On Disintegration and Return (part 1)

A Form for Living

Jan 21, 2025

This is the first post in a three part series.

My Canarsie winter

One winter in my late twenties, I lived for six weeks in an Airbnb in Canarsie, a far flung neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. I was (surprise, surprise) in a moment of utter, existential confusion about my life. Sometimes I think about the time as being similar to this moment early in “On The Road” when Jack Kerouac describes feeling a sense of ghostliness—

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

In my small brownstone bedroom four blocks away from IHOP (the closest restaurant), I too woke up far from home, haunted and tired with travel, listening to the creaks of wood floorboards under shuffling feet overhead, and the sounds of the room’s radiator’s sad spasms and gasps, and cars sloshing through the sleety streets, all while the sun in its wintry dim blueness shone through my unshaded window, at least on the days when its light pierced the cloud cover.

And then—and this is where my comparison with Kerouac’s time breaks down—I spent my days attempting to avoid my overwhelming angst. I binge watched TV shows, scribbled observations in my journal, read books a few paragraphs at a time, mindlessly scrolled headlines on the internet. Sometimes I went for a cold wander around the neighborhood or trudged to the L train to take the subway an hour into Manhattan. I sat in coffee shops and dawdled some more. Sometimes—rarely—I talked to a person or two. The daylight hours seeped into darkness and, as my meager savings dwindled, the days blurred into weeks, and I felt increasingly desperate. Suffice to say that my six weeks lacked some of the romantic awe and brimming potential of Kerouac’s fifteen strange seconds.

Now, when I read through my meandering journal entries from those weeks, what I encounter is a yearning for form and shape in my life. On page after page, I ticked through options for my future that included joining the army or the coast guard or the foreign service, applying to grad school, returning to New Orleans and finding a new job, looking for service jobs in New York. At my most melodramatic, I longed for an illness that would at least clarify and justify a need to move back in with my parents. Floundering, I wanted to be able to say explicitly, I am X and I am doing Y. And I didn’t want to go back to what I’d been doing, I wanted to go forward. I just didn’t know which direction forward was.

On ‘form’

In his 1978 essay, “One Body: Some Notes on Form,” the poet Robert Hass writes, “The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself.” Hass is writing about form in poetry, and he goes on to describe how this repetition, when first experienced in life by young children, is the means by which they begin to recognize their own forms as people. “I thought they responded when I bent over their cribs because they were beginning to recognize me,” he writes, “Now I think it was because they were coming to recognize themselves.”

To Hass, artistic forms allow a person to experience again this surprising, enlivening sense of awakening anew to their own emerging form—what young children do so naturally by simple virtue of their own newness to experience. By mimicking the basic repetitive movement of life—what he calls, “disintegration and return”—artistic forms provide a mirror to our own processes of formation. The disintegration part of a poem leads us into experiencing again the fall into formlessness in life (see: my winter in Canarsie), the return shows us what it looks like to regain coherence. A good poem, he argues, sparks the feeling of awakening not by returning to the same place it started from, but to somewhere new.

Some other angles on formation

The very first sentence of Bereishit/Genesis, the first book of the Torah, describes how when God begins creating the heaven and earth, there is tohu vavohu—utter chaos—until ruach elohim—the divine spirit—meets that chaos al pnai hamayim—on the face of the water. Chaos and order, meeting on the ultimate field of unmitigated play—water, as you may recall, is what chapter 8 of the Tao suggests is best to be like (“Best to be like water / Which benefits the ten thousand things / And does not contend”)—this is the one of the most ancient formulas for formation we have access to.

The Jewish mystical tradition identifies this movement from chaos to creation as not just the beginning of the universe but the foundational ebb and flow of all being and becoming, a process that is repeated again and again at every level of existence, from the lofty heights of cosmic formation to the intimate formation of individual souls.

The Ba’al Shem Tov, considered the first of the rebbes of Hasidism1, made the relevance of this idea to individuals even more explicit. He taught that a self lives in a state of ratzo v’shov—run and return. According to the Ba’al Shem Tov, every person has within them a beam of light that provides a direct connection to the divine; in the privacy of our own hearts, we repeatedly run away from this beam and then we return to it. Continually departing from our most intimate relationships—with the divine and with our closest others, our beloveds—and then coming home to them, again and again, hopefully learning to return closer and closer to that intimacy, we are pulled by our deepening sense of yearning not to what was but to what has not yet been, each time closer to a form capable of ever renewing love.

Some enchanting questions

What can it mean to say that the form of a life emerges in a repetitive movement of returning to something that hasn’t yet been?

If form isn’t a static state, if it’s one of consistent change, how can it be distinguished from formlessness? Can it? Does it need to?

How do we locate where we might be in this dance of formation? Are we always somewhere inside the process of disintegration and return?

I don’t have answers to these questions, only an appreciation for their mystery and ability to enchant.

In thinking about what it might mean to grow in our processes of formation, a story comes to mind. A Hasidic rebbe was asked by a student, “Rebbe, if the divine is everywhere we look for it, what does it matter to go to so-called holy places?” The rebbe replied, “The divine may be everywhere and may be the same everywhere, but in places we deem holy, we are different.”

Maybe the experiences of disintegrations and the repeating cycles of formation they engender change us enough so that our returns feels new because we have changed. For a minute, or a day, or a few weeks, or a few years, we might feel like the “I” of the self has gone missing— “who am I now” seems, in retrospect, to have been the meta question of my time in Canarsie—so if and when we find a firm footing in confidently using “I” again, that moment can feel like both return to the familiar and discovery of some new aspect of our being.

Kerouac’s experience of ghostliness in “On the Road” helps him head into an adventure that alters the form of his life, a form that leads him to create artistic works out of the chaos in his spirit; and by the end of the book, Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, is falling in love and feeling ready to stabilize his form by getting married, starting a family, and staying in one place.

But here’s the thing: that’s not really the way Kerouac’s life ended up going.

The ongoing nature of this process, the unclear boundaries of it can feel so confusing. We might yearn to be able to say, “I am X and I am doing Y,” but I wonder if it’s instead possible to hold onto the feeling of yearning while replacing its object. In other words, whenever we feel that gingerly knotted string tying up the container of self start to become untied, can we yearn to be able to say and believe, “I am forming, I am forming, I am forming?”

This all still feels to me like we’re only at the beginning of an insight.

In a few days, we’ll keep digging.

Preview: On Disintegration and Return, parts 2 and 3

In the second post of this series, we’ll look at some more ideas of how this ebb and flow might work on the scale of historical change (“Crash Theory”), and what that might mean for the present and future of our culture and society.

In the final post of this series, I’ll share some thoughts and practices of how I navigate disintegration and return in my life.

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