All Those We've Gone Down the Row With
It’s a sort of remembrance, too, when we speak of other years and remember our younger selves and the absent and the dead—all those we have, as we say, “gone down the row with.”
- That Distant Land, Wendell Berry
Where in memory does relationship lie? Is it in each experience I’ve had with a person, celebrated when remembrin’ the times? Is it in the emotional tones evoked when I think of them? Is it in the etchings of the faces that linger in the imaginally infused air in front of my face? Where is my knowing of you? To what facet of being do I owe our roots and binding?
I disdain to believe that our love perishes with our bodies, yet every sinew and fascial flex sings of your imprint on me. The pattern of our coshaping lives in my body, but is not contained by it.
One of the best compliments I’ve ever received was from a friend and mentor of mine who told my girlfriend and me that our relationship was delightful company. Anyone who’s hung out with a couple for an extended length of time knows what it’s like for the third person of a romantic duo to be an obnoxious guest in the group field. He makes a comment that provokes a grimace on her and suddenly the air that we’re all breathing is infected with the stench of their bad vibes. To hear that a wise friend felt the presence of our romantic third was an angel not a demon was a blessing and ornament on our love.
So the relationship exists not just in the bodies of those related but in the bodies of all who encounter them. It is not just a governor within the relationship but an ambassador without it. How far does this ambassador travel? Will a stranger in the Orient ever meet my relationship’s egregore? And do these angels—the invisible conductors of our connection—know each other? Does the entity that hovered over my childhood playdates know your marriage? Does the collection of dreams and nervous system states inhabiting American soil talk to the frisbee I tossed with a park stranger? And what is the nature of that relationship? Are they colleagues? Adversaries? How deep do our interconnecting roots go? And can we relate to those roots?
When my girlfriend asks, “can we talk about us?” she is calling for a council between each of us and the principality of our partnership. When I hold a group counseling session, I often ask the governing spirit that she be inviting today. Or maybe I ask how she’s feeling and she requests that we keep it light because she’s had a rough morning. The best teachers intimately know the air in the classroom and address it accordingly.
Our relationships outlive us. Who and how I know—that way in which I’ve met the world and its inhabitants—lives a bigger life than me. Or would it be more right to say that I live my life within it? Is not my every step nested in the consequence of every meeting, every commitment, every joining of eyes I’ve participated in? I live because I have known you. Even the tree outside my window doesn’t arrive at my heart before refracting through the mandalic array of every other heart I’ve encountered. This is part of what being a fractal being is all about. Each moment of unfolding experience is turning the kaleidoscope of the relations we’re entrenched in. To attend with presence to that experience is to love them all (or at least respect their existence).
I struggle sometimes to know what language will best make this intuition intelligible. I can speak of somatics and interpersonal neurobiology. I can speak of angels and the celestial hierarchy. I can speak of psychological dynamics and the psychoanalytic third. And perhaps I will. But those all serve as, at best, rhetoric. They’re all attempts to tell a story about what our relationships are. Different strokes for different folks; weaved yarns that serve to invite one more person to talk to me about the space between us. What’s it like being you here now with me here? I’ll tell you the same. When we share that with each other, we get a chance to meet our lingering third.
This has become an obsession for me. Whether it’s work with clients or hanging with mystically minded friends, I can’t stop turning my gaze towards what’s between us and inviting the other to join me. The more I pull this thread, the more it continually proves to be the most embodied, immediate, ontologically sound way of meeting the non-human agents we live amongst. As I climb up the ladder of angels, ushered through introductions up the chain of command of being, I see more clearly how the One Who Came Before lives in each point of contact between persons. And as I remember all those I’ve gone down the row with, I see and remember the Row. I want to say to each person who’s passed through me, “Thank you for being with me.”
Thank you, because you being alive to me has made me more alive and has made the Whole Show more alive. You and me? We did the human person thing together. We experienced life and made meaning out of it and experienced meaning-making together.¹ We jointly participated in the co-shaping of how self and world unfold! We did that together! That’s friggin RAD! I want to remember that.
As I prepare to die (not that it’s imminent, but aren’t we always preparing?) I ponder what I might like in the last moments. Most of us dream of being surrounded by loved ones, and I certainly hope for that, but really, how much do I need them all physically there? If I’ve lived well and let myself be affected by everyone I’ve loved, they are always with me. They are always alive to me. That’s what I want. People can be physically present without being alive to me. Ideally I have both, but if I have to choose, I’m picking aliveness. I’m picking the experience of each moment unfolding as a cascade of all those I’ve gone down the row with—not as nostalgic reverie (though, again, will take some of that too), but as the realization that my experience of self is a living testimony of every person I’ve ever known, loved, or been loved by.
