Sunday, November 20, 2005

Getting In

In a way, I suppose, it is the final smash of all my hopes.* If it's not possible to simply jump the fence by a physical laying-on of hands, then it's simply not possible, in that way -- for me -- at all.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is hilarious that MG, whom I barely knew, and on whom I had a stupendous crush, should show up on the New School list at precisely this time. God always has gone in for heavy-handed obvious underlining.

You could put it this way -- I will never get in, so long as I want to get in. Not only because "them as asks don't get," though that's (trivially) true as well. There's a structural reason for it. Even if I got in, I would not be able to recognize it as in. My wanting excludes me all by itself, before any other player even steps on the boards.

Because after all, I have gotten in. Many times, many places, including many places I had no business being in. The problem is not that I can't get in. It's that I can't be in. And that has nothing to do with MG, or with laying on hands, or anything else in the external world. It's right here in the rag-and-bone shop. It's in the nature of the wanting.

(Craving is probably a better word than wanting, except that craving specifies intensity, and this can be the faintest velleity. It's not the intensity. It's the nature of the expectation, a certain dissociation or dishonesty, It's "having something to prove.")

So what does all this mean?

Well, among other things, it means this -- that I am already in. My job now is to learn to see that.

*For those of you unacquainted with my equanimity in the face of moderate failure -- not to worry. This typically extravagant response is simply to having done a not-terribly-successful massage a few days ago

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