Love and the Deathless: A Phenomenology of Anxiety

1.

While in the grips of anxiety, it often feels as though my body would decompose into a sweltering swarm of electric eels. Walking down the street, they would slink off me as would slime off cold marble, only to reemerge from within my body out of my orifices once more, weaving eel over eel from my head all the way down to my toes. Some eels could speak, and when they do, they would whisper venomous tales of fancy that would set me aflame with groundless envy and rage. But others, they would just slither wordless, follow the dark call of their instinct, and coil themselves over my neck and my limbs to cut off my breath and my blood. 

So much of its terror is then also so simple. This anxiety is terrible because it afflicts the body; terrible because it hurts; terrible because it binds me and pains me and chokes me to the point where I can’t breathe.

2.

But this affliction of the body is simultaneously an affliction of an entire existence, damaged in the structure of its temporality, and deranged in the contour and direction of how this creature lives time.—For what is anxiety except a disorder of projection? A mutilation of the ability to make sense into one’s future?

This mutilation can take several forms. In either case, the threads of temporality out of which a life is woven in anxiety becomes unbound, the future having been dislodged by the force of some trauma—by death, disease, disaster, betrayal, by heartbreak—and one finds oneself, then, with nowhere to go but the present and the past.

In the first condition, one can do little more than roam and bumble in a buzzing present that knows not how to expect, or otherwise circle back in desperation time and again to the past. The future, having lost all recognizable form—the lines of confidence and comprehension by which one’s world is normally carried forward having become everywhere scrambled, untethered, frayed, and knotted—becomes in anxiety nothing-in-particular, shapeless and unapproachable. No longer the field of dawn lying beyond the still benighted farm, no longer the quiet street around the bend of this raucous parade, no longer the happy home at the end of this momentary conflict and divorce—the future becomes, instead, nothing but a SOMETHING, a BLOCK, a mute wall of indifference entombing the horizon before which one stands. 

In the second condition, the future is transfigured into the opposite extreme. It is projected with painful clarity ahead—a crystalline image cast prismatically into the eye—where it narrows like sunlight beneath the magnifying glass into one single obsessive burning point of light. In this case, the future is not an indeterminate haze, obsessed by the unknowable SOMETHING that could be, but instead an overwhelmingly determinate vision of the inevitable catastrophe to come. Thus, the horizon encloses itself, wiped clean of every possibility except the one, and the creature, scarred by trauma, finds themselves locked into a dark maze wherein all tunnels lead to doom.

In both cases, the future in anxiety is thus not so much annihilated as disfigured. Just as the world is still there even in the heights of delusion, the future remains forever beyond denial. For the future and its weight, looming ever still like a storm upon the horizon, is nevertheless still there—only now in anxiety, it can be experienced only in distortion, either as point or as mass. While in the first case, it is experienced as the mute mass of a mountain, in the second, it is experienced as the burning point of a knife.

3.

Stationed, then, either before this stony cliff face of radio static, or this terrible overhang of fate, one can ultimately do nothing except cannibalize oneself—being alive still, remaining of one’s nature still: 

MOVEMENT, UPSURGE, TRANSCENDENCE. 

For having lost one’s bite upon the future, for having become, instead, consumed by the future, whether for its being all-too-known or all-too-unfathomable, there is nothing now to do except run circles around an ever-shrinking present and an exhausted and overrun past—doing nothing in particular, for no clear reason whatsoever, chewing and regurgitating whatever matter one might find in some desperate hope that this might eventually allow one to gnaw one’s way back into an open clearing of a future once more.

So in anxiety does one cannibalize oneself. 

4.

But is she nothing more than a monster? Of what is anxiety actually born? There are moods in which I haven’t the heart to spurn her—when I not love but at least pity her—just as there moods when I desire and even indulge her. For when approached with calm and patience, and without fear, it seems one can yet divine a pulse of light trapped somewhere deep within her storm.

What then becomes clear is that what animates this beast is in fact the perception of a deep and simple truth—one the Buddhists have long ago codified as dhamma, but one which just about anyone also already knows. Though this perception has in the course of the beast’s life come to be wildly overgrown, bloated, dangerous, and drunk, its basic sustenance is all along nothing but a truth: an acute awareness of the impermanence and contingency of all things. 

