With increasing frequency, I’m noticing that the “F-word” is replacing “making love” in our personal conversations, social media, books, and films. What does this say about our changing attitudes toward intimacy?
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Social media question (paraphrased):
Original sin does not make sense. Eating the fruit would have enlightened Adam and Eve as to what was good and bad. How could they have known it was bad to disobey God, before taking a bite of the fruit?
My metaphorical response:
Adam and Eve are like children, who don’t yet comprehend the consequences of not listening to one’s father. Alternatively, we could view them as naive, inexperienced adults, indifferent to an authority’s warning about a risk or potential danger. For example, without the physical experience of being burned, the warning against playing with matches often goes in one ear and out the other.
Often, as a writer, I allow a story to drift off into the void, with no definitive conclusion, resolution, or insight. Life is like that much of the time, a smudge of situations overlapping one another in the same time and space, with no obvious dividing lines between anything, no endings – not unless I create them through various self-deceptions. But even then, the unfinished business of things continue to haunt me, well beyond the artificial endings I’ve given them.
Discomfort has a way of dredging up the truth.
What really happened? Why did you run off with that guy? Do you still love me?
Ask such things while dodging bullets, or huddled together under newspapers to keep warm.
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” ― C.G. Jung
I believe that Jung was on to something here, but I would replace “outgrown” with “acknowledged.” Most every situation in life – good and bad – lingers as an emotional footprint, continuing to impact us in both subtle and dramatic ways. Change does not erase nor reconstruct the past, but rather builds around it, like tree roots stretching over the remains of an old stone wall.
Notes from David 