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Metaxu. The Between. (On existence in the wake of violence.)

Metaxu. The Between. (On existence in the wake of violence.)

Last updated on: June 25, 2016 at 9:23 pm by Anne Carpenter

Metaxu. The Between. (On existence in the wake of violence.) 2016-06-25T21:23:34-08:00 Anne Carpenter

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"Study for a 'Resurrection,'" Agnolo Bronzino

“Study for a ‘Resurrection,'” Agnolo Bronzino

Metaxu. The between. It’s an idea from philosophy, ancient and modern. It as an attempt to assemble the various ways that we are not fully ourselves and yet that we are ourselves. That we are, that the world around us is, metaxu. Between. Or, to put it another way, that we are all becoming.

“What does it mean to be? … We might say that this question rouses itself in us, struggles to shape itself into saying.”

(“What is Metaphysical Thinking?” in The William Desmond Reader, 15-16).

Human beings are a question to themselves. My existence alone is a question that I answer with my life, and in that way the question is impossible to avoid asking – and impossible to ever ask completely, impossible to ever entirely answer.

Ever since I tried to kill myself, the question has become more real, more perplexing. I ask myself what the hell it means that I exist, and I grasp for even the thinnest frayed thread.

I remember the time when I almost could not countenance existing. It lives in me still, that time. Whispers to me still. I glance at the thin white scars along my skin, see them staring back at me in a mirror, and I know that there is a way they still bleed. Still hurt.

When I am deeply overwhelmed, something in my mind goes a little wrong. Something in me screams, terrified, and imagines that agony is the only way out. Like an instinct. I never listen, not anymore, but I hate that I have to not-listen at all. I wish that part of me didn’t have to scream. It makes me so very aware of the vulnerable ways I have not yet healed.

“Being between troubles us” (Ibid., 17).

I was never much interested in a peaceful death, back when I could not get the thought out of my head. The thought that I had to die. I thought that it would be a relief, or finally mean something, or– Who even knows. I don’t really. Who could? But there was always blood and sharp edges. Always alone. I wasn’t a danger to anyone but myself.

What I remember most clearly is what I still see: that the world is deeply, deeply violent. That I have known this violence intimately. Quietly. So I suppose I wanted to testify to this truth with my last breath. I suppose that, faced with this truth, existence made absolutely no sense. (And I carved that truth into my skin.)

I still see the world like this. See its violence. Like a spectrum of light that my eyes are sensitive to, that I take in along with all the other colors. Sometimes I think that my redemption will consist in some kind of appropriation, some kind of embrace, of that aspect of the world. Redemption won’t be making sense of it. Won’t be learning to love it. Redemption of that part of me would be something else, I think, whatever that is. Holding out the possibility of something else is a fundamental part of it.

“We might say that there is both a wager and a promise in metaphysical thinking” (Ibid., 21).

A wager that something else might be. A promise – that existing, continuing to exist, means that something else may yet be.

Suicide is not an embrace of the meaninglessness of the world, of its violence. At least, it would not have been for me. It was a protest. A final, outraged scream. I can still hear it ringing in the dark recesses of my mind. I’ve spent too long burying how it hurts not to be honest with myself about it. I’m afraid of that darkness, but I’m also not afraid at all. There is no one who has not touched this shivering part of themselves, no one who is not touched by this painful part of the world.

We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom 8:22-23)

I wonder sometimes in a child-like way if God will have me keep my scars. Or I wonder in formal ways – so serious, so methodical – what it means that this experience will always be a part of me. And I wonder sometimes what it means that God was with me as I made my scars. With me – and no voice stayed my hand. With me – and I lived. God was with me, is always with me, is with everyone as we laugh and cry, and what does that mean? What does it mean?

“The finite entity is let be in its thisness as other and its own. The intimacy of being, we might say, is the memory of God’s creative breath that sustains every being as a singular ‘this'”

(Desmond, “The Idiocy of Being,” Desmond Reader, 51).

I feel myself double-marked: by the original violence that touched me, and by my repetition of that violence. I live in the aftermath of both. I live holding out the possibility that there is something other than either. Many times I refuse to name it, that something. It is pure possibility. It is that there is possibility at all.

But I am between what was and what will be. I am between even possibility. It is a stretched and aching place. It is metaxu: where time thins and time soothes and time hurts. Sometimes all I can say of healing (of existing) is that it is not all at once, and that it is uneven. I run out ahead of me and behind. Healing is also slow, and made mostly of details. It threatens to be boring because it’s so repetitive, so small. And it never ceases to be hard.

There should be another note here, but I don’t know what to play.

And I don’t know how to end except to say that I am between.

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