Repair and Grace

Inward force: the reduction of your spirit to a thing, the disfigurement of your relation to yourself; often manifested, but not always, as trauma. For context, read Weil's The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.

I once believed inward force to be totalizing - the complete, and utter disfigurement of what made me feel human. The inward force of affliction - the extremes of life slowly putting pressure onto my spirit until the inevitable fracture - seemed to be omnipresent across all aspects of my life: the way I spoke to others; the way I spoke to myself; the way I thought of others; the way I thought of myself. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing, in its own sick way, for the capability of man to systematically destroy another soul and to teach them to enslave themselves is a testament of both human capability and the fragility of the human condition. I held my own whip, and I never put it down as I walked across this realm. This felt encompassing.

Yet today I placed the whip down, and, for the first time, found myself disarmed.

It always has been the deeply social and personal situations that have brought me great strife. At the worst moments, even being perceived by another human was deeply troubling and stressful. Yet today I entered a tournament, stayed for the entire bracket, and, most importantly, hanged out with strangers for about 3 hours afterwards to eat dinner. For some reason, I did not care that they perceived me. I simply existed without a care of their thoughts of me. I had fun, yes, and I was authentically myself - quiet, finding myself engaging in conversation but reading Oppression and Liberty by Weil at the table. I went to the bathroom, and in the mirror I saw a beautiful human, not a tormented ghoul. But why was this deeply interpersonal moment not troubling to me if inward force is, supposedly, totalizing?

I suppose the first and easiest argument would be, "Marcus, you are healing!" And then I must wonder what the definition of healing is. The most obvious and socially accepted definition is a return to the original state of things, the threading of yourself back into something whole. But then I must ask, do former slaves or survivors of the holocaust ever return to their original state? I would guess not. Even if we contrast this conclusion with Epictetus, it is obvious that, despite his immense spirit, the person he became after surviving slavery is in no way the same as the person he would have been as a free man. I am trying to not project, but I imagine teaching others his inner strength and indifference to be partially restorative. His philosophy of freedom from inner control is the philosophy of a man altered by chains, not of one altered by freedom. Healing is certainly not restoration to your original state.

The second argument would be, "Marcus, you are replacing the cracks of your soul with gold!" This is a beautiful and aesthetic idea, but I believe its beauty to be problematic when discussing affliction. It is a gorgeous idea, but it is often used to render the deepest human pains palatable and aesthetic. If we examine the idea for its content, not its form, we see something somewhat closer to the truth: healing as a human would be taking the spirit's fractures and reconnecting each piece with some type of glue. The glue could be, as Weil would say, grace. But this implies a linear progression towards wholeness, and most importantly it requires a reconstruction towards our original state. This, as we contemplated, is not possible.

The final argument would be, "Marcus, you are learning to live beside the fracture without disguising it!" Not a return to wholeness, nor the gilding of reconstructive glue to my fractured spirit. Rather, the consent to unadorned, unfiltered confrontation with the inward force that enslaved me. To see without filter, to feel without filter, to surrender to grace without filter. To accept what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen in surrender. Grace itself is the most mysterious force; it can only fill the spirit's container where there is a void to receive it. Its mechanics are beyond my cognition. Paradoxically, to accept and widen the fractures, like a man peeling his own essence apart, is the precondition of grace. And only then may it enter that man's soul. Transfiguration requires deconstruction.

And so perhaps what I saw in that bathroom mirror was not the absence of fracture, nor the gilded repair of it, but the radiance of grace entering through it. A glimpse of myself not as a ghoul, not as a thing, but as, once again, a human.