E is for enough :: E is for (passionate) entanglement

One regret dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed, is that I did not kiss you enough. -Hafiz

In 2008, I will be satisfied. I will have enough and I will be enough. I will spend my time not getting more, but giving more, kissing the dear world more, naming what it is to me to kiss the dear world more. And letting go in order to be passionately entangled in life, not possessively so.

This letter’s day could just as easily come with “A” for accumulation. I’ve long been intrigued by what I’ve called the poetics of accumulation, that adding onto, grabbing onto, holding onto, that so characterizes our culture. That luminous debris in which we float. More, better, newer, bigger, faster. It is a deflection, isn’t it, from an honest, slow, passionate and sometimes solitary engagement with the world? Perhaps my interest is fueled by my recent transition to being vegan which, by definition, seems intentional, simple, direct. Perhaps it is fueled by the feeling of lightness these two weeks of eating a vegan diet have brought me. Perhaps it is fueled by watching people on their deathbed, the one of which Hafiz speaks. All this stuff? It falls away.

I wrote earlier of hearing a lecture recently given my former professor, Jerry Caris Godard, on his “passionate entanglement with William Blake.” In illuminating the ways in which he has been passionately entangled with Blake all these years, Jerry differentiated between passionate entanglement and possessive entanglement.

“Passionate entanglement,” he said, means “wishing to kiss the uncanny, not grasp it.” He referenced the genesis of each word in the OED, using this example to illustrate passionate entanglement: “the sea was everywhere entangled with islands.”

“Patience and passion have the same root,” he continued. “And without patience, passionate entanglements veer toward possessive entanglements.” He spoke of a wildness that refuses possession.

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated—or nonlocal. I am only me in reference to you, wherever you are in the world. Your up-spin requires my down-spin. That’s passionate entanglement. If only more of us saw the world in such an interdependent way, even though Einstein famously derided entanglement as "spukhafte Fernwirkung" or "spooky action at a distance.”

Back to enough. As Toni Morrison wrote in Tar Baby: At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.

Perhaps letting go is a kind of passionate entanglement.

Intentions: Where I feel lack, I will realize I am enough (even though that brings up another “e” word that scares me—“ego”) I will distinguish between possessive and passionate entanglement in my life in 2008. I will seek the wildness that refuses possession. I will kiss the uncanny, not grasp it. That should keep me busy until at least July, don’t you think?

From the last alphabet challenge: E is for Esther

[image from here]