Fragility of the Naked Heart

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-W. B. Yeats

The naked heart desires vulnerability. It wants to allow its romantic dreams to lift and drift, carried by a gentle breeze. There is, nonetheless, a hesitation, a trepidation at baring one’s soul, exposing it to another in feats that they will trample upon it recklessly. We are, in a word, fragile.

And though the brave romantic strives to temper the glass of their being, make it more resistant to the unexpected repudiations of unrequited feelings, the nature of that being remains tender and sensitive, even in the frothing wake of emotional disparagement. And yet, with an eager innocence we should not confuse with unworldliness, the wounds which have bled profusely are stitched back together through the sheer force of psychic coagulation and clotting; a pure internal desire to make oneself whole again, only to return once more to the scene of the crime, the battlefield of love. All is fair in love and war.

These feelings of despondency and dejection are, after all, fleeting. All things shall come to pass. If anything, they remind us of what it feels like to be a human being. How to be a human being. Life itself can be so fundamentally fickle, full of sadness, grief, misery that the only comfort we can find is in each other. There is something special in the gentle demeanour of a person lost within the labyrinth of love who seeks to remain there forever, for they are never truly lost, but finding their way, finding themselves by running their fingers along the long stretches of walls as a guide in their playful exploration.

There is a definitive reassurance in being surrounded by walls, and perhaps this is the reason why love birds seek to find a mate with which to nest, to cosy up to. Under the blanket of care and compassion, we could spend a whole day, sweaty, unafraid, exposed, but safe. The long embrace in which we can melt and forget the external world is perhaps the rarest of luxuries. The devotees of romantic principles see this as the one truth of nature, a fundamental act of beauty within the scope of the law of attraction. This gendered principle in which the energies, both masculine and feminine, in any ratio, blend together in the similar satiating feeling one gets after coming in from a winter storm to a warm and hearty soup.

What the fragile naked heart is seeking is resonance. Someone to lean on and make us feel whole, make us feel seen. Existence can be, at its worst, filled with an unbearable loneliness for which the only remedy is seeking companionship; someone with whom to weather the storm. However, when we feel as though we have found our other half, there is a desperate attempt to cling onto them, not simply as a respite for our solitude, but as a fuel to stoke the fires of our passions for existence itself. The fragile naked heart knows, at this point, that all it can do is hold on for dear life. This person becomes your home. The place we go to at the end of it all, where we can drop all pretence and simply enjoy the echoing comfort of each other’s company.

The suffocating withdrawal from this person leaves us physically and psychically aching and teeters on the cusp of imaginative obsession; they become ingrained in your life in such a way that we feel as though a part of your soul has been extracted, not with the delicacy of a surgeon’s touch, but that of a brute ripping out the wires from behind the walls of this house we have endeavoured to build together.

Our mind is on the fritz. We are left with the haunting memories of resonant ghosts that once filled us with the divine inspiration of that Promethean Spark. We desire only to use our creativity to make them laugh and smile. Without A muse to amuse us, everything loses its shine and the world feels lifeless and grey; our former pleasures and entertainments seem to be but hollow and insubstantial ways to pass the dull ache of time. In this period we are nostalgic for that stirring of emotions, thoughts, states of mind which we had not known existed beyond perhaps a vague inkling sentiment referenced in the immemorial great works on love.

Part of the grieving process is coming to terms with the prospect of never being able to speak to someone again, a feeling that leaves us floating within an existential vacuum, a pit in our throats and a constant throbbing with every thought that doesn’t seem to disappear. So in turn, we ourselves try to disappear so that we can avoid feeling this way. There is a kind of mental fog, an emotional vacuity that seizes us, paralyses us and impairs our cognitive functions so much so that every word and every action seem to be in dissonance with each other. Up is down and down is up, our entire world is shaken up and all we want to do is curl up in a ball and fade into oblivion.

There is no rage at this dying of the light. There is an ambiguous intensity in looking in the mirror and witnessing our void-filled eyes, a penetrating gaze simultaneously invasive and vulnerable; everything is quite fuzzy, bleary and out of focus. A realisation comes that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own and one day that life ends abruptly. There is subtle monachopsis, this persistent feeling of being out of place, having no place. The air becomes vellichor, filled with a strange wistfulness of used bookshops.

We feel the tendrils of robotises, the acute feeling of our heartbeat and then the distinct lack thereof. We try to maintain some kind of poise, but really we just want to fall down and let everything go, allowing the torrential rush of emotions to be released from the floodgates while simultaneously feeling an urge to push everyone and everything away, to create this bubble in which we can scream and shout and let it all out without burdening anyone else with the heaviness of our soul.

We long for it all to dissipate and be replaced by a kind of playful lightness. Like a balloon breaking free from the avid grip of a child, escaping towards the clouds. We find ourselves compulsively sinking deeper into our own despondence, having hypothetical conversations we know will never materialise because of the transience of life.

We find ourselves humming in this amniotic tranquillity of being indoors during a cloudless thunderstorm, looking for a shred of comfort, but finding only the jagged feeling of every nerve in your body feeling frayed, strained by this persistent kenopsia; stuck in this placeless place, an eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people, but is now abandoned and quiet.

We lose ourselves in the meaningless voices chattering away around us in anedoche, a conversation in which everyone is talking, but no one is listening. A kind of white noise; a comfortably numbing song. We say nothing, patiently waiting for our individual unspoken denial to unravel; the last moments of pure recall, reticent like a quiet dusk coming early. There is an ominous sadness of never being able to know how history would turn out.

“Beautiful and transient,” I sang back to you, my voice wrapping you'r being like soft and warm but deeply unsettling tendrils.

We said nothing for a while, struggling to understand, a quiet rebellion brewing inside. We could not rationalise it, could not fit any of it into boxes of meaning. There was a frustration with how long it took to get to know someone, to bind yourself to one life.

“There is a hidden sea buried deep,” I recounted the resplendent recitations of love as we walked past newly nascent nebulae coalescing. We witnessed the evolving evanescence unfolding universally in this nursery for the stars, full of wisdom and wonder. “Beyond loss, their lies the sublime.”

In our now aching cavernous state beyond lucidity there was only one thing. An empty bliss beyond this world. A realisation that the plot of our lives didn’t make sense anymore.

A place that was somewhere, everywhere at the end of time. A burning memory of retrogenesis.

Part of the grieving process is coming to terms with the prospect of never being able to speak to someone again, a feeling that leaves us within an existential vacuum, a pit in our throats and a constant dull ache that doesn’t seem to disappear. Somehow that feeling is worse when you’re grieving for a person who is still alive and breathing. I am an intense person, everything I do, I do with the fire of a hundred suns.