Do You Know What I Mean When I Say That Sometimes I Don’t Have Any Feelings Or Emotions? I’m Not

“I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.”

— Roy Croft

I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath

“I think a guy fighting for his relationship and showing his feelings is more attractive than someone who acts like they don’t give a fuck.”

— Unknown

“I’ll only marry the man who can guess which is my favourite stone on the whole sea-shore.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry,”

“The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.”

— James Wood, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays

Angela Carter, “Black Venus”, Black Venus

[Text ID: “She was like a piano in a country where everybody has had their hands cut off.”]

Loneliness is a Dangerous Thing

‘Everyone knows there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.’                     - Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Rootlessness and homelessness, though similar in nature, are also quite different. A person who is rootless may very well have a home, but does not have a sense of belonging, they identify themselves as ‘the other’. 

Since the end of World War II, migration has increased significantly with people opting to set up their life somewhere new, whether this be for a job, education, religion, or whatever opportunity this may provide. A person disentangles themselves from the ties and bonds that they have with one place and form this relationship somewhere new… this is now home.

But home for you may not always be home for the new family that you set up. I have mentioned this before in another post so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but when looking at those with extremist and ‘radical’ thoughts, we find that they are often children of those who have migrated. The parents have chosen to build home in a new foreign land and build a relationship with that place, but the relationship is not so straight forward. This relationship is a half way house between assimilating and holding onto one’s culture; the migrant chooses which parts of the new culture to adopt and which parts of their old culture to hold onto. This might vary from eating and drinking habits, clothing, social life, it could be anything. 

The child of the migrant however, having not chosen but instead having been brought up with this conflict between the two cultures feels lost. This is something I have thought about for a long time, but Arendt put it into the words I have been searching for for so long. 

The child feels a sense of rootlessness. 

Arendt argues that those who feel rootless or homeless will seek out a home for themselves at any cost, which can have disastrous consequences. 

She states that for an individual who feels rootless and homeless, often with this comes the feeling of having an existence that is not meaningful or fruitful. To find this sense of belonging, individuals often turn to exclusionary movements and groups, which actually only increases the feeling of alienation and rootlessness. Now they are in a group that only contains people such as themselves, perhaps from one place, class, religion, etc. all together feeling like outsiders, because of the absence of others of a different background. 

Arendt says that uprootedness has been ‘the curse of the modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution’.

Loneliness is a dangerous thing. When a person is lonely, when they feel their roots are not in any ground but sort of drifting from place to place, a person is not themselves. Who are we, after all, without a background against us? Just an entity, perhaps? 

‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.’

Relationships are like two temporary lines meeting once and staying still for a given time.

No one expects them to stay still forever,it is almost an obligation that of growing together to better strengthen themselves for future events.

And as for the latter,they might not be practical happenstances or chosen career paths;

they might be no more than the meeting of new lines.

Whether each of them will be remembered or not is up to the mind of said person.

There’s no obligation in this,not even in letting each meeting last till its own time is up,which would be the natural course of life never actually followed through.

We’re all living temporary meetings with others,where there should be no necessity of planning nor of requiring more than is being given.

Let’s live relationships as they come,with no requests or overthinking,as if they were a random object you picked up and kept stored on one of your most precious shelves.

ɴᴏᴍ ɴᴏᴍ 😋