That everything we love can and will come to grief, that anything can happen at any time, that to be together is to be separate soon, that to possess is in the same stroke to sow the seed of eventual loss, that every beginning is the beginning of an end, that all the ten thousand things are subject to death, sickness, and decay, that even the Earth itself can rupture and quake, and the stars burn out and die, and therefore that when this moment or this object or this necessity or this person begins as it must its process of slipping away, no amount of grasping, clinging, willing, wishing, thinking, however skillful, however momentous, can possibly alter the fact—all this anxiety sees—albeit darkly, through a feverishly distorted and obliquely positioned lens.

5.

How does this happen? How does a creature born of an awareness of dhamma end up mutating into a terrible god of delusion?—The Buddhist answer, here again, seems to be pretty much the truth. The way it was led astray was the same by which we are all—and the way is Desire, the wheel upon which we are all born bound. 

I do not want you to die,

I do not want you to leave.

—Even if I know 

that it is the way of the world for you in time to go. 

6.

And who can blame us? For who can blame love? Love is in its ways all-but-fated to excess and tragedy. Love loves to rage against the night, and the day shall not arrive when lovers cease to spite these most obvious facts of our condition. Time and again, they sound their revolts against Time and against Death. 

“To love is to say: you at least shall not die.” (Gabriel Marcel)

7.

The tragic lover is thus by the very logic of their quest condemned to suffer incurable heartbreaks and griefs—that is nothing more than the price of electing to raise as the Deathless their Love. Anxiety, then, is simply the fate of those tragic lovers who happen to know themselves. It is the condition of the tragic lover who (more or less) self-consciously lives their tragic love. Impermanence and contingency are, in anxiety, known in the full force of their ineluctability. They are clearly recognized in their essential character as our condition and our fate. It is simply that they are reckoned by the lover, regardless, as Evils they wish impossibly to transcend.

8.

—But who said anything about blame? In tragedy, victim and hero are two aspects of the same face, and thus it is no contradiction to pity the hero while admiring them too. For tragic pity is not a pity which condescends; it meets the subject of pity eye-to-eye and sees in the heroic Other a pitiful I. Might we not then at least also pity the lover a victim and a fool? 

More to the point: might we—might I—not love still without denying the necessity of death? Is this love that fates us towards suffering, for all its beauty, truly the best and highest form of love? After all, is not the refusal of delusion itself a basic task of our love? Am I not obliged to see the other as the lubricious thread of smoke that they are? Not obliged to learn to love in a manner which renounces these tragic desires to grasp and to cling? Could this love which avoids reality truly, in the end, be a better love than one which knows to embrace life for what it is?

The answer, at an abstract cognitive head-level at least, seems clear enough: a love that refuses to acknowledge mortality cannot, in truth, be what it wishes to be. Indeed, one might even think that there is something of a logical mistake here. It is of the essence of love to desire infinity, and it is for just this reason that clinging frustrates the flowering of true love. For true love is eternal and the love object is not, and so if the possibility of true depends upon the existence of the object, then true love could never be.

The thought tempts us that if death is real then love is impossible. But here we would do well to recall ourselves to our lives, for the fancies of philosophy have here once again set flight in the face of ordinary fact. Death does not make nonsense of love, does not strip bare the value of this world, simply because it in fact does not. For love is, and death is, and there is, therefore, nothing more here to say. The puzzle then dissolves, and we realize it was never the world that was in contradiction but ourselves that were in a muddle. Love exists nowhere else except within the fleeting vicissitudes of the world—like so many flights of transcendence, reaching, lighting, relentless—being just what it is, so many fireworks in the night sky.

9.

Against Marcel—and perhaps against Māra—should we maybe then learn to say:

Love is not the Deathless, 

Love is not the Deathless, 

Love is not the Deathless.   

and

If she’s dead, 

she’s dead. 

Let her die,

Let her die,

Let her die.

For only then will I learn eternal love.

10.

It is true—who could deny it—there is a difference between attachment and love. To love is not to grasp but to behold freedom with freedom and attention and care. It is a law of love, then, that when she leaves, she must be allowed to depart. 

But being human (even if perhaps only being still-too-human, all-too-human), I remain in grief haunted by ghosts who in love are undead, and the mantra is therefore not (yet) one that I can chant.  

Oh, Blessed One, I am sure you of all beings would understand! Why it is I sweep this tomb; why I frame this picture and weep; why I offer these fruits and these wreaths—and why against all knowledge, I play with the dead. 

For here at the limit, in this sandbox beside life, I find permission once more to be madly in love.