Zach said it best while looking at a nondescript field in East Lansing: “I’m actually going to miss this town.” All too true my friend.
Let us think of our friends not by how we greet each other, but by how we part.
The five residences I’ve lived in for the last five years have are all known by first or last names. Alphabetically: Elsworth, Gilchrist, Jeanne’s, Phillips, and Ulrich Zasius. These mostly year long engagements were broken up by short stays with my parents or friends. With less than 48 hours left in the US before another year abroad, I’ve begun to think more seriously about this life of unrest. A life defined by saying goodbye. The goodbyes I’ve been able to say in the last few days helped shape the axiom above. And like Zach, I can’t help but feel a little remiss to be saying goodbye again.
The social imperative to “network” in order to make “contacts” so that we can “get out there” and “sell ourselves” has some necessarily unfortunate consequences. I’ll leave the Marxist inspired discussion of self-motivated alienation to one with a more materialist worldview than me. What I think is important to note is how this imperative cultivates a culture of constant introductions and greetings at the expense of being able to say goodbye. Ours is a society that has as many ways and means to meet new people as the pope has to offend. What we’ve lost, forgotten, or never knew how to do is to say goodbye. Of course we depart out of necessity, but never with the grace and tact–the nuance, as JumpinFrog would say–as our greetings. Granted, my own departing-ineptitude may be coloring this argument, but I stand by the principle. Let’s put it another way in order to return to our axiom and thus bring this discussion to a close.
We spend our lives learning to cope and confront the last goodbye: death. I don’t think this is a controversial position. Why do we want to live life “to the fullest?” Because eventually it will end. Why do all religions invest a large part of their doctrines in developing a discipline attitude toward the nature of mortality? Because it’s nature is to bring death. Why can the dead bring us to tears? Because they are the dearly and truly departed.
Thought of in this way, a goodbye is never a goodbye, but rather a tremor that forewarns that goodbye, which we are always eluding. Until we are not. The stutters, awkward handshakes, hugs and kisses, and heartened promises are precipitated by an impossible thought–a thought of nonbeing, of separation, of incompleteness.
Certainly we form ourselves through the people around us, the places we visit, and the thoughts that form our everyday life. In this way to speak of the “self” is always to speak of an”Other.” As indebted as my opinions on this matter are to Derrida, Lacan, and Levinas, the self/other dichotomy–constructed intersubjectivly–is problematic at best and misrepresenting at worst. Suffeict it to say (for {on being invisible} at least) that if our notion of the self comes through an other, to say goodbye is to prohibit that aspect of the self from developing: to kill one’s self.
This is why I believe that all of our goodbyes are couched in the “till next time” sentiment. We desperately hope that those worthy enough to say goodbye to are also true enough to find again, its those parts of our self, which we are willing to say goodbye to, that we want to meet again. The fate of our self depends on it.
If only it were so simple. Bidding farewell may be a small scale suicidal performance, but we do it because of the promise of resurrection. The open-endedness of our goodbyes betrays our belief in a new and glittering future. We must be able to walk away in order to come back. This is the crux of the cultural paradigms that demand social networking. Our interconnectedness promises unlimited intersubjectivity, wherever we go, however far we travel we can always reach out to our old neighbors and lovers. It sounds like a utopia of intersubjectivity, and yet more than ever we are unable to firmly understand who and where we are.
My contention is that saying goodbye is as critical to a notion of intersubjective space as connectedness. Departing, walking away, letting time pass are nessecary counterpoints to meaningful relationships and recognizable identities. To put it simply: If life is meaningful because it will end, our self is whole and our friends are valuable because we leave them. To say goodbye is to kill part of the self, but its a nessecary death, which promises new and meaningful formations of the self.
This post has long left the impetus of its departure. I’m an hour closer to another goodbye. The memories of the last five years are imprinted in mosaics across my thoughts. Like Zach, the dirty old town of East Lansing went from the epitome of freedom, to the last wall of escape, and now to the aches of nostalgia.
goodbye my fancies.
{on being invisible} 