Has it happened to you, that you wanted to describe something to another human being, an experience of extraordinariness and yet you were unable doing so?
You were lost of terms, in your effort to give an image and a feeling towards the person you would have liked to reveal a truth, it still felt insufficient?
The more you tried and the more the other one could not follow nor share this very experience of yours, the more you got frustrated?
I remember this woman, a so called "housewife" which tried to explain what she had sensed during her LSD-trip.
You could see how she was having some troubles to find the right terms in order to make the researcher understand. While she herself remained still fascinated in this very unique realm of experience and I felt great joy listening to her, for I myself have shared a somewhat similar, but not exact experience.
There are things you cannot put into a description nor definition, for those are the true moments, you only can have for yourself.
The researcher, on the clinical side of this experiment, could have asked questions ad infinitum and still wouldn't have understood her thing. For if he really would have liked to know how it would be to come under the influence of LSD, he'd have had his own trip (he might, though).
In the same way, I could not even create a sense of mutuality with a friend of mine who never gave birth to a child herself how it is to give birth.
It's impossible.
Often enough, you can only tell what something is not instead of what something is.
It can be perceived by another person as always nay saying or complaining about what one observes. My man sometimes tells me that I have a very good eye for what I find of negative things to say instead of seeing something positive. He is right about it.
What I intuitively want to get at, is to open up a process in which we can further give ourselves an experience rather than an exchange of verbal communication.
So, when I see a woman pushing a baby cart back and forth on her balcony like several times a week, holding her mobile device in her hand, I see something of incoherence. I cannot tell exactly what I find incoherent, but I have a sense that something disturbs me here. Having a smoke on my own balcony or doing my things there puts me into a position of becoming an observer of my neighbors. Indeed, she reflects myself from over there. What I see is that I see myself.
From abstract to concrete
My man and I visited my home town. As it was in this time of the year, my mother died, I suggested to take a walk to the grave yard. We went. For a while, I stood there over the grave of my parents, silent and serious.
After that we became silly. We strolled the paths and read names and dates. Then we asked ourselves what the two of us would like to be put on our plates. With some giggling behind covering hands we came up with this:
We shall be placed next to each other and one stone would be carved with the word "you" and the other with the letter "I".
We were so pleased with this very idea of ours that we talked to my brother some hours later, laughing at ourselves while telling him about it. We told him that in case we die sooner than him, this would be our wish.
Now, we did not make it all serious and official. In this casual atmosphere of giving each other a meaning, it was a fine balance between having had a serious moment at my moms and pops grave and then losing it for the sake of being alive and happy.
Letting also my brother know about our little grave yard excursion was giving him another hint at how we tick.
This story even has a back story.
My man and I usually like to tease each other. When he (or me) says something provokative and we start to blame the other like "No, it was you who put the cup in its wrong place" and start arguing about who is right and who is wrong, we often end up in becoming unserious about the situation, ending it like children in saying "No, it's you" and the other one "No, it's you". It also goes the other way, saying "No, it's me" or "it is I that said it first".
Forwarded into the scene at the grave yard, we played therefor with the carvings into the stones, telling the future viewer "No, you" and "No, me" but for the sake of eliminating negations - the word "no" wants to eliminate, we ended up eliminating the "no".
We imagined us and the future viewer being in synch.
For there is no escape that the decaying body, which will lie in that grave, will be for sure, you and me. (If I would be alive in my future grave, you'd hear me giggle from underneath).
Those of you, who having deceased ones in the grave yards, have you asked yourself once in while, in which state of rottenness the body of your loved one already is in? Or have you avoided it? For this, indeed, is a very creepy thought, right?
In order to balance out the creepy sensations you can find something funny about it. But first you've got to have a serious emotion and not trying to escape it, which then will you allow to embrace the lightness.
If I would have told you without giving you the context that I was in my hometown, wanting to visit my mothers grave and just coming out of nowhere with my idea to put "you" and "I" on grave stones in general, you might have wanted to argue with me.
So, I really do not suggest that our idea of doing what we have laughed about should be every one else's attitude. It could be, though.
We have spread this anecdote also yesterday,
when I was having guests at my place, to my mans son, while playing cards. He caught up on it in an instant and we were already laughing all together again.
There are some simple truths we all can feel in certain situations. But it is really difficult to put them into words.
What is true and positive is too real and too living to be described, and try to describe it is like putting red paint on a red rose. Therefore, most of what follows will have to have a rather negative quality. The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.
Alan Watts
But hold on, we were yet to make another observation at this grave yard.
All of a sudden my man was flashed and shouted: "Goodness! Now I can see it! This single grave spaces look the same like many front gardens in the neighborhoods!" And I responded: "Good lord, you are right! What an observation! So, I ask myself, are those home owners actually inspired by this grave space designs? Looks like it!"
Oh, I so much wish to have taken pictures. But, ahem. That would have gotten a bit too far, wouldn't it? Or, what do you think?
I mean, people in their depths are the funniest creatures ever.
They are even so wise as visibly shape their front gardens into imitations of grave properties. Can you imagine it? Those little properties do have areas with graveled stones and tiny bits of greeneries in between. Preferably shaped into geometric patterns.
So, there you have it. They already abandon life during their life times and already imitate death in their front gardens. I must bow to this artistry.
Bye bye.
Title drawing: Mine.
Interesting observation! That our homes are fashioned after gravesites. I want to be buried under a tree, or in one of those pods that grow into trees. An oak. A mighty oak. with chanterelles, acorns, squirrels, birds, caterpillars, teeming with life.
I think poetry comes closest to being able to express in the ineffable.
Your description of arguing with your man reminded me of this poem I wrote a few months before mine left his earthly form
once again,
placed in the dish and left there on the counter
and I,
once again,
wrapped it and put it back in the fridge.
.
Then I carefully,
almost reverently,
took it out of the fridge,
unwrapped it,
and,
for the first time ever,
put it back
on the counter
in its dish.
A very beautiful and touching poem.
Your example with the butter makes me smile. It's things like that between spouses, those little things in everyday life, knowing each other through their habits. How is it now? Does the butter stay on the counter or does it go back into the fridge?
You could put butters and toothpastes, clothes and utensils there that were favoured by the deceased. Then to return to one's habit. It's also about making a gesture, isn't it? That there is something we do and understand in common with the death of someone else. Friends would notice and ask why the glasses are now the other way around and we would say, "Oh, that's for my sweetheart. He did it that way and for a while I will do it that way too." Besides the intimate acts to understand the common ones. Otherwise we would be truly poor beings if we had nothing that could be understood, as it were, when people pass away.
It is appropriate to tell one's own how one wants to be buried.
No, I don’t think so, I can imagine my father and grandparents in their graves; they are not rotting, but are as light as the wind because I think that the body is nothing and only the soul survives - energy cannot be destroyed, they are all feathers on the breeze. For myself, scatter my ashes where you may, if that helps your pain, for me it makes no difference these silly traditions that revive the living. However, I do believe that it’s important to laugh at our own mortality, it warms us, but has little other use.❤️💕🤗
Oh, for me, laughter towards my mortality has such a great use that I can't really put it into words. I've tried, but it's difficult to convey how much I take from it. I think the mine will be content to know which way I am to be buried. I was fine with knowing what my mother wanted.
<3
Your suffering, is without doubt dreadful despite everything. We lose people we love, it’s unacceptably difficult, yet somehow we manage if there’s a friend to send us love. I’m sending you love on heart stings and I’m sending you love on moonbeams, and I’m sending you my love!❤️
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