INTIMATE STRANGER.

by Stanley

IN THE BEGINNING it is not even like living in an ocean – one is the ocean. There is not even a mother and child; the difference has not even been thought of. There is no inside or outside, no past or future. There is not even a ‘myself ’. Though there is sentience, I am nowhere near human … yet!

This is all before I even know there is anyone else. So that the first meetings with the intimate stranger (not yet even named) comes as quite a shock – exciting and frightening, carrying with it the fist hint that there is a ‘me’ too, the beginning of my psychological birth.

Ever since that time, whenever I meet you, the boundaries between us are always blurry – at best a pleasant nonchalance about who I am. Where I can happily say: I don’t think I am quite myself. Or, paradoxically, I feel more myself than I have ever been.

There is an incredible agitation at finding ‘another’ as I emerge from what Freud called ‘primary narcissism’: the first schism of being. It is the momentous discovery that ‘another’ actually exists – a feeling I revisit over and over in life every time I fall in love, every time I rediscover a wave of affection for whoever, whatever – close to that undivided, unbounded place.

Every renewal in life is a revisiting of that beginning before it all went wrong; before enchantment became disappointment; before finding became losing; affection, resentment. The vicissitudes of relationships are life’s cycles of loving and leaving. Forever repeating all that has gone before, again and again, with only slight variations on the same theme. With help though, I come back to the beginning, perhaps with a little more wisdom – who knows? But always more from chance than good management. The tragedy in many a life is where it has gone so wrong that the door to the beginning is shut. Luck run out. Locked in where ‘I have to do it all for myself’.

What I require to find the beginning all over again, one more time, is what they call, a ‘significant other’, one who can be for me, with me. Alone, it is impossible. There are those who insist that the only person who can provide what I need is myself; no one is going to do it for me, they say. True in a sense. Especially true for those who have given up that there ever can be the intimate stranger who can kick-start what it was like in the beginning.

This is the perennial longing to start over, to move to another place, another country, another life – to be born again, don’t they say? To act out such fantasies misses a vital factor. It isn’t about places, it’s about living and loving connections.

To recover the sense of one’s beginning one has to discern that the intimate stranger has retuned in whatever shape or form, someone with just that certain smell or something: a mate, a dog, a presence of some sort. Then the flow of life can start to move down the track, onwards once again. One more time with feeling! With luck, maybe even a bit more feeling.
Even though I encounter once again where it all went wrong I will…

..........… Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
...............Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!...


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