Love Without Emergency

The title of this post is taken from Clementine Morrigan’s book Love Without Emergency: I Want This but I Feel Like I’m Going to Die (Writing on Trauma, Attachment, and Polyamory).

I want this post to add to a conversation I saw on the Paris Review website, here.

Something about the post put me off, not that I don’t believe a newly sober person would write into the Paris Review blog for advice…but it does get at a lot of topics I have been thinking about in my own sobriety, and I would like to use this space to discuss some of it, since it is exciting to me.

This question times well with Juliana Spahr’s recent Artforum Top Ten. About her #1 list item, Bernadette Mayer’s “The Way To Keep Going in Antarctica (1968),” she says, “I often think poetry is bad at comfort. Or at least, I rarely find it comforting. But this poem might be an exception: ‘Look at very small things with you eyes / & stay warm / Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside.’” Madge McKeithen’s book Blue Peninsula, a narrative of her son’s degenerative illness, looks at how poetry can help us confront grief, pulling us back “from the exile margins, the poet reaching where little else could.” She views poetry more as company than solace, (there’s a chapter titled “Crying in the Car,” for example).

First, to this person not-quite in crisis, I would say they are about to receive a life-changing gift of mutual help addiction recovery. I recommend hitting up an addiction group and getting some phone numbers from other newcomers, and calling them every day, especially if you feel like you do as you write this letter. You will feel better, I promise, and you’ll be helping them too.

I found Love Without Emergency in my own similar context: I was catching up on the work I didn’t do the past 20 years, reeling around doing other things, one day I looked in the mirror and saw Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” staring back at me, (at least from the shoulders up), which is to say, I’m now allocating time to my aspirations—you must change your life. This pivot found myself with a flipped hourglass, time regained so to speak.

Love Without Emergency is a series of personal essays and writings by Clementine Morrigan on healing, polyamory, and navigating complex emotions in non-normative relationships; it’s spiritual practice as praxis, and the stakes are high. Show me someone who doesn’t think they are a good person, or that they can change. Rilke’s sonnet (or is it a prayer?)  says we must—and it seems particularly poetic to realize this standing in front of a broken fragment.

Sarah Schulman, in her incredible book Conflict Is Not Abuse, says, “Relationships of all kinds, after all, are the centerpiece of healing.” Polyamory is appealing to me as a human being living in, as Morrigan writes, “a world that consistently defines love as monogamy.” The coupled unit dominates the image repertoire, but in my experience it often amounts to well-timed co-dependence.

I realized through meditation that relationships are also the site of conflict, stress and trauma, and frustration. Romantic relationships can be ground zero for character defects and defenses. Through aspirational friendships, writing, organizing, creating situations of mutual aid: I look for a code of conduct I could stay in constant contact with. Starting with honesty with myself about doing the work, morning, noon, and night.

Knowing what you want is powerful, so long as you know the principles by which it will lead you there. In the first essay in Love Without Emergency, “Jealousy is a Teacher if I Let it be,” Morrigan writes, “I want my love to love and desire freely. And so I write this to explore this thing.” My friend and poet Rachel Rabbit White describes polyamory as an on-going aspiration of hers, to love without possession. Some believe it takes an evolved person to be polyamorous. To me the evolved action is knowing what you want, and being able to conduct yourself according to the ethical principles that allow you to get from point A to point B in your wants and desires, in relationships with other people.

I admire Morrigan’s candor:

To my surprise, despite my belief in and desire for polyamory, I experienced extreme, terrifying jealousy and fear of abandonment...I believed I would get better at it as things got worse and worse...All my ptsd symptoms were extremely heightened: nightmares, dissociation, intrusive thoughts, panic, hyper-vigilance, depression, anxiety. The beliefs I had internalized during my abusive relationship, that I have to be perfect to deserve love, that I am inherently unworthy and flawed, were dominating my thoughts constantly...My partner and I agreed to take a break from polyamory.

It takes a lot of courage to admit when a project, especially one you’ve invested a lot of time into, isn’t working. And the candor required to ask for what you want … I think about this very simple poem from Sufi poet Hafez:

Ask the Friend for love.
Ask Him again.
 
For I have learned that every heart will get
What it prays for
Most

It’s a prayer in itself. Doing the right thing doesn’t always feel good! Robert Hass, writing about loss, described the feeling as “Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. / He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge.”

Ivanna Baranova has a more Zen-adjacent view, in her new book, CONFIRMATION BIAS:

losing you
doesn’t
make me
sad
necessarily
 
i just
think
 
we used
to do
those things
 
and now
we
don’t

And as Barbara Guest quotes in her essay “The Beautiful Voyage:” “It’s always something else in the end.”

***

“‘Accountability’ should not be a bad word. We all cause harm. I have caused harm,” Aishah Shahidah Simmons said in a recent interview. I came across Simmons’s work after learning about her anthology Love With Accountability. Amends and de-escalation braid into my interest in transformative justice, an ethics of conflict navigation that takes place outside of the police apparatus. Transformative Justice holds that all people are valuable. Aishah Shahidah Simmons, a survivor of sexual abuse offers these thoughts:

I do think that the person who caused harm has to be made aware that they’ve caused harm and has to take responsibility. We’re not just letting them off the hook. Do they need to go to therapy? What needs to happen to ensure that, a.) it doesn’t happen again; and then b.) how they can make amends, even if it’s not engaging with the person, but what is the work that they need to do to make amends for the harm?