DEAR {REDACTED},
There are certain personalities which I have increasingly come to believe should not be left for very long without something sufficiently real depending upon them, and I do not mean that in the crude Protestant sense wherein a person must be kept endlessly working so that he might finally prove his usefulness according to whatever market is currently measuring him. I mean that some people appear to contain arrangements of force which become difficult to separate from the environments through which those forces have been given permission to move, and once that environment becomes too small, too artificial, too repetitive, too forgiving, or simply too absent, the forces do not disappear alongside it. They remain. They become unsponsored. They begin searching for somewhere else to go, and when there is nowhere else to go they will eventually turn around and discover the person himself as one of the last remaining objects upon which they can act. I have called some of these people hypervigilant, extroverted, sensation-seeking, restless, charismatic, aggressive, creative, compulsive, funny, confrontational, unusually sensitive, physically expressive, impossible to bore without consequence, although I am not confident any one of these terms is sufficient, nor that they describe a single faculty at all. Maybe the mistake is already happening there, in naming several movements as though they originate from the same thing. Still, I recognize the configuration. I recognize what seems to happen whenever a person who is built almost offensively outward is required for too long to live without an adequate exterior. He begins to consume himself. Not always dramatically. Sometimes he only agitates. Sometimes he provokes people who did nothing to him. Sometimes he becomes addicted to whatever produces enough sensation to temporarily resemble consequence. Sometimes he fucks people he does not love, gambles with things he actually cares about, manufactures enemies, discovers elaborate reasons to remain angry, over-identifies with his own suffering, becomes a performer of himself, or spends so long inventing situations in which something might finally happen that eventually the invented situations become his life. And occasionally no one outside of him notices anything at all because the violence has become entirely interior, which does not make it peaceful simply because nobody else can see it.
I have thought about prisons when considering this, and schools, and the many places where a person can become interpreted entirely through the visible consequences of whatever he learned to do with himself after the world had already failed to become intelligible to him. I have wondered, perhaps recklessly, how much latent ability exists inside institutions whose occupants we are socially permitted to understand only after their abilities have been subordinated to the fact of their failure. I do not mean that criminality evidences genius. It does not. I do not mean every destructive person was secretly one opportunity away from becoming an artist, nor would I insult either artists or prisoners by sentimentalizing them into the same convenient mythology. What interests me instead is how quickly we allow outcome to become retrospective proof of essence. A person becomes violent and therefore we imagine violence must have been the truest thing in him. Another becomes an athlete and suddenly every childhood excess is reread as competitive fire. A loud boy becomes a performer and his loudness acquires dignity in retrospect. Another loud boy becomes an inmate and the exact same loudness becomes one of many early warning signs everybody claims they should have noticed. What I distrust is not consequence but the laziness of the causal story. We begin at the collapsed roof and infer the architecture from debris. Home life, security, humiliation, expectation, attention, deprivation, boredom, physical intensity, opportunity, rejection, praise, fear, whatever else accumulates from above, all of it eventually settles upon some original temperament which may itself have contained no moral instruction whatsoever about what its own magnitude was meant to serve. Then the person becomes blamed for the posture through which he learned to carry the weight. Perhaps sometimes what required correction was not the existence of the force. Perhaps it was direction.
This is the distinction I cannot stop returning toward, because I am no longer sure that virtue always appears by subtraction. Aggression may become protection without ceasing completely to know what aggression is. Restlessness may become work. Risk may become sacrifice. Charisma may become care. Physical strength may become custodianship. Desire may become devotion. None of these equations are perfect and I would not want them to be, because the uglier version of this idea would imply that vice and virtue are secretly the same substance with different branding, which I do not believe. But there are capacities which seem to arrive in us morally unfinished, and I have started wondering how often we mistake the unfinished quality of a force for evidence that the force itself is corrupt. A person capable of obsession may also be capable of unusual fidelity. A person capable of domination may, under a different order, become unusually protective. Someone who is able to risk himself stupidly may eventually discover something worth risking himself for intelligently. The distinction matters because a person containing enormous outward-moving energy cannot simply be told to become smaller and then be expected to interpret his reduction as health. You may teach him to imitate smallness. You may punish eruption until quietness itself becomes a survival technique. You may convince him that his magnitude has been the common denominator underneath every problem he has ever caused, and perhaps some of those problems really were his fault, perhaps most of them, but shame remains a poor cartographer. It can tell a person that something inside him must never move again without teaching him where movement might have belonged. There is a difference between restraining a force and giving it an object worthy of being restrained for.
