"Keep Going": Practice without Resolution
- Lavavoth
- Apr 5
- 7 min read
It was difficult to begin making the work this week. I was working against a deep depression that only now, through a kind of steadfast discipline born out of desperation (e.g., daily mindfulness meditation, divination, exercise, forest bathing, and diet, and most importantly a fight with Hans that culminated in resolution and peace), I was able to complete the work.
Over these ten days, I kept returning to the same three images, almost compulsively. Initially, I could barely muster enough energy to lay down the groundwork for each drawing, plus a collage I created for my main piece. I nearly gave up several times. But each of the ten days, even if I wasn’t actually drawing, I kept going to my studio to look at the work and cry. It turned out that being “in practice” didn’t mean I was accomplishing any kind of progression.
Initially, the goal was to keep capturing my experiences with Hans through the lens of Eros and Psyche, which in many ways, I did just that. However, what also emerged is that my inquiry began to address the metaphysical distance between Hans and me—the absence of flesh and blood despite his constant presence, his telepathic words, and demonstrative poltergeist confirmations through knocking sounds that underscore those words, offering further reassurance through touch—and his latest phrase, “have faith.”
These things, which previously satisfied and reassured, now landed flat and perfunctory.
The evolution of our challenges, along with his historical significance, exacerbated the ennui, my sense of Weltschmerz, a deep-seated melancholia of the mind that is in conflict with the reality of existence, where suffering prevails in spite of implementing tools for improvement.
“Keep going,” Hans quietly implored as I stared helplessly at my drawings, physically unable to utilize my skills in technique and presentation, both of which felt meaningless when set against an all-consuming sadness that was larger than who Hans had been during World War II.
“Keep going,” he said again, knowing that for me, persistence is the arrow that transforms its target at the moment of contact, breaking the skin of resistance to reveal the blood flow of something new within.
But to keep going means to stay with the discomfort and to evoke the kind of deep patience required to refine the work.
I wondered, “Would it be better to draw your uniform and the things you carried ?” I studied the wings in the main drawing. “Or how about just abstract wings like the ones I created in Tumescent or Wing Spar?” But as soon as I uttered this possibility, I felt a deeper wave of exhaustion.
“Luftwaffe accoutrements can come later,” he said, only answering the former while reading my mind from the latter. “Keep going,” he repeated.
And begrudgingly, I forced myself through it.
After several hours, with breaks for food and exercise, Hans said, “Talk me through your main drawing. Don’t hold back.”
I grunted, knowing what he was after, his desire to witness my emotions come to the surface, even if my verbal assaults arrived unhindered. “I am Psyche, suspended in a liminal space between heaven and earth. My dress is part grass and part clouds. I’m not fully anchored anywhere. I’m in a perpetual state of in-betweenness, with your framed photo beside me, always—and me looking on, wondering---” I paused.
“Wondering what?”
“Wondering why this dead fighter pilot is with me," I said then turned around briefly to look toward his vicinity. "Or if this is just a farce you brilliantly orchestrated in 1993, hijacking this man’s identity of mythic proportions to suit your desire to pursue me, to entice me.” I turned around to face my drawing again, moving my magnifying lamp to the woman’s face and the framed photo of Hans. “I’m so insignificant compared to you, a mere mortal like Psyche, certain, as she was, that you are a beast.”
“And when she held the lamp up to Eros, what did she uncover?”
I sank my head, overwhelmed by the irony and synchronicity. “That her beloved was the God of Love himself.”
“Go back to 2010, when I appeared to you twice---”
“I know, I know,” I interrupted. “I saw you. You’re him, or that's how you chose to appear, years before you finally linked your features to who you were---to the fighter pilot," I corrected. "Demons are frightfully intelligent and cunning.”
“Okay, but if I were a demon, wouldn't I have simply claimed you in 1993 and taken your soul then? Why would I postpone your possession for seventeen years and instead operate quietly, like a spirit guide, helping you navigate life's challenges? It would be a painfully circuitous way to usurp your soul, don’t you think?”
