Street art, Bushwick. Brooklyn, NY. Circa 2015
When I was in middle school, a few of the boys were fond of this game. They’d proffer something in their hands — a glittery pen, a juice box, a sticker or something, and ask, “You want this?”
If I said yes — and sometimes before I had the chance to say anything — they’d snatch the thing away with glee and say, “How does it feel to want?”
Well it wasn’t my first taste of it, or my last.
I am one who longs.
My earliest memories, though they are few and slippery, are ones of longing. Aching to be in on the kickball game down the street. Envying a blond-haired, blue-eyed child actress named Nicole. Wishing other kids were around to play with me on holidays. Trying to convince a boy who would only kiss me when we were sitting in the hammock in my backyard… to sit in the hammock in my backyard. Longing for a sibling.
My essential longings have not abated, and they play on now as variations intoned by a slightly more mature, definitely more restrained, orchestra on the same themes — belonging, envy, sexuality, and partnership.
Here is an abridged list of things that fill me with longing:
Wes Anderson films
fireworks
the moon, particularly when crescent-shaped
men who look at their partners with love in public
most holidays
acts of heroism
artistic duos
really intuitive assistants
people who love spending time with their families
book deals
book signings
book readings
Broadway at 7pm when the actors are arriving.
***
A couple years back, my friend J sent a message to check in on me. I was feeling pretty melancholy.
“I think you like feeling melancholy,” he said.
“I don’t know about like it,” I said. “But I think it’s my resting state.”
“Me too,” said he. Which surprised me.
***
There exists a word in Brazilian Portuguese that Brazilians will insist is untranslatable and without synonym in any other language: saudades. It’s pronounced sow-DOD-gees. It means something like the insuperable sweetness of longing.
I was born in autumn. Every year, I feel a stir of my blood as I sense the crispness coming, nearly masked by the late summer air.
Also, I feel melancholy, but in the way the Brazilians refer to it, as something rightly beautiful. More like saudades. A precious feeling to be held and carried, not one to be escaped as soon as possible.
What is so wrong with sadness?
Why do we incessantly try to fix it?
Why is longing something we want to be free of? Isn’t is simply a byproduct of desire?
What could possibly be more human?
***
Melancholy is not required, but a deep lusty awareness of life is.
In the deep fall of 2015, Matthew Stillman took me to Rowe Camp in Massachusetts to learn from Stephen Jenkinson, founder of the Orphan Wisdom School. He is a scholar of heartbreak and dying. He worked in Hospice for decades. I took notes.
One of the things I wrote down was his translation of the Latin phrase lacrimae rerum…
the tears that are in all things.
The tears that are in all things.
The tears that are in All Things.
I used to cry at a sharp word or a soap commercial. I’m less free with my tears than I once was.
Maybe the reason why these winter holidays are difficult for so many of us is because they remind us, more than any other time of year, of the tears that are in all things. Just as how spending time in the presence of my mother is like submerging my skin in hot water, all the old wounds and second-degree scars rise pink and jagged to the surface of my skin — harmful patterns I thought I had healed, adolescent and visible.
I often go upstate to see my father for Thanksgiving and we celebrate with Chinese food and a movie, as is our way.
A couple of winters ago, my father had been growing out his thin combover cloud of white hair, in order to put it in a ponytail, because he’d never had a ponytail and thought it would be kind of nice. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, he had carpal tunnel release surgery on his right hand, making ponytailing a rather difficult proposition. He had just begun driving again and was managing by using his left hand for steering and for shifting gears. He did not ask me to help shift gears. He did ask me to help him put his hair back and handed me the tiniest clear rubber band, like the ones used to tighten the braces of pre-teens. With great effort and a grunt he managed to turn his sciatica-laden body away from me so that I could reach his hair from the passenger’s seat of his parked compact car. I don’t remember ever touching my father’s hair before. It was very thin. I wrapped the little rubber band around many times. I felt an unnameable sadness.
I stayed one night at dad’s house before heading back to the city. My dad’s place is a cross between a construction zone, a hoarder’s nest, and a Costco. Some of those dust clumps have been gathering forces for nine years. I spent three and a half hours with a shop vac, furiously vacuuming, disgusted and determined to make a dent. Angry with my father for living that way. Disappointed in me for feeling embarrassed by it. Upset with myself for blaming him, when he has limited mobility. Guilty that I don’t want to spend time there to help him renovate.
I suggested that he move some power tools and two air conditioners out of his bedroom, to have one room that’s finished. He said that there’s no place for them to go. I said that he has a whole house he could put them in! He said that everything is where he needs it, and five projects need to happen before he can move those things out of his room. Then, as usual, I threw up my hands.
I said, “The floor looks nice.”
