The Undetained – 1
A year or so ago, I became wrapped up in a lexophilic pursuit. I was looking for a word that surpasses “resilience.” When I was in grad school, the concept of resilience meant a lot to me. Emerging from a doctrinarian Christian background, both in the church and within myself, I felt that there were purer forms of morality than explicitated coda, abstract principles that were real yet not given over to stricture. It is also part of growing up to step back from the directions of one’s parents, one’s upbringing, one’s culture, to enter into the nebulous zone of individuation, to listen for the deeper movements. When we are young, we are given a simplified picture of the world, even if these simplifications introduce falsehoods that we must later outgrow and may even come to resent. Granted, it is difficult to guide children with a mature vision of truth, with all its complexities that may confuse, but I believe that children are better equipped to deal with complexities than most people give them credit. The decision to oversimplify reality seems quite often to be rooted in parental exhaustion at addressing a tireless chain of questions of why things are the way they are. So parents give metaphors and false representations so as to direct the child’s behavior into something better for them, even if the child does not understand at the time. If the child were expected to understand what a hot stove means, then maybe they would get burned trying to learn, and instead of explaining, the parent uses emotional force to simulate the effect of a burn and mitigate a burn from happening.
This is what is at stake in the New Testament. Jesus, the Apostle Paul, the essential gospel is about the juxtaposition between the constraining, simplified way of living, in which social norms and fear dominate, and the open-ended, ever-developing, mature way of living, in which learning and grace is at the heart. In a sense, it is a shift from outward, simplified, shallow forms of stability, and deeper, subtler, inward forms of stability. We stop looking for the God without and start finding the God within. This is the pivot point of Christianity, the trace curve of Jesus. We move from grasping for highly saturated images and allow the deeper resilience to hold us and guide us, through all sorts of mess. The tradeoff is that when you move out of fear-based living, from trying to barely survive to trying to create, from living against to living for, you lose a sense of clarity or definition. There is a sense of mattering, of importance, of need, of urgency when we live reactively. The transition from the two lifestyles is a rift zone where that loss produces all sorts of confusion and wandering and hurt. We may find ourselves disappointed by the apparent absence of God, the apparent absence of protection or creature comfort. It is much the same when we go from the city to the wilderness. We may at first interpret nature’s apparent indifference as hostility, even outright aggression. Nature’s silence may seem like an evil toward us, and in running from the indifferent silence, we throw ourselves into all sorts of calamaties that would not have arisen had we first slowed down and acknowledged that there is no demon chasing us in the solitude but our own fear. Yes, the open-endedness of real living is frightening and more chaotic, in a way. It opens you up to failure, to change, to hurt, you stop trying to cover over your mistakes or coping for other people. You start to accept loss even though it hurts. The whirlwind passes through your life and you hold your palms open. If you were to trade away the wind so you could gain control, you would also trade away the depth and height of living. To stand in the center of the world’s whirlwind, you enter into the vast unfiltered void of outer space. Despite the wild, raw chaos, your life is also purified of the internal constraints that drive our panic. It takes time to develop the new awareness. We must attempt to hold fast as the waves pass through us, bobbing in the surf like the otter wrapped in kelp. The holdfast may be hundreds of feet beneath us, and it may even rip out, but it is holding us in a way that is deeper and more secure than we ever could hold ourselves. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. We should learn to trust the depth, the natural resilience. The world is being balanced in a way that far surpasses our understanding.
Now as time went along, I began to feel that resilience was still a lacking term. Resilience implied that you could push something very far, and it would return. But in the process, there a sense of loss, as if you temporarily kill the stabilizing force in deviating from an average, moderate, normal state. I wanted to acknowledge with a word that which does not go away and yet is also in no way a simplified constant, in no way a metaphysical security blanket. Yes, I’m searching for consolation, but I’m wanting to refine through the false hopes as well as the false pessimisms. The fractal that unifies the cycle through life and death, through good and evil, samsara and nirvana. It was a concept I had loosely imagined years ago while writing a poem. I searched the dictionary for a few days, and I irresolutely pinned down the word “unadulterated.” It was simply the high point I got to at the time. I felt little need to go further. I was at the time content with Jesus being the answer to everything, and so the quest went dormant for a few years. I learned resilience, and that was the new filler word. Then I got to a point in life where I wanted a word for what is beyond that, beyond a mere returnability into a fullness of re-emerging, the very source of life that overcomes all the havoc slated against it, even is the havoc slated against it, the dynamic within the dynamic, the flux of the flux. I scoured and scoured and scoured the dictionary for a few days straight last year. I have to run to work, so I can’t tell the full story right now, but it involves a vision of a specific place in the high Sierra, and an unending search for the word. I felt the word must have the prefix unde-. It was a double negative, and that felt right. I will tell the story more full. Undetracted, undepleted, unphased, undissuaded, undetained.
July 20, 2023
Gorda