The Pleasure and Pain and Pleasure and Pain of Living. And the Cycling around and around their Wheel.

The thrill of new connections–with people, with ideas, with places–charges me. The fear of misreading and misplacing my trust unsettles me. The flaring pain of being hurt burns me. The thrill of new connections–with people, with ideas, with places–recharges me. [If I stop here I end on an optimistic note. . .] [but if I go on. . .] The fear of misreading and misplacing my trust revives my unease. [not so sunny-minded] [and of course I could go on further still. . .] The flaring pain of being hurt again burns deeper down. [and what if I go on further still–will the optimistic recirculation back to new connections seem quite the same as last time?] The thrill of new connections–with people, with ideas, with places–recharges me. [it could still seem optimistic, but it could also now seem a bit absurd, a bit exhausting]

‘Round and ’round we go.

Telling a circular story or a story of a cycle requires that we add an artificial stop, lest we go on. And on. And on. [see–lots of drives or directions can be hard to stop, for me at least.] And where we stop matters; it shapes the story. We can’t truly tell the circular story–that isn’t a narrative mode (visual yes, but not narrative; narrative must move and except in Jorge Luis Borges’ world of circular books, and to a far lesser extent, Joyce’s Wake, narrative has a start and a stop). And these things matter; their placements and forms shape mean things.

Viewing experience as cycling and round rather than linear can provide reassuring continuity or it can feel confining, like the overall territory is too bounded. And it can feel both ways at the same time, and so it does, to me.

And if our linear version of the cyclical story stops on the upswing, it feels like progress. But this is an illusion. Upgoing means downgoing and all that. If it stops on the downswing, it feels like worsening, like decline. But this is an illusion. We are not really going anywhere. Not far, just around in this tight space that the circle marks. There isn’t any room for goal-directed journeys, but more importantly to my mind, there isn’t any room for the other sort, the sort where we depart without maps, and possibly even without destinations. We give ourselves over to the experience. We don’t presume to be able to predict where we need to go and how we need to get there.

Or so I say. It could just be that I want to justify my haphazard way of moving through life, of being in the world.