Fidelity, Abuse, Affection, Grief

 by Lucy S.

I've been thinking a lot about fidelity, and what it means, why it matters, when it is broken. I mean it in the sense of this definition: "Faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support."  I have written before about how Alain Badiou's book Ethics deeply resonated with me, especially when he says to maintain fidelity to "the event." And the "event" is that moment or period of time in which we commit to "a person, cause, or belief" (although "belief" must mean a practice or it will be too vague to be faithful to in Badiou's sense). I have wondered how we can harmonize an ethics of fidelity to the particular with the reality that sometimes these particulars have no fidelity to us, that sometimes they can instead abuse us or devalue us. At the same time, people with all of their flaws (and the groups and entities they create) inevitably hurt other people to some extent, so how do we know when the hurt we experience is simply part of binding to one another with our imperfections, and when it is consenting to continual maltreatment?  Or, how do we also maintain a fidelity to our own selves as well, to our health and growth? 

It seems to me that in this society, we have the strange combination of people mostly accepting mass systemic abuse which plays out in many specific ways in individual lives, and on the other hand, making frequent accusations of abuse between individuals.  Those accusations may be legitimate. But I wonder at what point they are not, and are instead a distraction that keeps us always feeling like victims in an individual sense (as if most people were just no good, unlike "me"), and keeps us from building lasting connections, not only for organizing, but to even believe that we would ever want a more collective life.  We end up distrusting so many people. 

And yet this fragmentation and / or alienation doesn't make us happy, so we are always yearning to find "the one" or "the ones" (depending on whether this is seen as just a need to find one other person in a romantic sense or whether it is the search for "real" friends and "community"). Meanwhile, our lives go on.

I am not outside of any of this. I experience these same problems and dilemmas and yearnings.  I cannot tell you how many times I have trusted someone who has hurt me, and trusted them again, and again, because I have always thought that I shouldn't throw people away, that they have reasons for how they are, that we can always learn to do better. And also because I just feel my affection for the specific ways and reality of particular people, so if they come back or act kindly again after acting coldly or meanly, my memories of their good qualities and of our shared good times almost always win me over again. I can't seem to hold a grudge.  And I don't WANT to hold a grudge. It seems pointless. I am always swept up in the joy of interacting with that person NOW. 

As I write this, I question if it is entirely true. There are people who I do hold a grudge against, people who were chronically abusive, or people with whom I have had so many negative experiences that I don't trust them or want to have much to do with them.  And yet even with these, it can be hard to hold onto this hard shell I put between me and them. I am always overwhelmed by the staggering mystery of what it is to be a self, what it is to be a human life in this world. I think about how I am contained by the borders of me, and how another person who I might deem abusive or mean is living just as much in the borders of her- or himself. 

And there are small grudges which I know I must carry, because after I am immersed in that joy of binding to particular people NOW, if they again do what they did before (for me, that means a complete failure to respond over weeks or months even if I talk or call or write, or, in the past, responses that were verbally or physically very aggressive) -- in feeling that pain, I find myself thinking that NEXT time, I will just not respond if they finally communicate with me, or I will be coolly distant, and I will not let myself fall for it all again. (To be clear, I mean this far beyond only 'romantic' relationships.) But I can't seem to live by these hurt-filled statements to myself.  I don't want to. I don't understand the sense of living such a defensive life, a life which is so unfaithful to the possibility and reality of relationship. And as I said earlier, I am always won over.  And then I think of how there may be other reasons, which have nothing to do with me. And I wonder in what ways I have let others down, and in what ways they too have maintained fidelity to me in spite of the pain I may have caused them.

What is damaging is when I interrogate myself about what I might have possibly done to bring about this result. Did I resume the relationship too easily and eagerly? Did I say something with connotations I didn't realize?  Was I somehow offensive or intrusive? These interrogations are damaging because they soon lead me to the "I just don't fit in this society" feelings, in which I decide there is either something wrong with me or with "others" or both, but at any rate, that I might as well give up. It makes me want to retreat. 

A friend told me recently that her partner struggles with intense depression, that at times he will stay in bed under the blankets for most of every day, calling in sick to work. He is also my friend, and I would not have known this about him just by talking with him. He is far more extroverted than me; he is quick-witted, funny, confident. Yet he is quietly in pain.

What are these terrible pains that so many of us carry inside? Why are we not better at comforting each other? What do we need from one another that we are not getting?  I want us to try harder to explain to each other how we are feeling and even what someone has said that we disagree with or feel hurt by in an effort to understand each other better. Where is our fidelity to each other and even our own selves in these withdrawals and abandonments? 

Or I might say, where is our affection for one another? And in what ways does affection connect to our ability to grieve and mourn with one another instead of in isolation? 

In Life Among the Piutes (published in 1883) Sarah Winnemucca writes of a time when they are traveling (the part of her tribe that she is with), and they encounter some more of their people who have devastating news: many in the tribe have died from drinking water poisoned by white men in the Humboldt River. They weep and cut off their hair to mourn. They keep traveling and finally get ready to meet her father and many of their people coming out of the mountains. 