I’m quite certain that, if I deplored my father’s character, or thought he didn’t love me, it wouldn’t matter at all how clean his living room was. I have lucked out!
And yet, the sadness remains. The wish for him to be healthy. The longing for it to be other than what it is. The tears that are in all things.
***
Stephen Jenkinson was scheduled to give a talk organized by a young filmmaker. The filmmaker called him to make sure everything was all set. It was. Stephen called him back a few days before the talk and said that he had an idea of how he wanted it to go. Ian said that he thought it was already set. Stephen said that he was gonna set it differently. Instead of preparing topics, he had Ian prepare four or five questions (“Good ones, now!”) and not to tell him the questions in advance.
His first question was, “Most of my friends are depressed. Can you tell me why?
This is true for most of the twenty and thirtysomethings that I know, also.
And then Stephen spun a story that sounded like my story, about a family breaking apart and the father (he said, “let’s face it, it’s usually the father”) being absent in some way, and the child, in the midst of such terrible longing, a longing tsunami which they don’t have the wherewithal to manage, decides instead to disown the longing itself. And so, as the child grows up and people ask this child about the absence of a father, the child, now a young adult, shrugs and says, “It’s fine. I mean, it really doesn’t affect me much.”
I have said those exact words.
At thirteen years old, I remember being surprised when my father called, because in between summer and Christmas visits I would occasionally forget that I had a father.
We disown our longing, and by extension, our grief.
Many of us labor under the belief that grief is something inherently traumatic, to be avoided at all costs, instead of the body’s native protocol for loss.
I think the heavy drug use (recreational, pharmaceutical, and “medicinal”) of my generation stems from our attempt to obliterate longing and grief, in search of a bunnyfluff utopia of “positive vibes only” . . . . . which is like being handed the mantle of life only to put our arms behind our backs and shake our heads like a child refusing broccoli, instead tying it around our waists and letting it drag on the asphalt. Since we refuse to carry it, with each step it gets dirtier, dustier, and heavier, covered with flakes and spills and pieces of skin and eventually, discarded tires and old sink fixtures and empty watercolor paints until the point when the mantle is so tangled at our feet that we trip over it and either crack our skull open or go to rehab.
The noun “mantle” has at least two meanings. One is a garment — sleeveless and billowy, long, like a cloak. The other is “an important role or responsibility that passes from one person to another.”
Maybe our longing is a torchsong, a flame to be tended, tracks in the wilderness. Maybe our longing is our mantle.
***
I used to hiss at smokers on the street. Usually mentally, but sometimes aloud, under my breath. too. The smell of cigarettes is anathema to me. If I get too close to them I’ll start coughing, and not on purpose. I find them so overwhelmingly vile that any lit cigarette within a ten-foot radius curls my upper lip. The funny thing is, most of the smokers I’ve spoken to feel the same way — they heartily agree that it’s disgusting and smells bad, and mention that they quit once and their taste buds came back to life and they couldn’t stand the scent on anyone else and it’s true that they smoke again now but they NEVER smoke in their own apartment. (Just in their own atmosphere.)
Some years ago, one of my primary yoga instructors told me that the lungs are associated with grief. She asked me to look at smokers as though they are grieving. I do this now, on my better days. My upper lip recoils involuntarily, I wrestle it back down, and then I look at the smoker, really look at the person and think, “I see that you’re grieving.” And I do. I see it and it mitigates my rancor.
I imagine that this might be the only time they take deep breaths all day. The only time they manage a few minutes alone. The only time they get to talk to so-and-so whom they really want to talk to but wouldn’t be able to connect with over pretty much any other shared activity.
I see that there is something they do not want to carry.
I was going to write to you about how: on the other side of longing is motivation, how the wound of longing holds the gift of purpose, and how I can transmute my longing into action. But after that weekend at Rowe, I see how it is not transmuted at all.
Transmute also comes from Latin: trans (across) + mutare (to change). My longing does not actually change in substance to become something else — this thing I’m calling action. It can spur my action and yet still remain wholly itself, the longing undisturbed by whatever it is I am doing about it. My saudades may be un-killable.
When Brazilians say that they want to see someone they miss, or visit a place from their youth, or eat a food that reminds them of their grandmother, they might say that they are doing it to matar as saudades— literally: kill the saudades. But I really think the sentiment is closer to “cure the saudades.” I want to see you to cure myself of this longing for you.
The relief is typically temporary.
My longing is not fixable. It is not to be fixed. It is the mantle I am willing to carry folded in my arms, sometimes atop my head like a baiana’s basket of fruit, or across my back, worn open, not to conceal as the cloak does, but to dance with the wind like laundry on a line.
So perhaps the answer to my childhood taunt, How does it feel to want? is:
I can carry it.