This may be why responsibility has begun appearing to me as something much stranger than duty. We have inherited a childish idea of freedom wherein freedom increases proportionally with the removal of whatever might demand something from us. No obligations, no bindings, no fixed expectations, no hierarchy capable of disciplining appetite, no person sufficiently dependent upon our presence that absence begins to acquire moral consequence. But I do not know many people who became free that way. I know people who became available. I know people who became entertained. I know people who acquired options. Freedom seems to happen elsewhere, and rather irritatingly it seems to happen around the exact things we are told freedom ought to exclude. A child who cannot feed himself. A student who notices whether you appeared prepared. A craft whose material punishes false technique. A relationship which refuses to remain whatever story you wanted it to be. A promise which becomes inconvenient after enthusiasm has worn away. An animal who must be fed regardless of whether you are depressed. A God who cannot be reduced into an ornament for whatever desire happened to arrive first. Something has to become resistant enough that agency finally encounters an exterior which does not merely mirror it. Something must possess its own requirements. Something has to occasionally defeat you. Otherwise the personality is left to negotiate only with itself, and the self is very good at counterfeiting necessity whenever necessity has not otherwise appeared.
And this is probably where my thinking stops being psychological because eventually agency runs directly into desire, and desire cannot be spoken about honestly for very long before the body begins making a mockery of whatever clean abstraction we had prepared. Before language teaches us how to describe ourselves there remains the animal fact. I am hungry. I want sex. I become angry. I want recognition. I notice movement. I want to win. I become jealous. I want tenderness. I want conquest. I want to be left alone, and then I resent being alone. Seek, seek, seek. There is something almost humiliating about incarnation when described without ceremony. Whatever spirit means, it has accepted for itself an arrangement in which experience must arrive through blood pressure, hormones, exhaustion, appetite, time, pain, fear, pleasure, digestion, sexual desire, deterioration, memory, physical distance and the fact that everything capable of being touched has simultaneously become capable of being taken away. We spend enormous portions of our religious lives speaking as though this material enclosure is principally what must be escaped, but I am beginning to wonder whether I have held the proposition upside down. Perhaps the body does not only limit spirit. Perhaps it is the body which allows something spiritual to acquire stakes at all. Courage means very little where injury is impossible. Sacrifice becomes incoherent if nothing can be lost. Restraint requires appetite. Fidelity requires the possibility of betrayal. Mercy requires the real capacity to punish. Mortality does not merely threaten meaning. It may be one of the conditions through which meaning becomes expensive enough to become meaningful.
The body enacts the soul. I do not know whether I believe that sentence completely yet, which is perhaps why I believe it more than the sentences I am most immediately certain about. Flesh allows consequence to occur. It permits the invisible to enter causal reality. An intention can become action. An appetite can be refused. Love can cost something. Fear can be crossed through. Desire can become obedient to something which does not speak as loudly as desire. This is where sin becomes more interesting to me than prohibition. There is nothing especially compelling about an administrative universe in which some actions receive approval and others do not, as though morality consisted principally in discovering which doors have been marked EXIT. Sin becomes interesting because flesh places us inside a field of possible deviation. To have a body means that some things feel good which are not therefore good, some things hurt which are not therefore evil, and some interior forces speak with enough volume that the person begins confusing volume with authority. I want it, therefore it is mine. I fear it, therefore I should flee it. I am angry, therefore my anger understands what happened. I desire, therefore desire has interpreted reality correctly. No. Why should appetite inherit the throne merely because it arrived first? To deny a carnal impulse is not necessarily repression and it is not necessarily wisdom either. It may simply be the first moment in which a person discovers that not every force appearing from within him possesses an equal right to become him.
Perhaps this is also what darkness is for, or at least what darkness is not. We seem tempted toward two stupid extremes. Worship it because it feels honest, primal, forbidden, powerful. Or amputate it because its existence threatens whatever clean identity we have constructed around being good. But both positions allow it too much authority. Maybe darkness is material. Maybe it is pressure awaiting order. There are aggressive capacities which should never disappear because somebody may eventually need defending. There are appetites which should become disciplined rather than murdered because desire, once ordered, can carry a person further than disgust ever will. There are people whose capacity for obsession will probably remain dangerous for the rest of their lives, though perhaps the same architecture is what will eventually allow them to care for a child at three in the morning, study some impossible craft for twenty years, remain beside a sick person when everybody else becomes uncomfortable, or pray after the prayer has ceased to feel like anything. The difference between the man devoured by a chasm and the man who learns to stand over it may not be that one possessed less darkness. Perhaps somebody, somewhere, taught one of them what darkness could be placed underneath.
