​☤☤ K O L O B O M A T A ☤☤
koloboma: a Greek word meaning the part that was removed by mutilation, or is missing or cut short.
Not to get too personal, but:
I was dreaming, and in my dream I was writing a response to logotherapy, which is an existential method from Victor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning.
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The dream was about consciousness - what isn't I suppose.
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In the dream I saw the following scene (which I was observing while writing):
A father with two missing arms and a son with only one arm missing. The father asked the son to reach some food for him from a pantry. The son became upset. He said he was envious of his father having no arms. He lamented that he was less able than someone with both arms. But more able compared to someone with no arms. His distress was real, and internal. The scene was clearly about the son's perceived ambivalence being difficult for his soul to bear. He expressed that he could accept his position were he to be one or the other. But as it stood, he was amputated and not. The father listened and then in response began to talk about his youth. He talked about the days when he had his arms. He had played in a band.
I think this dream may have been triggered by my reading earlier that day. Frankl writes that suffering is relative. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that when I read it. I agreed, and also felt something was missing. Perhaps it's just that I was more interested in his other assertion: that suffering allows for the possibility of spiritual growth via acceptance. The son clearly felt caught between worlds, unable to be left alone to one kind of acceptance for too long, unable to actualize either way (as someone with arms or someone without arms). He experienced both and neither. But I suppose the son needed to pull himself out of his father, and out of other people who had two arms. The son was singular in his identity. A one armed man.
Ironically part of his struggle was that others had it “worse” (though in his mind, worse was also easier). So ultimately I think the dream agrees with Frankl. Although for me it goes elsewhere. There is an opportunity there to think more about the kinds and qualities of suffering. There is more to suffering than simple more, or less, or more-than, less-than. Wouldn't you say?
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Personally, I will admit I get caught up in that place academics might call the cut. Or, the crisis. Or, the moment I became into two pieces: me and my ☤☤☤koloboma. I think back to the father and son circling each other's pain. I round off the psychomotor and instead slip up the tantric: a tiny electric shock, or pins and needles, flag me down like a lost motorist. It is, as they say, nightmare fuel.
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Because of that dejected snap-back, the presence of a remainder of myself, I hesitate to say I'm anything close to an existentialist. That's because I know the full gravity of a 'not being there' or a lack of presence. The way it can stuff your mouth. The way it will tear your eyes. Is there analysis without eyes? Sure, but not any kind that's visible.
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I'm not sure if I'm ready to analyze ever again. Perhaps that's your job, and I do something a bit different. In any case, the places where I am cut do not lend themselves to that type of discrete self-understanding. And to reduce it to suffering out of confusion is a second theft. Not that suffering cannot offer us anything. But again: maybe there is more to say about pain than that. Or maybe there's more to do than simply saying something.
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'does not cumpute'
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Another dream of writing, except this time in the dream I was reading an an essay question about Shakespeare. At least, I think. The question was about a literary device called a souir. Pronounced like souvenir without the ven. A souir is "both an object and a fate," as strictly defined by my dream.
Souir wasn't a 'real' word, for full disclosure. I cooked it up in the soup of my subconscious involuntarily, and woke up with it dropped into my lap. But all literary devices are made up words. All words are made up words. And who is to say what is voluntary or not? So let's just continue on with it.
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When I woke up I began listing devices that are souir. I can't remember any of them now because this was all in my head at one in the morning. But I can think of new ones just as easily. The Sword In The Stone; in that case, both sword and stone, in oppositional ways, depending on the person. A lottery ticket perhaps. Not just any object, but that one particular thing.
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After my list of souir, which helped me to confirm for myself that I had thought of a real thing with a fake word, I thought about the word itself. Souir, so close to souvenir. In French souvenir means 'to remember or recall.' But in English it means 'an object that you buy to remember you stopped or traveled somewhere.' Keychain from a gas station, T Shirt from a gift shop.
Souir is a souvenir without the -ven. -Ven is from the Latin venio, or, I arrive. So in the case of souir: what does it mean to remember somewhere you went without yet having gone there or arrived yet? Souir is the place we touch our future. And I suppose it happens every single day, all the time. Possibly at all times, considering we're always touching.
To be drawn in. To be devout. To lout (meaning to bend). Some people, including myself, believe that we cannot escape our fate. We cannot escape touch. Though I suppose we could delay or disrupt it, or never truly actualize it at all. I suppose we could live at the moment just before hand, imbued in something or other. In that case, pay attention to the souir.
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These petulant objects that make and break us. The puzzles that appear whole and don't need solving. The problems that appear simple. The obviousness that can never be understood. What was once only a secret lives in plain sight, though it remains a secret as long as it hasn't happened yet. That's really all it is.
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Koloboma, the piece of you that is missing and gone, feels like the opposite of souir. Isn't that neat that we found such a thing without trying? Though the opposition here is really just an illusion. It is a binary for the fact that these two are permanently implied by one another. And in that instance they probably are not opposite at all, but actually one and the same. Only the opposite in action, or appearance; not in soul. Accomplices.
Souir is found and touched. Koloboma is taken and separated. But koloboma becomes souir at the moment of its separation, becomes an object and a fate. The new boundary that was created by its removal will always hail the distant object, wherever it may now be. You are chainged (chained/changed) towards your future.
And perhaps souir is always a sort of koloboma. That is, the present remainder of the future, the constant and deterministic reminder.
I'm talking about wounds: but what kind? Literary, no doubt. The body of text, of course. Koloboma heals us a bit here; what we are implying is that a split is a separation, not a disappearance. And maybe we are even implying a moment of creation, where the piece is not just missing: it is koloboma, and it has become something. Though if we take physics for granted, nothing is ever truly created or destroyed: and so was the koloboma always a souir, before it even existed? That place in me which was destined to be taken, destined to be its own, separate thing? Was I always meant to be cleaved in such a way? Big if true: because that means in being cleaved, I become whole, who I was always meant to be. Gains, all gains.
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Someone once asked me how I can be sure it was Destiny. As if destiny is somehow a special event. Did it happen? Then it happened. It will never not have happened.
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And to clarify for a moment; about things and the strata of their relation to myself. I don't mean to imply an analytical hierarchy, where Things like souir supercede 'minor' peripheral objects, based on their relation to Me (or my fatedness). How unhealthy would that be to need to reduce the cosmos to a binary of that which serves, is apparent to, or made apparent by me, and then everything else? Or to simply stop there, at the moment of inner recognition?
It might be true that if any of part of the universe were to delete itself, I would not be possible. Isn't that the first law of thermodynamics? Energy just is. That makes hierarchy just as illusive and unstable as any other way of ordering. In any case, a hierarchy is not implied. No; a literary device is a holoarchic relation. Souir is merely a manner of framing; not a taxonomy. Like theatre, you'll know it when you see it (and you won't until you do).
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{UNFINISHED]
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