Tethers

“Dead in a ditch in Thailand.” That’s the fate I project for myself if my wife were to die before me. (She says she would drown herself in foster cats.) We seem to like sharing such grim conditionals. The underlying message: without you, it would all go to hell; without you, I would exile myself. No particulars would hold us back, at least not in our theorizing—no parents, siblings, friends, pets, jobs, commitments. In the eyes of others such freedom might seem fucked, but it is what it is: I would simply stop taking my medicine, walk away from the rest of my life, and travel the world until my brain or guts killed me. I know this. Or I think I know this. My tether is thin.

When I consider history’s freaks, the tiny class of the truly aberrant, I admire most those who exploded their lives for the sake of love. I’m talking Rābiʼa who crawled across the desert for days, Hallaj who exclaimed his identity with all of creation, Simeon who lived a stone’s throw above the earth. In such lives I read deep experimentation. Here are full souls irrupting into workaday living; here are those who make our story a question; here are extremists whose brilliance indicts the mean. They are the brave children of a singular insight, a flash of experience whose power compelled them to restructure their lives entirely. You see in many of their statements the temptation to rejoin the world and its business, and you see again and again their refusal. In the hot light of intemperate visions, these weirdos cut their cords.

I do not pretend I would become such a figure were my strongest love stripped from me, but I’d definitely go at least a little fucking crazy. I wonder now if the thinness of my tether to the world as many understand it—as a chaotic arena whose competitors fight for scraps of shelter, meaning, and affection—is a product of my misunderstanding the world, of my seeing it too uncharitably. I’ll admit to a long-held grimness. I don’t think we can view our species honestly unless we account for our bombs and blood and bullshit. Am I so willing to walk away from the world, at least in theory, because I believe the world worth abandoning? Do I want to withdraw my love from organized lovelessness? Yes. I almost typed out an excuse for my species’ failures but then I remembered my doglike devotion to the truth. I say yes to wanting to exit the arena, though I do not want to die. At least not as long as my surest love lasts.

I wonder about you out there. What tethers you? What are the conditions in which you would remake your life—or break it?