This is what keeps bringing me back toward water. I do not think I invented the metaphor consciously. It appeared while I was speaking and then became more accurate than whatever I was attempting to say before it appeared, which is occasionally how thought behaves when you have finally exhausted your ability to control it. A wave rises from the ocean and becomes visible because something temporarily gives it form. We can point toward it. We can photograph it. We can describe its height, direction, violence, beauty. It is not unreal simply because it remains ocean, yet whatever independence we attribute to it has already been conditioned by the larger substance through which it arose. The wave is secondary in form and not in substance. Then it breaks. From the perspective of the wave this appears to be destruction because the configuration through which it recognized itself has disappeared. From the perspective of the water almost nothing has been lost. The difficulty is that we live as configurations and therefore understandably experience the preservation of our configuration as though it were identical to the preservation of being itself. I do not know how far this metaphor is permitted to travel before it becomes dishonest, but it continues some distance. A droplet retains shape because a boundary allows water to behave locally as though it has ended. Surface tension becomes identity without becoming substance. Then another sufficient body of water reaches it and the boundary ceases to survive contact. The two do not merely touch. They reorganize.
There may be encounters in human life which work this way. Not because persons literally dissolve into one another, which would be sentimental nonsense, but because some realities are large enough to render a previous boundary inadequate. Love does this. Grief does this. Responsibility does this. Beauty can. Death certainly can. God would have to, if by God we mean anything more serious than the largest concept we were capable of manufacturing. Some encounter arrives which does not depend upon our comprehension in order to remain real, and suddenly the border through which we had been saying here I end is no longer sufficient. Perhaps reverence begins there. Not in understanding something perfectly, but in discovering a reality whose existence does not wait for my agreement. Faith then becomes less interesting to me as the possession of propositions and more interesting as the willingness to accept responsibility for collision. We are very good at standing beside the ocean defining water. We can speak about its composition, its salinity, its symbolic function, the moon, tidal force, gravity, maritime history, baptism, whatever else allows us to remain perfectly dry while becoming progressively more educated about what it might mean to enter. Eventually you have to jump through the fucking wave. Otherwise explanation becomes another border, and intelligence becomes one of the most sophisticated instruments we have invented for preventing reality from occurring to us.
Maybe this is why incarnation itself becomes such a strange privilege. To become physically alive is to become vulnerable enough for something to happen. We spend the next several decades resenting the arrangement. We resent time because it alters what we love. We resent hunger because it reminds us we are dependent. We resent uncertainty because knowledge cannot guarantee survival. We resent pain, aging, separation, deterioration, and especially the fact that anything sufficiently precious to become beloved has therefore become something we can lose. Eventually someone calls this meaningless. I understand why. But meaninglessness itself may contain an opening because once life has failed to guarantee meaning according to our preferred measurements, we encounter limitation again. Flesh again. The temporary numerator suddenly behaving as though it has forgotten the denominator beneath it. And I keep thinking about seeds here because potentiality has been lied about in much the same way freedom has been lied about. We treat potential as though it were the highest condition of a thing because potential contains every possible future without yet having sacrificed any of them. A seed is clean in this sense. Perfectly enclosed. Capable. Untested. Then life occurs to it and ruins everything. It cracks. Dirt enters. One possibility begins consuming the others. The seed cannot become the plant while remaining perfectly capable of becoming something else. Becoming costs potential. Actuality destroys alternatives. There is no life without this contamination. A thing becomes itself by losing its pristine capacity to become indefinitely otherwise.
Which may be why flesh must rot. Not because rot disproves life, but because any temporary coherence which has borrowed matter eventually returns what it borrowed. Dead things feed living things. Failure reorganizes will. Pain can rearrange priority, although of course pain is not automatically wise, and anyone who has suffered pointlessly knows the offensiveness of pretending otherwise. Grief changes whoever remains. A person loses an identity and becomes capable of inhabiting another. Something dies and continues exerting causality through people who remember it incorrectly. A father is absent and may still occupy more psychological territory than strangers physically sitting beside his son. A teacher dies and continues speaking through a student who has forgotten the teacher’s exact words. Civilizations collapse and leave categories inside minds which no longer remember where those categories came from. Dissolution does not erase consequence. If it did, then every love would eventually be retroactively defeated by death. Beauty would only mean delayed decomposition. Attachment would become an error exposed by enough time. But life does not behave that way while it is happening. It continually feeds its previous forms into subsequent ones. Nothing living remains pristine because life contaminates itself with experience, and perhaps this is not contamination in the ordinary sense at all. Perhaps this is what participation costs.
