Excogitate; Excogitates; Ex Cogitating. To cogitate upon s/he who is "Ex."
It has been a quiet day. 3 e-mails from WAW's return address and 1 phone call from WAW's caller i.d., and they have all been from the Boy Child. That is good.
Gone now the sun; comes the night. It is quiet.
And I realize: I have gone as far as my limited skills would take me. I have drained the reservoirs of all mojo. I stand now without -- tools, resources, beliefs, expectations.
Beginner's mind indeed. I know nothing -- only this moment. The now is when one lives, writes Marcus Aurelius, the only time one lives, for the past is gone and the future uncertain. The Journey continues apace.
Whence came you, Traveler?
From the Land of To Survive, and that I have done. Doors have been shut, bridges burned, footprints in the sand taken by the sea. The year draws to a close, lamentations sung, days marked away on the calendar, time past. It is over.
And now, Traveler, hence?
That, my man, is the question. Terra incognita. The White Ship sails without skipper at the helm, without navigator at the binnacle. Time alone will tell at Journey's End. Said Macbeth, "Come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day;" from this there is no escape -- time will run, and I with it.
Smiley's Person understands. She is Ex. All that Ex is; all that Ex implies. An Ex. MyEx. Ex: Latin -- out of; from.
That is she: out of, from. Ex matrimonium.
And he? He, a chastened Siegried who must guard against seeking the Golden Ring, Virtuous Retribution, the Pleasure of Being Right -- for no Pleasure is without its attendant Pain, no Virtue without its attendant Vice.
Which is prior? Impossible to say -- Virtue got chocolate in Vice's peanut butter; Vice got peanut butter on Virtue's chocolate.
Better simply to leave it alone.
This Smiley's Person now understands -- it is divorce, my brothers and sisters, it is without Virtue, without Vice, and -- lamentable perhaps though it is -- without Victory. It simply IS.
Hard lesson that, for a Searcher am I -- I sought Victory, Accountability, Justification, Validation, Righteous Moral Indignation's Karmic Accounting! She cheated! She lied! She betrayed! She disrespected! She didn't...She! She! She! Ahhhh, but I, oh, how I! I! I!
I. Not path, not forward, not future. I. The search wasn't for a way forward -- you bloody stupid man. You never left the starting blocks, so concerned you were with I.
Searcher? No, not quite right -- I didn't just search for it; I hoped for it, I worshiped it, I prayed for it: O, Ye Olympian Gods of Left-Behind Spousedom, give me that Righteous Email, that Infinite Mot Juste of Retaliation with which I may smite WAW a mighty blow and bring her to her senses, that Holy 180 that will bring Hope to Fruition, for this I pray, ay-men! The Elmer Gantry of divorce-busting.
Hard lesson, this: "Right" and "Wrong" matters not a whit -- whitless it is, and witless I was.
For in the end, there is only emptiness, the Void that descends upon your heart, upon your soul, within your life where once your Marriage stood.
This we know through hard-felt physical pain, yet on we rush to embrace the Void, for therein we hope to find the presumed pleasure of Being Heard, of our Pain Acknowledged -- of seeing WAS chastened, rebuked, and shamed. And once there, if not cast adrift within the Void, we soon learn the Hard Lesson: There is no Victory, Moral or Otherwise, over a Walkaway Spouse -- even if you're right, s/he's gone.
But I refused to see, refused to know. No, not Smiley's Person -- headlong, he rushed; headstrong, he rushed. Rushed to grab Alberich's Golden Ring in the name of all that was Righteous, of He Himself, Smiley's Person, Left-Behind Spouse...only to find, as Wotan did, that the Ring will bring down Valhalla -- that Victory its own defeat. Götterdämmerung, indeed.
So, Traveler, what lies beyond Survive? Not Victory, to be sure. Perhaps, one would like to believe, simply Forgiveness. Forgiveness of self. And, yes, even forgiveness of Ex. And what of Righteous Vindication, of Virtue triumphant over Vice? Let that, too, be Ex.
No more Virtue in suffering; no more Virtue in waiting; no more Virtue in reliving; no more Virtue in bearing that which, it must be admitted, no longer needs be borne. I bore the pain of my lost marriage to make a point -- to show myself -- to her? to myself? -- to be more Virtuous than she.
"No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness." -- Reinhold Niebuhr
I didn't hang onto my marriage, to my beliefs, to my values, to my hopes -- I understand, you see, that in the heart-of-hearts I wasn't as sanguine with detachment as I'd liked to have been -- for their sake, or even for hers, or even for the sake of Marriage Writ Large. I did it for me. For ego. For Victory.
That's gone, and with it the Hope of the Hail Mary Reconciliation -- the Reconciliation I could cruelly-but-happily turn down, ha-ha! that'll show you! I win!
Smiley's Person himself is mos' def' a half-empty-glass kind of guy. Niebuhr and love (ultimately, for Reinhold, the love of the Lord Jesus Himself) is probably a bridge too far in a league, along with Faith and Charity, that Smiley's Person is out of.
Better, perhaps, to stay close to the Nibelungen, to forgo that most dangerous of verbs, To Hope, and to choose instead that simplest -- but most difficult -- of verbs, To Be.
Yo dawg -- keep it Wagnerian. For Smiley's Person it will be Nietzsche, not Niebuhr, as guide on this part of the path; he who suggested to us that "hope is the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torment of man."
Thus spake Zarathustra, the Superman who leads the interior monologue in Smiley's Person's head:
Without Hope, walk that path that is for your footsteps and no other's, Smiley's Person; let there be no agenda, no motivation, no reason other than that you live, you breathe. You are. Let Hope be for another day, for Journey's End. In this moment, you are a survivor, and on that day, the blackest of days you will recall, you thought -- you wished -- that you would die.
No such luck, Keemosabe. Like Yossarian, you live.
So walk already. The past? Gone. The future? Uncertain.