We heard them as they came nearer and nearer; they were all crying, and then we cried too, and as they got off their horses they fell into each other's arms, like so many little children, and cried as if their hearts would break, and told what they had suffered since we went away, and how our people had died off.

 I don't know why I respond as emotionally as I do to what she describes here. But from the first time I read this (in fall 2011), I was stunned by it. I have thought about it so many times.  I have wondered whether most of us are capable of this collective grief in which we hold on to one another rather than withdraw into private pain. Do we console each other? 

And for so many of us: who are "our people"? Are they our immediate family, our closest friends, our relatives, our fellow workers, our neighbors, people in our church, comrades?  Who are they? Do we have “people”?

It might be that their response is so intense because of the catastrophic nature of the loss. Yet Winnemucca describes the response to the death of her grandfather (the chief) this way::

Everyone threw themselves upon his body, and their cries could be heard for many a mile. I crept up to him. I could hardly believe he would never speak to me again. I knelt beside him and took his dear old face in my hands, and looked at him quite a while. I could not speak. I felt the world growing cold; everything seemed dark.  [And a bit after]: Everybody would take his dead body in their arms and weep. Poor papa kept his body two days... 

It seems that Winnemucca is describing fidelity in action – relationship not held out as something to contemplate, but as doing. Their grief was expressed so freely and collectively. And they were so affectionate with each other, both in times of such awful loss, and in times of joy.

How many of us have been able to say goodbye to our loved ones this way - those we will miss for the rest of our lives?  Do we ever get to take their 'dear faces' in our hands one last time to look at for quite a while?  Do we get to truly mourn any of the other losses, the people we are so far from, the times that go away, unable to return, the places that we love and cannot abide in?  

Are we supposed to believe that this was simply 'their way' and does not say anything in a larger sense about how humans are?  But are all societies' ways equally healthy?  Are our society's ways healthy?  We turn so much into what can be bought and sold, and we consume what doesn't fill these voids, and many have to work so many hours at what is harmful or pointless, or others cannot get work. Even those with meaningful work are forced to compete against others for that work, and there is always pressure to empty out the meaning of it and make it only a means to something else.  Our government has poisoned other countries with things like Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium and nuclear bombs and who knows what else. Our bodies and our local and global environments are being perpetually poisoned. How are we to respond to these vicious onslaughts?  And how are we to stop being forced to participate in them?  

 Do our lives matter?  Do we matter to one another, or are we to treat each other in an "easy come, easy go" manner in which we wonder if anyone will care at all that we have existed?  And do we care that our own selves exist, or do we treat our lives as throwaway?

Badiou says: "Do not give up on your desire' rightly means: 'Do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know.'” 

What is the part of ourselves that we do not know and how does this connect to not giving up on our desire?

He says: "It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.." 

And: "We might put it like this: ‘Never forget what you have encountered.’"  

He says that this not-forgetting does not consist of inactive memories, but of thinking and practicing faithfulness to 'the event.'  

I am thinking that 'the event' was when each of my kids were born, and I knew that I was bound to them. But there are other 'events' that cannot be located in time so precisely; they are woven into our lives, such as our relationships with parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, close friends, fellow workers, classmates, teachers, comrades (and yes, partners). And there is fidelity to our own process of creation, to the meaningful work we yearn to do, to what we have already created.  I do know that this fidelity has nothing to do with whether this person or work seems to be our "taste" this day or week or month. This fidelity binds us to people and our true work beyond the ups and downs of what happens this week or next.

Is abuse a violent lack of fidelity that goes beyond painful inadequacies? Is it also a personal or systemic failure to be faithful to the fidelity we know others have to one another:? Is it a failure to practice what we know through our encounters, to 'not forget'?

I spoke with my friend Angie recently whom I have not seen in more than five years. She and her husband used to come over and visit us in 2003 and 2004. Roger brought me raspberry bush starters and perennials and anything he cared to dig up from the garden they'd started decades earlier. One day, he fell backwards at a wedding and hit his head hard. They flew him to the closest major medical center, and he was there for months. After that, he was never the same. But Angie kept him at home for over eight years, no small task for a woman in her 70s. They'd always gone on long walks, so she tried to get him back out walking again, even if it took far longer than it ever had.  As he got worse, she told me that she couldn't have people come to the house anymore because it upset him.  He couldn't remember who very many people were, and this made him afraid. Angie called to tell me that Roger had died two weeks ago, and to invite me to a special service to remember him. She said she had always had a soft spot for me and our family. I feel it, too - that soft spot I have for them. What is it about certain people that makes us feel as if we recognize them as people from home, people who seemingly have nothing in common with each other?  Maybe it is that fidelity, that determination to persevere.

Who can we become when we never forget what we have encountered?