Writing on Empty

Two hours ago I sat down at this keyboard and came up empty.  I looked at my closing “bridge” from yesterday, about spending the next few days on intimacy.  I looked at the “seeds” that I had described as being scattered next to the keyboard.  The phrases, vivid and moving to me yesterday when I wrote them, were dry and lifeless.   I went for a walk in the twilight, in the quiet, beautiful hills north of our house, into the Old Mission Peninsula, hills that were once covered by cherry trees, hills that provide a foothold now for us, on a rise of land between one beautiful bay and another.  As the road crested and I had a glance of the gilt reflection of the dawning sky on the still water of the East Bay, I remembered S’s face, telling me about the guy they found dead in the car submerged in the bay behind me, West Bay, the one nearer town. 

“Suicide”, S said; “I know it.”  He mentioned the guy they found burned in the smoldering car in the middle of the woods a week earlier.  “They couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, his facial muscles too exhausted to show the slightest emotion. 

His truth inhabited his eyes, looking out with candid helplessness, the honesty that inhabits the border of despair.   They were on empty, too, these two who ended the struggle in their cars, one in the dark chill of the water, one in the bright heat of fire.  They were empty and alone.  It was with that same still face that S told me how he’d come close himself, close to ending it somehow.  He told me that he was getting used to the place, the Shelter, getting to know some of the guys, finding that some of them were bright too, some of them had really rotten luck, too. 

I had met S the previous week in my small group, and was struck by his quick, analytical mind, his logical way of arranging complex ideas into sensible language.  I felt in my own skin a glimmer of hope that this exercise that we were doing might help him hear the good stuff that he was saying, too.  And now a week later he was not inert in the dark cold of west Bay, or in the smoking remains of a car in the woods.  We was not alone, having exhausted the last of his hope as those two unfortunates had exhausted the last of their air.  He was feeling the company of others who shared his situation of homelessness, and who dared to try one more time to get beyond the broken relationships, the addictions, or the unhealing mental wounds of wartime “duty”. 

Martin Buber’s great little book I and Thou proposes that we dry up alone, when we deprive ourselves of relationships with others who are just as much an I as we are, have as much dignity and worth and identity.  How often do we fall into the trap of turning others into ideas in our own minds, categorizing or rationalizing or judging them until they rest in us, leaving us to our individual devices, until we are unperturbed by them, when whatever is inside us becomes an inert puddle?  I found that when I had S in mind, I expanded.  I felt myself awaken, think, consider.  I began to look at the day as a resource.  I began to consider possibilities.  No.  I said that wrong.  S was not merely in my mind.  He was not an idea.  He is a mystery.  In providing  me the sweet discomfort of not knowing, he gives me the elixir of dissatisfaction that fills me, awakens and opens and engages me.

Buber is right.  I become myself in relationship.  And yet there is in me the temptation to isolate.  Why?  You too?  Comments are welcome.