Drawing Derrida

I took Dylan for a long walk through the forest today. Today the trees looked restful, instead of stripped and tired. My earphones allowed the experience to be sound-set with music, while also preventing an ear ache. Aesthetics and Utilitarianism unite. Presently, he is resting at my feet, and I have been drawing. After deciding to take this entire weekend for myself – to be alone, while not lonely - I have finally found that sense of peace that comes through writing, reading, walking, and art. It’s been a while, and when it came…I welcomed it with a deep breath. It is a process of active meditation– to be fully present with one’s self.

This week there has been a sense of transition, in the unknowingness of what familiarities will remain – and in what sense time will bring change. It is easy to get lost in questions that lack immediate answers, and so hard sometimes to read the signs. When the details get blurry, I seem to grasp for a different focus; on broader pictures, and that which frames this convoluted design.

I have been reading Jacque Derrida, and sketching hands. The philosophical discourse of love seems to be revealed by him that what is of primary importance is: to love rather than to be loved – and to love through declaring love; as without such vulnerable proclamation, silence only serves to render the animate into the inert. Without “verbalizing,” - to make love into verb instead of adjective - nothing is claimed. It is the act of the lover, and not the beloved that signifies a friend: a person that one has become acutely and profoundly aware of, and who will be maintained and then remembered, through love, long beyond the end of the end.

“…life, breath, the soul, are always and necessarily found on the side of the lover, or the loving, while the being-loved or the lovable, can be lifeless…Loving will always be preferable to being-loved, as acting is preferable to suffering, act to potentiality, essence to accident, knowledge to non-knowledge. It is the reference, the preference itself.” (Derrida)

I have sought for years to understand this; to know why it is that I love the way that I love…with such intrepid voice. It is the only way that I know how; the only way that I can. Knowing that it impossible to reach out and stake hold of wonder, without the offering out of your hand.