have been singing all along. We exist in relatedness. We emerge from relatedness. We sometimes need to lose a thing we loved and thought we were in—whether that is a relationship or merely a house—to know it was home. It is this relatedness, it is relationship itself that makes up what we experience as ‘the world,’ and it is in moments where both you are affecting the world and being affected by it—Rosa’s resonance—that exists an uncontrollability of which we are a part—this feeling of being fated. This beautiful, terrifying sense of having no control.
Resonance, though, is not just a fuzzy, hippie, jazzy vibration with the world. It requires something to elude us, something to be not understood (perhaps as a poem or a piece of music), something that continually pulls us back into a dance with the ineffable of which we are part. In our daily experience, we fall into the illusion that our consciousness is something we possess—something 'ours'—and through this misconception, we develop rather reified senses of self. It is within these selves that we naturally interact in an aggressive, distancing posture towards the world that is not self. All of which is to say that resonance also contains risk—for we must release our sense of subjectivity and release our grip on the world’s objectivity and exist, at least for a moment, in the “process dimension.” As Rosa explains: “There must be at least one ‘obstinate reminder’ that has something to say to us.”
That obstinacy can provide us with a sense of awe—the view from the mountain you just climbed, the feel of the wave you are surfing on and its momentary coalescence with your movement—but it can also be a paralyzing terror. In her essay on the suicide of her two sons, YiYun Li slips around the profound pain uncertainty can cause to land in a feeling about life which
is something else altogether. Call it a combination of keen attention and “a profound indifference” (borrowing Camus’s words), or a combination of intense emotion and an equally intense apathy. The fact is, there is no word for this state I’ve found myself in, in which lucidity and opacity are one and the same.
The day after James’s death, I said to Brigid, “One has to muddle through this life.”
That statement was not accurate. There was something stark and piercing in me that was much closer to clarity than muddle, but calling it a muddle took much less effort. It was as though I were averting my eyes from a mirror, which reflected my mind to me in such an unrelenting and sharp manner that I was startled by myself, frightened, even. By looking away, one could imagine a muddled image, vague, softer, less unsettling.
To confuse resonance with softness is indeed to muddle through life. Or to pretend to muddle while knowing the horror is just a reflection away. Resonance requires risk which may indeed kill us, or worse shatter—not us but the relationality itself—into still and terrible silence.
However, the ultimate reward for such risk is simplicity. How so, you may ask? Not simplicity as a simpleton’s foolishness, but earned simplicity. I have long been guided by an idea that one’s evolution in life is intended to follow this sort of path: simple–complex–simple. Kierkegaard’s version of the journey skips over my first simple but still suggests the goal isn’t “to become interesting, witty, profound, a poet, a philosopher. No, it is just the opposite; here one begins and then becomes more and more simple.” The ultimate simplicity? Silence. Not an empty absence, but the resonant space where subject and world cease their exhausting distinction—where we no longer need to narrate our experience to know we are experiencing.
But aren’t we meant to have a voice, you ask? To speak out? To express ourselves? To move the world with our being? Well, when you go that far, it just sounds silly. In fact, I believe no. We do a lot of talking, way too much talking it seems. There is, it feels on many days, an oppressive amount of talking in the world. Endless podcasts. The MSM and the independent journalists. The arguments, sorry debates. The explanations of why and what was and when it is okay and how to and whether you should and where you are wrong. We are called, in this brave new world, to participate in a self-aggrandizing—sometimes deforming—form of self-branding. More than called, we are warned it is necessary for survival.
It is not that I don’t love ideas—and in this world of endless voices, there is certainly no shortage of them. They are indeed my bread and butter. It’s rather that perhaps the proliferation of ideas isn’t the goal. Perhaps this is the busy necessity of our humanity, the maintenance of being a thinking, naming, sorting, narrating human. But in an age of exceedingly excessive chatter and ear-splitting noise, I ask as T.S. Eliot once did: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?” And honestly, how can we hear the resonance when it comes within reach?
