“... the exhausted can no longer possibilitate.”

On pain and enduring

Last weekend, I discussed a line from Jorie Graham’s Deep Water Trawling (2014), with participants in a workshop that was drawing to a close as a catastrophe beyond comprehension unfolded around us, bursting into wildfire at a speed that compressed days, hours to a prick of a needle. On the screen, names and faces appeared in a pigeon hole grid that hasn’t stopped feeling alien despite its alarming dailyness. Worry and dread had joined us for the evening, a call to take care prefaced every presentation. I looked down at my notebook and read:

I was very lucky. The end of the world had already occurred. How long ago
was that. I don’t know. It is not a function of knowledge. It is in a special sense
that the world ends. You have to keep living. You have to make it not become
waiting. 

I wanted to talk about the difference Graham draws between living and waiting. But I was already feeling tired. I haven’t stopped feeling tired for a long time. Tired is the journey and the destination, it is the constant state and something I am seconds away from. I shuffled a few lines around, willing my voice to not break. Time changes form when you’re speaking, it rushes out of clocks and gathers in the pulse. You stop keeping time and you begin feeling it, an altogether different measure. Living, perhaps and not waiting.

Since the past year I have been reading an essay by Deleuze called, “The Exhausted”. Right away he tells us that exhaustion and tiredness are different: “The tired has only exhausted realisation, while the exhausted exhausts all of the possible. The tired can no longer realise, but the exhausted can no longer possibilitate.” I have found a lot of comfort in this essay, it reminds me that I am still in the land of tiredness, I have yet to reach exhaustion—when I can walk out of the whole forest of realisable symbols that continue to bind me (“I will travel to every land I ever wanted to,” I exclaim the other day, a tired body’s hope; “I will be happy, I will be happy, I will no longer spend good days of sunshine being morose,” followed shortly).

 In the book “Exhaustion: A History”, Anna Katharina Schaffner traces the root of the word to “the act of drawing out or using up a limited supply: the English term derives from the Latin exhaurire, composed of the prefix ex- (out) and haurire (to draw).” This sense that there is a limited amount of realisations that you can achieve and that it is possible to reach the end of that rope, at its end is exhaustion, that exhaustion can be a gift, that it can lead to a refusal to realise within given paradigms, has been challenging to think about, even as I burrow into tiredness.


What exhaustion seeks is revolution, what tiredness needs is comfort. Tiredness wants to be told that things will rearrange themselves as they once were. Exhaustion knows that is not possible, that as Walter Benjamin, wrote about the world yet-to-come, “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven’t they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Personal events will become interesting again.

Hair will become interesting.

Pain will become interesting.

Buds that open out of season will become interesting.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;

their memories are what give them

the need for other hands. The desolation

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness

carved out of such tiny beings as we are

asks to be filled; the need

for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.

Don’t go too early.

You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a little and listen:

music of hair,

music of pain,

music of looms weaving our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,

most of all to hear your whole existence,

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

– Wait, Galway Kinnell

There’s a lesser-known work by Giorgio Agamben, called The Coming Community which begins with the statement: “The coming being is whatever being.” He clarifies that this “whatever” has the indifference we attach to the word, but it also holds the assurance of existence—the coming being is indifferent in that it exists, it does not matter in which state. He defines the state of “whatever” being as a potentia potentiate—pure possibility, a possibility that hasn’t taken a decisive shape or form, that exists as a faculty and not an outcome. The “whatever” thought is the very ability to think, not the arrival at a conclusion. Later in the book, he clarifies, why this coming being is “whatever”, we do not know it, for we cannot. “The innermost character of salvation is that we are saved only at the point when we no longer want to be. At this point, there is salvation – but not for us.” 

Reading Galway Kinnell’s poem, I realised I was approaching this all wrong, thinking of a future  limit to endurance where exhaustion may be sought. Perhaps such a borderland exists, but it is one of total exhaustion. Exhaustion could arrive in pieces, parts. The exhausted body doesn’t crumble into bits but sits, as Deleuze says “hands sitting on the table and head sitting on hands, head level with the table.” Increasingly, my repose resembles this attitude, the splaying of hands across a sturdy surface, the nestling of the head within the knot of arms, the dissolving of every feeling into the solidity of this state. Often now I think, do not sleepwalk into a previous world, do not desire an untarnished return.  In “The Pain Scale”, Eula Biss states that once a bodily state settles in, it is impossible to think beyond it: “After a year of pain, I realised that I could no longer remember what it felt like not to be in pain. I was left anchorless. I tended to think of the time before the pain as easier and brighter, but I began to suspect myself of fantasy and nostalgia.” I try to believe instead that it is safer to dip my toes in the coolness of memories, embrace the respite they bring from the heat of the present, but reject any relapse. Say: whatever I will be, whatever I will become—not a fatalist passivity but an urgent assertion of endurance, endurance beyond a familiar order of the world.

Beckett was exhausted, Deleuze writes, so he burnt holes in the surface of language. Sickness instructs us in exhaustion too, revealing the inadequacies, the non-realisables of language in the face of it. An image that has stayed with me through the years is from Virginia Woolf’s essay, “On Being Ill”, where she describes the condition of the sick to speak in a language that refuses such possibility: “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry . There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the inhabitants of Babel did in the beginning) so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.” I think of this image of collision, the friction of sound and pain to exit an exhausted language, when I think of how depleted our vocabularies are in the face of catastrophe, we cannot possibilitate. The stuffing of common words with meanings they can’t carry—okay, alright, well—melting  into a shared descriptive failure. Woolf says illness needs poetry, not prose, and I do think of the surge in sharing of poems in this past year, or even before in moments of crisis, when sentences have failed to make sense, and lines have come to the rescue. It is perhaps why I choose to end this letter with a question, lines from a poem (Revenant, Meena Alexander), to chew and ingest and store for the days to come:

If you were torn from me

I could not bear what the earth had to offer.

To be well again, what might that mean?

Image: Ramón Casas, Tired, c. 1895 - 1900. Image courtesy Dallas Museum of Art.