Reading a Substack post by Lauren Hall, on the Phenomenological Diary of Emilio Paci. She writes about Paci’s insistence that “truth isn’t a static thing “but a lived meaning, to be found over and over again in the exercise of époché”, in acts we renew constantly”.
Epochè is mental gymnastics for those most habituated to concerned frowns and moral dictons. It consists in suspending judgment and the curtailing of presuppositions. While the stoic philosophers that first developed épochè used it as a negative tool - what isn’t fully known cannot be given approbation for ; I’ve lately found myself more of an optimist in this practice. One that I was, to begin with, pretty reluctant to engage in, fully aware of my difficulty to move on, forgive and even less forget. But, despite my best efforts at nurturing a defense mechanism of more or less legitimate bitterness, life this time around has kept on giving me lemons - in this case, reasons to consider, and the theory to grapple with, épochè in practice.
In my very own “moral laboratory” (Mattingly 1994), good friends turned sour and then lovely back again - all it takes thinking very carefully about how bitterness arose, if the sweet can be found again, and if said individual truly belongs in your life. I know, difficultly done if you have a lifelong aversion to cringe catch-phrases and “personal development”talk as we grating Parisians call it. But laboratories are ambiguous and a little bit embarrassing, and necessary, when you turn around and realise maybe you dropped a few things on your way home and you actually miss them, and your life is wanting in some way. When that moment at lost property comes, my friend, fellow cynic, you must open yourself up to the cringey, gross world of corny sayings that actually contain the whole of the (constantly flowing and shadowy) universal truth. And love. A lot of love, stronger than pride, famously. One of them, admittedly less cringe because produced by Louise Gluck the glorious poet, although sadly mediated by Instagram.com, reads : “I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write”.
Writing, I think, is akin to love ; and if I am more often willing to become different in order to write different, a narcissistic consequence of engaging in autofiction, I am currently drawing analogies and considering letting myself change in order to love differently too. And hopefully better.
Another quote i read today helped explaining what links i’d had intuition of but struggled to identify. Javier Cercas, a man i am not familiar with, says : “Literature is pleasure and knowledge, like sex (which i like to replace with love). It’s useful only so long as one doesn’t set out to make it useful”. Separating utilitarian strategies from how we think about our relationships is strikingly unheard of within communities that supposedly aim to deconstruct and work away from capitalist management ideologies. And last month in London, eating boiled eggs and dancing “salsa” and sleeping in cow-dung meadows with a blonde-haired girl, this is precisely what I was moving away from. I'm now writing about this because I think it's possibly the only way to rebuild precious relationships, the jewels you regret losing on your way.
So, my practical guide to shrugging away rancoeur is rekindling with use-less relationships. When your life feels wanting of something useless, its value suddenly becomes obvious. Something with use can be functionally identified and replaced with an object that carries same use function. I missed my friend, and realised it when nothing of an objectifiable same use could replace her, or more specifically us. Our relationship couldn't be identified by roles, responsibilities, pros and cons and a flow chart. Yet, hello, a little pang in the thorax whenever i meditated on our not being together anymore. (Also, here, pause and think for a minute about why you find this formulating strange in friendship. Just think about it!) A pang upon realising this absence is also that of a dynamic I lost, something I long for and have not : something I let happen to myself, a fact of life uncontrolled.
And when I let the happening happen again, the seemingly impossible task of letting time slip over me and slick me up, new and grown-up and perhaps a stoic, but an optimist one ; then it was only natural to see her standing around the corner, to be known again.
Just like this piece of writing has no use, and I write this for no-one, not even for me, but for the exquisite rolling under my fingers of letters and words that barely scratch at the soft edges of reality, vaporising as i try to recall it because nothing worth loving can ever be an object ; i think now that love, for no-use and for no-one, naked of strategy, is épochè at its best : suspending judgement on all things and persons, quelling all questions of worth, of deservedness.
Who is deserving of said love ? A big scary question a lot of leftists would be quick to rebuke by principle, cos everyone deserves it of course and inclusion and wellness, bell hooks etc, clashing with a rock-hard reality of love squalor and rationing even within our tights ranks... But deeming the question legitimate, I’m not sure i know many 20 year olds who’d know the answer, or any roadmap to do so. And i feel particularly distrustful of anyone who claims they know their binaries up to their tippy-toes.
My good friend and I recently spoke to a sociologist who expertly dissects the left, left-wing communities and especially queer ones. She’s published two books, one on feminist punitivism, and the other on doing justice and "progressist" moralism. It was troubling enough to get schooled so eloquently by a woman only a few years older, arms delicately tattooed and half-covered in the usual unhappily named white wife-beater, her style echoing codes and attitudes i’d only really discovered at Uni, the same place where at times moralism, or at others lack thereof, had really worried me. Sitting at the table with her, all mic-ed up, she drew a long thread from local over-policed and racially-categorised communities seeking alternative modes of justice, to current conflict-management issues in trendy metropolis queer groups, but also in regular unis where sexual violence was no longer- and rightfully so- put up with. She spoke of repeating injustices, of yelling ACAB whilst enforcing punishment within community. Opposing such methods, she offered her group’s efforts at transformative justice, their interventions quite distant from the eradication focus of rat poisoners, actually leaning into fixing sinks and broken pots ; ‘rewilding’, as such, relationships between two or more people who love(d) and care(d) for each other but didn’t know how to do it anymore. The loving and caring.
Going back to Cercas, it's obvious now that if literature and love are about knowledge and power, and useless-ness, and if we sometimes write and love for the wrong reasons, and thus do it badly ; then the seeds for repair lie in challenging the knowledge we depart from to decide how to write and love, and examining the power dynamics in which we are rooted when we try to write and to love.
It will make for better, truer relationships, I feel. Letting words roll out wet from the mouth onto the blue-lighted screen ; caring enough for the other to let Them crawl out of an eggy-like rounded structure and host them in warmth. Perhaps the egg and texture-heavy analogies are spontaneously arising to me due to the time in my hormonal cycle, but you know what, that's a form of biologically-spiritual knowledge that I welcome, nurturing literature and love where we do not know how to feed. That's it for now.