It is pretty hard to listen these days. Not just to each other, but to the world, the presence, the process dimension, of which we are but a part. Sometimes it feels like it makes more sense to listen to what doesn’t speak, or speaks differently—for instance, trying to hear the visual in place of the aural. In planning to write about the artist, Celia Paul, Karl Ove Knausgaard made a trip to her London flat which is also the backdrop of many of her portraits. Knausgaard found an uncanny sense of familiarity upon entering her space and yet
this struck me all at once—reality is always much more than that which can be fixed in images, infinitely more. The other’s face continually changing, one’s own thoughts in constant flux. The various surfaces, the way light is reflected off each of them, always shifting. The history of objects, and what they signal about status, class, the personality of their owner. Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it. So what we do is look for patterns, for whatever can be fitted into a stable structure. It is a way of managing reality.
Into resonance and then back out. Letting go into the infinite fluidity and then back pattern managing. We certainly cannot stay there and live a material human life. Paul herself resists the title of portrait painter, instead calling herself, if something is required, an autobiographer. This honesty seems to me reflective of the way that creative processes open to resonance beyond the self, then filter that resonance back through it.
Oh, that impossible pain of slight, but fundamental, misalignment. The translation of the resonance cannot ever be the resonance…and yet…When I write, I am often shocked later to read what has come through me. What is this foreignness that I coughed up? The same thing happened to me when I attended painting school. Standing before the canvas, I’d set out to create portraits with specific intentions, only to watch as stark, intensely colored paintings emerged before my eyes, through my hands, but not from my conscious direction. I could not say, in fact, that they were mine. My teachers were as fascinated as I, seeing that these works revealed layers—an inner landscape I wasn’t aware of, the beingness of painting where Cezanne and Van Gogh created and infused the air, the not quite known or understood connection between me and the sitter. These paintings were, as Paul says, autobiographical, not mirroring the isolated self, but reflecting its entanglement with body, studio, space, landscape, past, paint, and something else moving through me. They were of me, certainly, but not directed by me—another instance of uncontrollable presence breaking through the illusion of creation itself. Perhaps the creative product is what Knausgaard suggests—the gathering of movement, of moments, of process…which is entirely impossible and yet it is. Paul’s paintings create for Knausgaard a different resonance, his theory being that each of her paintings
consists of encounters. The chair first meets the gaze of the painter, who paints a chair on a canvas. It emerges brushstroke by brushstroke, in a long-drawn-out moment, continually adjusted, and there are two chairs in play, one of them unchanging in a changeable moment, which is the chair in the room, and another changeable in an unchanging moment, which is the chair on the canvas. The painting is alive in the sense that it arises out of a process, led and corrected by the artist’s gaze, but also by her ideas, emotions, and expectations, until she considers the painting finished and it is our gaze it encounters. We see not the chair in itself, as that is for sitting on, but the moment it represents, the here and now it lifts forth. Not the world, but our connection to the world.
This connection is key to understanding Rosa’s idea of resonance and also his diagnosis of the non-relatedness towards which our current moment threatens to lead. His hypothesis is that the deepest fear of modern humankind is not the fear of going mute (all that noise) but the fear of the world going mute. From modernity’s promise of a controllable world—wherein our need to ever-expand our reach is conflated with controlling that which is reachable—is instead producing a radically threatening world wherein “we are incapable of experiencing self-efficacy or of establishing a responsive relationship of adaptive transformation when confronted with it.” Our tireless work to control the world produces a new kind of anxiety at the new uncontrollables-–the car locks that freeze and won’t let you out, the AI whose inner workings we don’t seem capable of explaining, the “quantified self” whose excessive amounts of data (sleep, steps, food intake, blood counts, genetic makeup) generate ever-increasing concern about the ungovernability of said self-–and, unlike the original uncontrollability of a world with which we can resonate (the magic that exists in the first snowfall of the year, its snowflakes melting on your upturned face), the new uncontrollable which we produce, the unintended byproducts of our efforts at full control, is now beyond our reach, beyond the place where we can hear. Thereby we are on a path to produce the very muteness which we so desperately fear of the world in the first place.