Hell, I’d like to start experiencing that long before I die if I can manage it. Luckily for me, it doesn’t take much. It takes turning towards my experience with a wondering heart, and turning towards you with the same. The thing is, my experience is already the most beautiful symphony imaginable, composed of every love I have known (the Kingdom of Heaven is already at hand!). But my experience is also a bunch of other stuff. We tend to attend to the other stuff, and no fault there; lots of the other stuff is cool, too. But I want to ensure my ears are fine-tuned to listen to the symphony, because when all the other cool stuff of consciousness stops being interesting, the relational symphony plays on.
As I sit here with pen and empty page, considering how to end this piece, I feel called to describe this song of relationally infused self, knowing full well that that is just what can’t be done. At least not here, not now. But I can describe the feelings that accompany it. First is the gratitude, an unending spring of it. The gratitude for having been been-with. There’s also a grief. A grief for those who I’m no longer able to be with physically, but whose memory echoes through the way my eyes meet the world. Yet this grief brings a joy; a joy that I had the chance to be with you at all, to be shaped by you, however briefly, in however small a way. And there’s a laugh. To me, it’s like the laugh between two friends who just got off a rollercoaster, or an acid trip.²There’s a shared look that knows words can’t touch what just happened, but you and me? We know it. An inside joke of the soul. A laugh at how absurd the whole thing was. How completely beyond all sense to be made.
Laughter, grief, and joy all dwell together, nested and held in a love that witnessed the whole thing. A love that made possible witnessing the whole thing. A love that binds it all together. I’ve been referring to this colloquially as the joy-grief-laugh-love. It’s not the Thing itself, but it’s the delightfully agonizing (agonizingly delightful?) array of affect that tends to accompany it. That’ll have to do for now.
So where do relationships live? Where (what, how, who) is their ontological home? My best guess is somewhere around there. They live in That Distant Land³ that hangs above and within and beyond, shaping, restraining, and giving purpose and context to each moment, each action, each living glance. They’re in our loyalties. They’re revealed in the actions that remain unthinkable to us, or in those we are bound to live out. We remember our ancestors in the way we remember our friends in the way we remember God. This remembering is our guide, our compass; it’s the contour of our souls. Each step we take exists in the light of all those we’ve gone down the row with.
“it is important to distinguish between the meaning that is created, on the one hand, and the experience of creating meaning, on the other. These two aspects of experience are inseparable. The meaning that created… [has] to do with coming to understand oneself and the world in which one lives. In contrast, the experience of creating meaning… [has] to do with being and becoming more fully oneself.” - Thomas Ogden, What Alive Means
This book continues to bear so much fruit. Ogden is, in my experience, the most intelligible writer on psychoanalytic practice and theory. The rest of them seem to be, at times, intentionally obfuscating. He’s done so much to differentiate the epistemological and ontological aspects of psychoanalysis in a long-overdue way.
Or who went down cutting a row of tobacco together. This piece, while filled with thoughts I’ve been having, was given a body and life and name by the great Wendell Berry. I was with my girlfriend’s (Kentuckan) family for New Year’s and came across his short story collection, That Distant Land, on the shelf. I read the titular story and found myself inspired . Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing if you haven’t, but I’ll share with you guys the inspiring passage:
In the latter part of August we started into the tobacco cutting. For us, that is the great divider of the year. It ends the summer, and makes safe the season’s growth. After it, our minds are lightened, and we look ahead to winter and the coming year. It is a sort of ritual of remembrance, too, when we speak of other years and remember our younger selves and the absent and the dead—all those we have, as we say, “gone down the row with.
"They were rows to break a man’s heart, for, shaped as they were, you could not see the end, and those of us who were strung out behind the leaders could not see each other. All that we could see ahead of us was the cloudless blue sky. Each row was a long, lonely journey that, somewhere in the middle, in our weariness, we believed would never end.
Once when I had cut my row and was walking back to start another, Art Rowarnberry wiped the sweat from his nose on the cuff of his sleeve and called out cheerfully to me, “Well, have you been across? Have you seen the other side?”
That became the ceremony of that day and the next. When one of us younger ones finished a row and came walking back, Art would ask us, “Have you seen the other side?”
Burley would take it up then, mourning and mocking: “Have you reached the other shore, dear brother? Have you seen that distant land?” And he would sing,
Oh, pilgrim, have you seen that distant land?"