I think this is where agency finally becomes clearer to me, though perhaps only because I have exhausted several worse definitions. Agency is not infinite choice. It is not the childish fantasy of existing without boundaries. It may be the capacity to participate consciously in what those boundaries are becoming. A high-agency person therefore does not necessarily require fewer constraints. He may require better ones, more serious ones, realities sufficiently difficult that his force cannot immediately metabolize them into stimulation. This difference between reality and stimulation matters enormously to me. Stimulation exists principally according to what it does to me. Reality retains requirements independent of me. A craft resists bad technique. A student remains confused even when the lesson sounded brilliant inside my head. A child still needs breakfast after I have constructed an impressive philosophy of fatherhood. A partner remains another person no matter how thoroughly I have interpreted her. God, if God is real, must remain God whenever my interpretation becomes inconvenient. Something genuinely exterior cannot merely flatter agency. It has to interrupt it. Resist it. Occasionally defeat it. Make it responsible for effects it did not intend. Otherwise what I call agency may only be appetite with better vocabulary.
And perhaps the people I began with, Kaelin included, are especially vulnerable to this confusion because a person possessing unusual amounts of outward-moving energy can survive for years by finding increasingly elaborate things against which to throw himself without ever discovering what deserves the throw. Everyone around him sees movement and assumes movement means direction. He may even believe it. But there are days in which the chasm becomes quieter, and those days have become more interesting to me than whatever theory I might construct around the louder ones. What is he doing when he is not consuming himself? Who depends upon him then? What kind of work exhausts him without hollowing him? What responsibilities make him more alive rather than merely more occupied? When does aggression become protection without announcing that it has become virtuous? When does restlessness become workmanship? When does charisma stop collecting attention and begin distributing courage? When does risk become sacrifice? When does desire become devotion? These are not poetic substitutions. They are questions about direction. Whatever force exists beforehand remains dangerous precisely because it is real. The task is not to pretend it away.
I may be describing conversion. Not conversion as ideological migration, not simply becoming the sort of person who assents to the correct religious statements, but conversion as the reorientation of existing force toward an object capable of ordering it without annihilating it. The wave is not asked to cease being water. The seed is not insulted by becoming the plant. Appetite is not proven evil because it requires discipline. A powerful person is not made holy by becoming weak. Something changes direction. Something becomes subordinate. Something discovers that its magnitude was never a sufficient argument for its own authority. And there is probably a strange relief inside that discovery because the person no longer has to spend every waking hour inventing something large enough to deserve himself. He is finally encountered by something which does not need his invention.
Maybe this is what I have been attempting to say for thirty minutes. Some people need extraordinary amounts of exterior reality shoved into their fucking face, not because they are more important than anyone else, and not because intensity itself confers nobility, but because unused force does not become peaceful merely by being denied an object. It folds. It becomes recursive. The person eventually discovers himself as prey. Perhaps this is why nurturing, coaching, teaching, fatherhood, building, protecting, serving, tending, making, all of these functions recur whenever I imagine what healthier trajectories might look like for such people. Each one grants agency while simultaneously fastening agency to something which cannot be reduced entirely into the self. You are permitted to matter, but only because something else matters too. You are permitted strength, but strength acquires an object. You are permitted desire, but desire discovers hierarchy. You are permitted darkness, but darkness is no longer worshipped as evidence of profundity nor amputated as evidence of shame. It is placed underneath.
And if I return finally to the chasm, I am less convinced than I was when I began that the chasm signifies absence. Sometimes hollowness may be shaped by what has not yet found its adequate object. Sometimes the appetite itself teaches us something concerning scale. Flesh mistakes appetite for will. The person mistakes his own abyss for the absence of God. Perhaps occasionally the abyss is only the negative shape created by a capacity which has not yet discovered what it was built to receive. I would be careful here because this thought could become flattering very quickly. People love being told their dysfunction is secretly evidence of enormous spiritual capacity. Usually it is not. Sometimes a hole is a hole and sometimes destruction is exactly what it appears to be. But there are also days when someone previously organized around appetite becomes peaceful inside obligation, when the person becomes useful without needing usefulness to become an identity, when he can protect without dominating, desire without consuming, lead without requiring submission, work without turning work into proof of worth, love without converting another person into medicine. I would pay attention to those days. Not proof. Evidence. Something in them may reveal the shape of whatever exterior can receive the person without merely reflecting him back.
Perhaps the wave was never being asked to become smaller. Perhaps it only had to remember that an ocean existed.
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CAMIGULA D. STEPHENS, | 10.03.26
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