I am a poet. I am a writer. And I am also neither of those things. The stultification. The titles and ownership. I also suffer the insecurity about my work and instability about the possibility of future work that all artists experience. But what if these are not merely quirks of self-deprecating creatives? What if these are not lacks in terms of capacity, or potential audience, but only seeming inadequacies that are in fact spaces? These expressed or feared deficiencies, this sense of being always just short of something—are not impediments, but openings—the very conditions through which art, or creativity more broadly, emerges. They are indeed central to its emergence or, as some like to say, features not bugs. Knausgaard remarks on the intense array of emotions experienced in producing something like a painting or a poem and the way in which
no matter how existentially complete a work of art may be, no matter how rich and life-giving it appears, it has arisen out of something incomplete, where the mean, banal, and petty-minded live side by side with the most sublimely visionary thoughts, and where it isn’t clear which of them holds precedence.
The ‘completion’ of a work isn’t a wrapping up or shutting down. Perhaps this is why so many artists feel uncomfortable about their past works. They truly are never finished. The resonance exists in a tension between an ending and the fact that presence itself is never complete. Knausgaard reminds us of what philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote about presence in painting which he called “the painting before painting.” Though the phrase appears incongruous, Knausgaard explains that there is always a before before the painting. In his words,
There is no such thing as an empty canvas, something is always already there–historical ways of painting, contemporary ways of painting, your own way of painting, cliches, the culture’s entire repertoire of motifs and methods. If you are going to paint a man or a chair in front of you, you have to force your way through the whole thicket of inner images, as the painting has to emerge in its own right, and for this to happen it can’t be governed by what was there before, it has to be present in the moment. All art, I dare to affirm, is about getting to that point. And here self-doubt and inadequacy offer an access. Not being able, not knowing—that is the starting point of creation. Such a thing as a new beginning, a place emptied of the past, of course doesn’t really exist, but the moment exists, and if we are able to disregard ourselves we can become a part of it instead of it being a part of us.
Attempting to think about any beginning can overwhelm us. Even if we were to posit that there was a “beginning” to the universe, it would be entirely inconceivable to us. Except perhaps in spatial terms. In their video, To Scale: TIME, the creators make a model of time from over 13 billion years ago when the big bang supposedly occurred to the present. What often strikes us ego-centric humans in these models is how tiny our entire shared existence, the entirety of the human time span, is when measured against the whole of time. This can bring you to tears, for sure. But what I love even more about this creation is that it reveals the incompleteness of a linear orientation of evolution and of time. Beyond their model exists more space, just as beyond the beginning and end of the universe exist more beginning and end. Just as beyond me and the world exists more world. Just as beyond our deepest scientific fragmentation of matter into the subatomic exists utter magic.
I have a good friend who shared with me that his current philosophy of life is to embrace the suck. Now, I am not one to discount any particular way of life, nor would I pretend to be able to inhabit his mind in order to fully explain the nature of his thinking about this outlook (or perhaps inlook.) In fact, taken on its face, embrace the suck is quite beautiful in its sentiment of acceptance of what is. I simultaneously have two other friends whose approach—never explicitly stated as such—is to create a kind of self-isolation, to build a safe house around their lives. We have bought into the idea that the goal in life is some form of self-discovery or personal growth and certainly these could be attempted in protected silence. However, these self-directed efforts are just the kinds of controlling approaches to life which Rosa warns are life-deadening. Embrace the suck is wonderful if it is a sort of surfing the waves of life, but less so if it is a turning inward and away, a stop sign to resonance and its unpredictability, an invitation to atrophy. It seems to me that instead of self-discovery or self-protection—this strange either/or that we so often yin-yang between—the purpose of life is ongoing resonance in which you and the world are naturally and continually transformed. Remember, we are in the process dimension and must attempt to heed the siren call of self/object division.
Of course, resonance emerges with friction. This is unavoidable. Knausgaard reminds us of the jealousy and self-doubt and pettiness that emerges alongside the process of creation as you reach for the universal. These sorts of flaws or potentials (depending on how you react to them) exist in all relationality. The challenge of being in relationship—climbing a mountain where you might fall, embarking upon a partnership where you will inevitably collapse into your small-self and allow that frightening, threatening backstory to push itself into a conversation, even at times to dominate the presence in which you are in—is to stay in relationship. To not continually become a self—yourself—which of course we all do all the time. We have too.
