At Blockfabrik (1)
...The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
— David Foster Wallace, “this is water”
I’ve always loved D. F. Wallace’s definition of freedom, especially how he connected it with our day-to-day small deeds that accumulatively set aside unrequiting ones from others, however negligible it may seem.
Through unrequited love there’s a certain form of beauty that usually gets misrepresented by the byproduct of suffering, for instance the Sisyphean persistence in vein, or some idealized images of heroism, which I think too often threatens our genuinely kind intention to take care of others, exemplifying the danger of the signifier outweighing the signified. To me, the beauty of myriad attempts to sacrifice oneself lies exactly in daily mundanity, and is by definition self-contained within the word “unrequited,” in which “quit” marries the meaning “to clear, establish one’s innocence” in the Old French word quiter with the sense of “free, calm, resting” in Medieval Latin quietus and that of “take revenge; to answer, retort; to acquit oneself” in late 14c English 1. Being “un-re-quited”, therefore, enables one to revolve around the mass of love in such a precisely torturing way that, the further and harder the unrequiter stretches for freedom, the stronger the gravitational force one must battle against at a borderline escape velocity.
The new year started off with me rushing into two sport routines I’d never imagined myself to get involved in, but this somehow translated the state of being “unrequiting” into an inexplicable urge to live like a pot, to be filled with whatever things upcoming, and with non-negotiable silence.
Insomnia warmly got back to me on the day after my second try at bouldering. The sport itself, with its whole point of grabbing boulders and climbing up to the top, does not align well with how I lead my way in life. I told a friend in a semi-serious tone and instantly regretted drawing oversimplified conclusions right at the beginning. The friend, who’s been bouldering for over four years and now a regular boulderer, very skilled at recruiting people into his informal bouldering club, gets to observe how the beginner’s momentum might drive ones to different phases of learning that may or may not keeps galvanizing us into prolonged practices. I will try to boulder at least once a week, conditioned on my workload from school. I said. “But maybe, regardless of the workload from school.” I thought. Forcefully inserting structures into my schedule helps to squeeze out some leisure time when the constant white noise of anxiety becomes increasingly unbearable. So naturally we were sliding into conversations of I-have-no-plan-forward and moving-around-exhausts-my-relationships and so on; without any solution but a temporary way out, I remembered how I was stuck in a bouldering block earlier, unable to rely on my right arm to step upward steadily, nor was I bold enough to leverage my leg strength and maybe to fail more royally, as well as how I simply gave up in the (early) middle of that route and felt, time by time, a bit more amused by the limit of will when combatting with the fear of falling, physical weakness, and most strangely some indescribable form of loneliness. In one way or another I am getting better at being clumsy. I returned home in sparse, quiet flurries of snow, almost disappearing.