Searching, Longing, Taking Form

on Youth by Tove Ditlevsen and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Past Childhood, into Youth. By pragmatic understanding, we are to lose our innocence and passage through abject recklessness, where our curiosity will mutate into naivete. This is the dawn of youth, I think, being stripped of the right to call yourselves innocent, despite not being a great distance away from childhood. Perhaps, to appease a pragmatic existence, we mistake innocence for thoughtlessness. I would like to propose that true innocence lies far from a child’s gullible disposition. I would like to propose that it is the tireless hope and obstinate spirit of a people facing impending doom, swinging open each door offered to them with no prejudice, a kind of fearlessness driven by its will to be free – free to dream, to want, to step forward and float about with hope. The young are innocent, of this I am sure, and they must be proclaimed so to be free, and as with seasons and rain, as with all of life’s elegant cycles, in freedom they may once more find innocence. All other words we call them are gross misrepresentations, false perceptions engineered to diminish: just as we like to call the assertive difficult, or the vulnerable weak, we claim the young careless, but they (we) are simply searching – longing.

Searching

What does it take to search? A will, a cause, a place. The latter is always difficult to determine, shifting with each new lead, each evidence that changes or threatens to extinguish it. It is even more difficult to fix when you are seeking the elusive: yourself, home, love. These are things we come to regard as the ingredients to selfhood. These are the atoms of a soul, and to find them is to draw a constellation; to gather an alliance of particles drifting and coalescing into a matter of meaningful existence. In Tove Ditlevsen’s Youth I found a curious thought:

“And almost every night, when the taverns have closed, I stand downstairs in the entryway kissing some young man who’s usually unemployed and who I never see again. After a while I can’t tell one young man from the next. But I’ve begun to long for the intimate closeness with another human being that is called love. I long for love without knowing what it is. I think that I’ll find it when I no longer live at home.”

Youth, Tove Ditlevsen          p.79

This is a thought that persisted within me throughout the first light of my Youth, that love waits for me Elsewhere beyond the walls that contained my Childhood. I thought this despite the fact that, like Ditlevsen, I spent Childhood in a fair, ordinary home. It was not one teeming with abundance, and in Ditlevsen’s case, perhaps not one of middle class comfort, but neither I or she was ever left to want for a roof over our heads, or for the protection of capable parents. Yet we found not love but loneliness – in our youth a particularly frightening affliction, even more so to the poet who yearns to be understood. 

“As long as I live here I’m condemned to loneliness and anonymity. The world doesn’t count me as anything and every time I get hold of a corner of it, it slips out of my hands again. People die and buildings are torn down over them. The world is constantly changing – it’s only my childhood’s world that endures. Up in the living room it looks like it has always looked…”

Youth, Tove Ditlevsen          p.79

Our Childhood home is the birthplace of a dream. It envelops the first flicker of our desires, tending to it until it becomes a hunger. The dream blooms and expands , but the walls remain unstretched.  Perhaps this is the beginning of Elsewhere: the search for fathomless depth and boundless flight beyond stubborn concrete, for another universe that might grow to fit each and every single one of our fantastical manifestations. It brings to my mind the act of merantau (journeying, wandering), a tradition of mobility in the Indonesian archipelago where one leaves home to make a living, or to search for a better life. Though the narrative of merantau is now driven by the popular imagination surrounding upward social mobility, and made complicated by the precarity and privilege of travel, there remains at its core the notion of a home that can no longer contain the dreamer. I came across a parallel thought in another reading of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, in which he proposes the search of elsewhere as a primitive impulse:

“But this shiver, we sense, Is no longer human fear; this is cosmic fear, an anthropo-cosmic fear that echoes the great legend of man cast back into primitive situations. From the cavern carved in the rock to the underground, from the underground to stagnant water, [...] The house, the cellar, the deep Earth, achieved totality through depth. The house has become a natural being whose fate is bound to that of mountains and off the waters that plough the land. The enormous stone plant it has become would not flourish if it did not have subterranean water at its face. And so our dreams attain boundless proportions.”

The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
p. 44

As with seafarers and explorers, merchants and treasure hunters, dreamers would voyage across unknown seas in search of a place that might attune itself to the gentle ebbs and flows of their desires; always pulsating, growing, unfurling. Then, another tender offering comes to me in the form of a poem by Lena Khalal Tuffaha, who conjures the dream as and by means of prayer within which she dwells. The dream in itself becomes her home, and she soars the heavens – an infinite expanse before her.

What she called home was a blessing bowl
flower-scented water swirling over etched prayers, 
chasing away phantoms. 

What she called home was a prayer call
ache let loose from the highest minaret
circling the dome of the sky.

