Acceptance?

Soumik Datta, a student and friend and fellow-Cohenite, posted something which I am having the urge to quote in its entirety

What if you must have something on your mind constantly, not as an obsession possessing you, but as a perpetual contender to your attention, a corollary distraction to anything you’re consciously occupied with? Something neither driving you insane (for nothing ever will), nor yet letting you be…
You don’t receive as well anymore: you listen to music, and you only appreciate its ambiance; you watch movies, but they only affect you when they do so viscerally; and you can’t read, for the printed word offers the least degree of unconscious pleasure: it barely lulls you in despite distractions, like the rhythm of action, the resonance of sound. You can’t create in any form: for words sounds visions slip past you too fast, and you know not what you want to say nor how. Even intoxicants leave you high and dry, their effects restricted to the dullness or animation they bring to your spirit and body, and no more.
Context limits our choices in courses of action. And things makes less and less of a difference when you’re not free to initiate those courses that can make the difference.
If you must have and hold on to something on your mind, you must resign yourself to a restless exile: a loss of centre, and control. You must keep running, though you’ll have nowhere left to run to no more.
Do you say, ‘Don’t think twice, it’s alright’? Well, what else can you do.

***

Now here is one of my brighter students and I am not actually worried that he is not attending classes these days. That’s never a big deal, but the state-of-affairs above is, ’cause it succinctly describes the state I am in too. He named the post – tellingly enough – ‘acceptance’. Thus, here we are, teacher and student: ‘acceptance’ is such a great leveler!

The only difference is – and it is a goddamn pissing-off one – you are younger than me Soumik! I can, now, feel it ticking away in my body: the time of youth, the time when ought to start it, the work which then should have been patiently pursued for the rest of life. And I am absolutely clueless of what it should be, what is the shape of the work to come.

Say Goodbye to the one who is Leaving, say Goodbye to the one who is Lost

“Yeah let’s do something crazy, something absolutely wrong/while we are waiting for the miracle, for the miracle to come”

- Leonard Cohen, Waiting for the Miracle, The Future.

1.

When the boy laid his sight on those shadows spread out on her skin, supposedly not to be touched by living daylights, he remembers he started crying before not touching. Oozing tears is not the correct sort of performance of liquid masculinity, so one had to hold it back and hide it. It’s a sport, it’s a game, let us take it at its funniest end: he earlier assuaged her trepidations. Tears do not belong to such contracts.

He was haunted by moving images. Cinema introduces a reverse vector to all known motions in this world. The hand which is moving towards the touch is haunted by the possibility: body inevitably moving away from the body. The tragedy of sex is the virginity of souls. The touch irreversibly etches the trajectory of not being able to touch anymore. Of retracing backwards the move you thought you were finishing.

That day he saw his hand moving in, hoping to pull out some piece of paper which might be deemed ‘necessary and lost’ by the system he has sold his soul and freedom to. The little finger trying to move away from its more powerful and longer siblings, memories assailed his hand to a momentary freeze.