Just Like Lilith
Upon Returning from Urbit Assembly
As an American growing up in New York City who didn’t travel much as a child, Europe had an implicit set of archetypal markers. “Glittering images” make up your vision. Perhaps a series of recurring dreams about a specific city. What was yours? Mine was Bruges. No idea why at least for now. The subconscious makes what it wants out of perceived randomness. Europe is both dream and externality. It is a collective of subconscious impressions and conscious narrative. I read enough Miller and Nin to splice it in. The 2004 Jean Cocteau exhibit and film screenings at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Before Sunrise, art-history classes in high school, World War II first person shooter video games. A place is a process of dreaming before you encounter it as a real person, that is to say, the place itself personified.
Carl Jung writing about encountering symbolism in dreams before knowing the actual symbols writes:
Before I discovered alchemy, I had a series of dreams which repeatedly dealt with the same theme. Beside my house stood another, that is to say, another wing or annex, which was strange to me. Each time I would wonder in my dream why I did not know this house, although it had apparently always been there. Finally came a dream in which I reached the other wing. I discovered there a wonderful library, dating largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Large, fat folio volumes, bound in pigskin, stood along the walls. Among them were a number of books embellished with copper engravings of a strange character, and illustrations containing curious symbols such as I had never seen before. At the time I did not know to what they referred; only much later did I recognize them as alchemical symbols. In the dream I was conscious only of the fascination exerted by the entire library. It was a collection of medieval incunabula and sixteenth-century prints. The unknown wing of the house was a part of my personality, an aspect of myself; it represented something that belonged to me but of which I was not yet conscious. It, and especially the library, referred to alchemy, of which I was ignorant, but which I was soon to study. Some fifteen years later I had assembled a library very like the one in the dream.
Lisbon did not have to be more than what it was for it to be myth.
On the beach in Lisbon a day after Urbit Assembly’s final day I sat by the water with my current lover and a close new friend. In the sand I lost a ring gifted to me five years prior by a former lover. In conversations our friend learned of his own romantic betrayals, a revelation that would stay with him for the rest of the trip.
Life is a series of changes. Often times changes we are deeply unprepared for.
Is a child that experiences death very young more primed for the experience later on or is it just mere trauma? Is someone who experiences no loss until an old age ever ready for it? Is it better to know these experiences young? None of these are questions I can answer. You can embrace anti-fragility as much as you want, but nothing prepares you for death, nothing prepares you for loss, betrayal, for real imposing, present, forms of mourning.
My friend on the beach discovered his then girlfriend was seeing him and another man at the same time. My ex who gifted me the ring entered my apartment in June while I was away on a trip and stole my cat. My beach friend’s deceitful girlfriend’s ‘other man’ would later throw away an over twenty-year friendship with me, collapsing our podcast project together, changing the account passwords under the same cover of night and deceit. Stealing a cat or stealing a podcast, here they’re more or less the same. But experience teaches you a lot of things. One is letting go of things that are below you, beyond saving, or simply too far out of the course of your life. Can loss teach you something about life?
Absolutely. But you’re going to have to feel it first.
No one will prepare you for it. The good news is, loss is unavoidable. Your parents will die, your possessions will burn, you’ll experience heartbreaks, deaths, betrayals. The inevitability touches everyone on every socioeconomic class, in every place, (perhaps not those with below 80 IQs, but let’s ignore that). You will have to face it eventually. And eventually someone very important will betray you, your house will burn down, life will ebb and flow into change and you will feel it. Really feel it. But you’ll be ready to move on moments later. You will be prepared for whatever action you need to take next. You literally have no other choice.
The ring my ex-girlfriend gave me was an elegant silver ring carved in the shape of a barn owl face. I wore it for five years without fail. Owls are associated with folklore going back to antiquity through to ancient Sumer, Ishtar, Lilith, Inanna. Mid century American myth associates them with alien-abductions, nocturnal supernatural visitors of the 3:33 witching hours. Owls are representations of transitionary liminal spaces. Have you ever encountered an owl is the woods while camping? When no one is around? There is something moving and arresting. Recall The Giant, “the owls are not what they seem.”
I dug through the sand trying to find it. The ring couldn’t have been outside of a small four square foot area where we sat. But it wasn’t the pain of losing it that stopped me there, but the release of something I had held on to so passionately. What I left in the Lisbon beach was the last of my pain attached to my ex-lover of five years. I could fill that small bird with all of it, leave it there in a beautiful setting where she, the little owl could return just like Lilith or Inanna, back to a netherworld in sand and water. She could complete her cycle back to earth, and I would have to inevitably, like we all must eventually, learn to move on.