marginalia Douglas Abel

marginalia

Stuck on... me

A column by douglas abel

Attachment. A word with two distinct but related meanings, each one implying or generating the other. There is attachment as an observable fact, as a ‘thing’, or state, or situation: we have the fact that something--an atom, an object, an emotion, a human, an event—is joined or connected to something else. A is joined to B. Then there is attachment as action, the describable process by which things become joined together, the act of connecting itself. A is joining itself to B, or C is connecting A to B, or A and B are mutually coming together. There is the act of attachment, and there is the resultant—or causative—fact of attachment. Because things have been attached (process), they are attached (situation). And from those two phenomena, the act and the fact, come “life, the universe, and everything.”1

We (think we) know now that the basis of the cosmos and everything in it is the joining of sub-sub (-sub?) -atomic particles (or particle-like entities) through the action of four fundamental forces: gravity, the weak force, electromagnetism, and the strong force. The action of these forces on those particle-like entities causes infinite sequences of attaching and detaching— bonding, splitting, attraction and repulsion, exploding (banging), collapsing, etc. Smaller particles are attached to become neutrons, protons and electrons; neutrons, protons and electrons attach to form atoms; atoms form molecules; molecules form substances, substrates, proteins, plateaus, planets . . . and people. In other words, attaching and detaching result in the structure of . . . everything. The entire universe, at any one instant, could be described as a set of attachments. As the set changes, the universe changes. Attaching and detaching are the processes by which all things, from microbes to galaxies, grow and change, live and die. The sequence of attaching and detaching is the sequence of time itself.

Does time somehow ‘cause’ the change of attachments, or does the change of attachments cause or define time? Perhaps time is just a useful temporary (!) observation point from which to examine the universal attachment structure. Attachment is, in fact, a state and a process at the same time. So attachment may be another version of Einstein’s space-time—or vice versa!

Ideas of time and of change point to a crucial feature of attachment, as act or as fact. The process can usually be reversed; detaching can follow attaching, or precede it. Attachment is not necessarily or inevitably permanent. Joinings might last ‘forever’, or for a very long time. But there is nothing in either the process or the relation that says they have to endure. In the human world, the Christian wedding service enjoins, “What God has joined together let no man

1 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979. There is no obvious or necessary

connection between the idea of attachment and the number 42.

put asunder.” The implication is clear: even God-made attachments can be broken. Nothing that we can experience is “for ever and ever.”

What we, as humans, do experience is a life, through time, that is a linked sequence of changing attachments. In so many ways we are our attachments: what they have been, what they are, and what they will be. They drive us, change us, move us. Our story is a story of joining and separating.

I cling therefore I am.

We come into the world physically attached to another human being. Many would say that, throughout our lives, we are seeking ways to recreate the emotional and sensual effect of this first attachment. We want to be joined to others. We long for relationships. Loneliness can be terrifying. Isolation is used as a form of torture.

Yet, at the same time, our growth and development do and must involve detaching from people, situations and events: leaving home, graduating from school, sending children out into the world, switching jobs, retiring, losing loved ones to distance or death. Sometimes actively divorcing. Always, inevitably, dying. We change the links—to things, to people, to events, to emotions—that define us, and thereby change the self we are defining. The milestones of our lives are those moments at which significant changes of attachment are taking place. We gain things and we lose things, and our lives are thereby altered.

Is there a difference, in human terms, between ‘physical’ and ‘emotional’ attachments? Common sense would tell us that the former are somehow more ‘concrete’, and therefore more durable than joinings based on ‘mere’ sensation. Yet our lived experience tells us the opposite; emotional attachments are much stronger than physical ones. The attachment that is a memory, a persistent sensation, or a regret can linger long after any physical link has gone, or even after the object that was once attached has perished. Physical attachments can be broken; emotional ones are much harder to sever. Lives are defined by the fact that feeling-laden memories persist.

It is so often true that “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”2 But it is even truer that you do know, and feel, and crave, and long fully, once the thing that you had has vanished from your physical space.

But then again, it may be that all attachments, even ‘emotional’ ones, are, in some sense, physical, because they involve interactions of molecules and electro-chemical interchanges. In this sense, a ‘feeling’ of love is just as much—or just as little—a physical event as the hanging of a picture on a wall.

Buddhism takes a novel and disturbing view of our human attachments. For Buddhists, our attachment to five factors—form, sensations, perceptions, thoughts and consciousness—generate desires and cravings that can be never be satisfied. Those cravings cause suffering, and set in motion chains of action that lead to more attachments, craving and suffering. Attachments are the fuel that drives the wheel of karma and pain. To stop the wheel from turning, break the clinging that causes craving. Disconnect. Detach.

What a profound thought. And, for many Western minds, what a terrifying one.

For, if we are defined by our attachments, if we are the sum of them, what is left when those attachments disappear? Is there any self after detachment?

Attachments make us suffer: discard them.

Attachments make us grow, and change, and feel and love, and . . . live.

Do we dare to let them go?

When everything you had is gone, do ‘you’ go with it?

2 Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi,” 1970.

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