Let’s get more grounded with the idea of mutual transformation in this example. Barrels in the whiskey industry exist in an almost never-ending journey. Once the white oak barrels have been hand built, and separately the fermented liquid has been made, the two meet in their raw, separate states as container and distillate. The liquid is then introduced into the barrels and allowed to stay there anywhere from a handful of years to half a century. During this time, the wood from the barrels offers its notes of cinnamon, vanilla, or caramel to the bourbon, while the wood itself is altered in return. Temperature swings in the rickhouse deepen various flavors—unpredictably, since they cannot be controlled. And beyond the rickhouse, there waits an entire market where barrels are “pre-purchased” while still filled with other spirits. Later, once emptied of that initial spirit, these aged and transformed barrels are shipped to parts around the world where they are filled with new liquor, enhancing and transforming that spirit through this secondary usage. From the relationship between the barrels and the whiskey emerges something entirely new. From the rickhouse and the barrels and the whiskey emerges something transformed. From the coming-after, multiple lives of the barrels in their journeys with new liquors emerge more splitting, more multiplying relationships all of which mirror something like desire—that which excites and eludes us, escapes and deepens us, inhabits and releases us, and is always forever somehow unfamiliar.
There is a song that has been giving me all the feels lately. It possesses just this kind of intensely familiar unfamiliarity for me. When I read Rosa expressing how true resonance will always exist in a relationship where something escapes us, I thought yes that thing which circles back, which circles you, and circles into you, the ineffable ache. In his song “When the end comes,” Andrew Belle’s haunting voice sings
Love never leaves a heart where it found it…
Someday, I'll fall into you
That's where I'll be now when the end comes,
I don't say I hardly knew you,
'Cause where would I be then when the end comes?
The part I'm holding onto would be the part
That I'm losing, part that I'm losing for
My heart is going onto you
What end? I thought for a while. There is no actual end, I began to see, as I listened to the song on repeat. In part, it may be his end, but his end is also where the connection begins. When the end comes, he will be losing the part that he’s losing. That’s not redundancy, rather the release that allows for the opening, for the falling into you. That elusive part he’s losing—that’s Rosa’s resonance. The ache of non-possession which becomes a presence and is where he will be “when the end comes.” The love that transforms the heart loving and the heart loved and creates the space for losing and falling and endings which are going on and on “into you” and beyond. That, if nothing else, is resonance.
It isn’t only love or art or human hearts that move this way. The very universe itself, it seems, is a story of transformation—of continual change, continual release, chaos transformed again and again. I will admit I was saddened when I heard a theory about the reason for life on earth. The sun gives us energy, but in a low entropy form. Entropy is often described as a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. Better understood, it is energy that is concentrated, organized, full of potential—like a tightly wound spring or, in this case, focused rays of sunlight. It is tight or rigid, you could say as a non-physicist.
What we—what all life—does is transform this orderly energy into high entropy forms and release it back out. We take the concentrated solar energy and, through our metabolic processes, scatter it into heat, motion, and countless other forms of energy that are more diffuse, more chaotic. Like taking a neatly stacked deck of cards and scattering them across a card table, we spread the sun’s concentrated energy into myriad directions and purposes.
God, I thought, that is depressing. The amazing giant mammalian whales singing songs across the ocean, the bowerbird’s clever and intricate nests, the trees that communicate in their underground community over centuries, the kisses we give our children, the touch upon your hand as you slip away from this life. All of that is just a way to transform low entropy into high entropy? But then I thought about it differently. What if we are merely entropy transformers? Would that be all that bad? Because, even if so, we are being transformed by the low entropy energy we take in and we are affecting not just the world but the universe back out as we release gases and thoughts and energies and matter and the disorder of mystery with more microscopic arrangements than the ones we took in. I would take that universe. In endless cycles of transformation, resonance is the us that is more mysterious, less “us,” and more infinite than we can possibly imagine.