Circling the Dome of the Sky
Lena Khalal Tuffaha

Longing

I am often convinced that I have found Elsewhere. Perhaps not as an immaculate, uncut entity,  but certainly I have found some of its grandest incarnations. Scenes, moments, souls: in its comings and goings, coiling and unraveling around the antecedents of my present self. Yet, for all the searching I have done to ease my thrumming ache for Elsewhere, I find myself longing for the place of Childhood. Homesickness, we call it, though I rather despise the term. I do not care to associate the term “home” with the Place that raised me, for it was never a Place of Freedom, and is that not what Home must offer – Freedom? Where our dreams, as Bachelard offers, attain boundless proportions, or act, as Tuffaha sings, as our shepherd towards the great cosmos. When I think of the word Homesick, I do not feel a longing, for my imagination refuses to stop at a warm dwelling or my mother’s delicious spread; it crawls over to the streets, the skyline of a City drowned in steel and haze, the whistles and glares,  the mores that strips you bare. I feel, aptly, a sickness. I scan a page from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands, and my heart hums:

“So yes, though “home” permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home...I abhor some of my culture’s way [...]No, I do not buy all the myths of the tribe into which I was born [...] I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me. [...] I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.”

Borderlands: La Frontera – The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua

I once offered to my friends the term “people-sickness”, believing that it is not a Dwelling or a Place I long for, it is kinship. In middle school, back when I still read the likes of Nicholas Sparks, I was fascinated with the notion that home might be a person. Type “home is a person” into the search bar and it will send you countless anecdotes and rhetoric on “the person”, who “you” will eventually find, after much self-love and patience. It’s a comforting thought, that the search might end with a single meeting, a single human being whose soul is tailored to contain yours. Our wildest fantasy, I think, is to be understood, in our singularity and multitudes, in a totality that forgives your past and embraces your future; wielding a lifetime into a single moment (“longing is beyond the idea of time”, Khalil Gibran wrote once). Said person need not share with you a romantic connection, in fact, they seldom do. They need only exhibit a cosmic ability to perceive you in the ways you have yearned to be perceived. 

Despite my best efforts Elsewhere, this is the longing that persists. Perhaps our most extraordinary connections, and, in particular, the earliest ones we encounter in our Youth, bring for us a Beginning. If Youth is the genesis of self these souls are its architect, and to be apart from them is to wander past the blueprint; aimless. Ditlevsen, upon finding that Mr. Krogh – an old man who opened to her a world of literature and encouraged her poetry without ridicule – had disappeared overnight, felt her spirit wane and tremble before the ruins of his building:

“ ...when I reach Gammel Kongevej, I stop as if paralyzed, completely uncomprehending. The yellow building isn’t there anymore. Where it had stood, there is just a space with rubble plaster and rusty twisted water pipes. I go over and brace my hand against the low remains of a wall, because I don't think my legs will support me any longer. People go past me with closed faces, wrapped up in their own evening errands. I feel like grabbing one of them by the arm and saying, “there was a building here yesterday – can you tell me where it is? Where is Mr. Krogh?” He must be living somewhere else now, of course, but how do you find someone who has disappeared? I don't understand how he could do this to me. […] As I go up the stairs to the back building, I am gripped by the fear that I'll never get away from this place where I was born. Suddenly I can't stand it and find every memory of it dark and sad.”

Youth, Tove Ditlevsen
p.26

I long to return to a Beginning, to the hours in which I took form – those moments of total planetary alignment. I wish to etch into my mind the contours of my company, and to commit to memory the words they scored for me. If one may make a return, if one may trace the Beginning of the self, one may understand it. One may even forgive it. Perhaps it is this I long for: a footpath to reprieve, a little spark of renewal. Bachelard subscribes to the sentiment, reciting in Poetics of Space the words of 19th century poet V.E. Michelet: “Alas! We have to grow old to conquer youth, to free it from its fetters and live according to its original impulse.” A return to the Beginning offers us fundamental images of Youth, Bachelard notes, simple engravings that invite us to start imagining again. 

They give us back areas of being, houses in which the human being’s certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that, by living in such images as these, in images that are stabilising as these are, we could start a new life,  life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths. 

The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
p. 53

I am reminded now of a ritual we Indonesians brave yearly, one that must come after merantau – the home-going: mudik, those typically taken on festivities, or its somewhat more permanent counterpart, pulang kampung (homecoming). Each time I go, there is a Distance that strikes me: first, an irreconcilable contrast between the great joys and haunting sorrows of Childhood, then the vast interspace between Beginning and Freedom – what self had dissolved, and what being has taken form. This always seemed to me as the uncrossable Distance. It is a length best left to preserve clarity, to stand far from the Beginning and look at what had transpired, knowing it could never again devastate Freedom. It is a length best left vacant to make room for divine, time-bending encounters. The road must stretch far and wide for the passage taken on repeat – merantau, pulang, merantau, pulang – mending and priming the Self for moments of delicate resurrections. I am searching, I am longing, no end in sight. Journeying ahead, prayer on my lips,  I take form. 

Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress, and the skirt
made a perfect circle.

                                   Turning and turning

until it flared to the limit
was irresistible . . . . The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms, and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.

                                   And I knew then

that I would live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart.

Evening Sun
Jane Kenyon