„PARTIR EST MOURIR UN PEU“
„Every parting is a small death,“ or so the saying goes, which is to testify to the cost of a life without roots, or without the reliable givens (job, family, friends, place) which might allow us to wholeheartedly embrace the larger deaths… and, ergo, the larger life. For we are– these days, in this world– in what one might call „the parting business“ (l’occupation de mourir), and so– to hold to the metaphor of our original phrase– it makes absolute sense that we should be obsessed with le petit mort (the orgasm) as well.
Virtually assured by the culture that I will prematurely part from you (via divorce, infidelity, economics, etc.), that I will be parted (either by upward mobility, transfer, termination or early retirement) from my employment, that I will, in all likelihood, be parted repeatedly from my community and home (by the preceeding, and by an economic and spiritual system that treat „home“ merely as another consumer commodity to be traded and exchanged), I begin to live life as an excelerating series of „pre-emptive strikes“ against such partings– that is, by more partings. Until, finally, we arrive at a cultural situation in which the most-uttered word, no doubt, is the one having the most to do with death: Good-bye.
Perhaps not accidentally, the rhymes so poignantly explain it to us: partir/mourir, good-bye/I die. There is, of course, still a way for the individual to fight this drift: One can always find a way to rhyme oneself back into life: Shalom/I come, Hello/don’t go. But it leaves one feeling strangely like a renegade these days… or a poet whose method is no longer in vogue– a relic, a kind of dinosaur.