Heart of (Semi) Darkness

I’ve been thinking this week quite a bit about what it means to give yourself to someone, or to your work, or to anything else. There’s a certain amount of confidence that feels innate in the common usage of the phrase, as if giving ourselves to someone or to something is fundamentally a kindness. The words themselves could imply a sense of charity even, maybe not so far as to say we’re a donation or an alm but certainly that this is a big, important gesture we’re doing and the person or the project or the thing on the receiving end should feel lucky to have us. For my part at least, amidst the countless failures of my life I’ve felt genuine shock or surprise at the eventual situations and wondered how this could have happened if I gave it my all. Not often pausing even for a few moments to wonder if the things that happened took place for exactly that reason. Maybe this result was the natural outcome of something in me that was included in the deal. Maybe in that moment or season or whatever else, it just couldn’t really have gone any other way with me involving that particular version or period of myself to the fullest extent.

I don’t say that from an angle of depression or wound-licking. The past is over and, in very real and literal ways, it is what it is. Instead, I say it after a few days of unpacking what I actually mean when I use the phrase in the first place. The traditional fear of vulnerability is knowing that someone else will hurt us, but the less admitted and equally present reality is that the real us will hurt them, and I think getting older has made my shoulders more aware of the weight of my commitments and undertakings. I don’t think there’s a resolution for it, it’s just part of the table stakes for being alive, but chasing that idea around a bit during the margins of my week led me back to a poem from Jorge Luis Borges that feels as prescient and important now as it did the first time I read it years ago. What we’re talking about when we’re talking about love must include the hungry animal in us if we want it to be true, and his writing here is a genius moment of self-disclosure that certainly helps show us the way.

Happy Friday.

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
      moon of the jagged suburbs.
   I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
      long and long at the lonely moon.
   I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
      that living men have honoured in bronze:
      my father's father killed in the frontier of
      Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
      bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
      the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
      --just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
      three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
      vanished horses.
   I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, 
      whatever manliness or humour my life.
   I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
      been loyal.
   I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
      somehow --the central heart that deals not
      in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
      untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
   I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
      sunset, years before you were born.
   I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
      yourself, authentic and surprising news of 
      yourself.
   I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
      hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you 
      with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

- Jorge Luis Borges (1934)