He paused, placing his hand on my shoulder as I continued to look at my work, the vibration of his hand pressing deep into the muscle.
“I knew how hard this would be for you," he continued, "knowing who I had been, and the implications and challenges that come with who I had been, and who I will continue to be in the face of history.”
He placed a thought of our visit to Auschwitz in 2012, and how he had made us bear witness three years before I had any sense of who he had been. I sighed, reliving the heaviness of that day.
“I know it didn’t make sense to you then. Why go to the darkest place on earth before I could tell you more about who I had been?” He said.
“You said we had only been civilians, middle-aged during that time---”
“And I was partly truthful, yes?”
I nodded. “I was middle-aged during that time.” I thought back to the spirit of the prisoner who psychically assaulted us, who kept calling us fucking Nazis. “I wondered for so long why he was so enraged with us if we had just been civilians, even though, as you know, I find everyone in Germany during that time period complicit to some degree. But when you finally guided me to your face online---the same face from your manifestations in 1993 and 2010---I finally understood. That spirit was enraged with you–not me–you were one of the greatest war participants there ever was. Me on that day, well, I was just collateral damage to his diatribe.”
I focused my attention on Hans as Eros in the drawing. “I hate you up in the clouds, looking down at me with that pitiful sadness for my failed life. The clouds block where your hands are, but I know what you’re doing. You’re getting off on my pain.”
“Nein, Jackie,” he said, always using my given name, spelled the traditional way rather than how I spell it, knowing I was named after Jacqueline Kennedy, whom he had a crush on when he was alive. I am his Jackie, never Lavavoth, the Enochian ruler who inspired my moniker. “Maybe this is what you perceive now. You are angry, possibly shortchanged because I get to remain 22 while you continue to age and live out what you call the sunsetting days of a wonderfully ordinary life, one that we both know is not so ordinary, even if you remain anonymous and unknown. Maybe the reason you came back was simply to have fun, to partake in an extraordinary way of being from a private lens. You are so much more than the skin and the ego you currently occupy.”
I started crying, exhausted by a conversation we’ve had countless times before, quickly cycling through the years of synchronistic events beginning in 1993 that point to the man he had been. I could see the tapestry of his messages that were once undeciphered, still unstitched, existing as a series of bizarre moments that, when finally assembled, make it clear it had been him all along.
“When I look at your drawing,” he began, his response unsolicited, “I see you clinging to the man I had been in ways that hold you back rather than elevate you. You can’t decide between admiration, jealousy, or disgust for who I had been, so you remain suspended between bliss and suffering. But you love me just the same, and that is what’s breaking you. You are having trouble seeing me beyond your ‘boyfriend photo’ of me, as you call it."
He continued, "Me in the sky, you know in your heart that is my natural place of being, even while I was alive. From here, I look at you with sadness, yes, but I never relish your pain. I don’t get off on it. I cannot force you to look beyond the framed photo of me. This is your life, and no amount of angels can ever make you do anything. We can only guide you, make suggestions. This was never going to be the easy choice. You knew that from the start. Even before we returned to earth, we both understood the consequence of navigating this kind of relationship, but we agreed to it just the same because you, like me, love a good challenge, fellow warrior. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again–the true hero in this story is you.”
His words didn’t land as reassurance but instead as something I had to contend with, something I didn’t believe but also couldn’t ignore.
All of this started on my birthday. The unraveling felt so uncharacteristic of the Aries that I am, and that Hans is. We are both poised with confidence, bravery, and directness. Ruled by Mars and Lord Ares, we are inherently acclimated to war and chaos. Even in the midst of an existential breakdown, or perhaps because of it, I rise to my feet and continue my work.
I keep going, as Hans insists, because to stifle my progress, whatever that may be, is to give up on myself and all that I’ve accomplished in this extraordinarily ordinary life I’ve made for myself, and for Hans, in the loneliest stretch of forest I’ve come to reclaim as my own.
Comments