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On Never Letting Go

  • Cary Howie (author)
Chapter of: Burn after Reading: Vol. 1, Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies + Vol. 2, The Future We Want: A Collaboration(pp. 63–71)

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Metadata
TitleOn Never Letting Go
ContributorCary Howie (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0067.1.15
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/burn-after-reading/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightHowie, Cary
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2014-04-28
Long abstractThere are a lot of things to be said for letting go. Our at-tachments can limit us in bad ways as well as good ones; more than once, when saying goodbye to a particular place or person whose future just cannot be mine any longer, I have thought of Alison Krauss affirming, with her usual bittersweetness, “And I’m no longer bound / I can let go now.”1 It is often difficult to cop to the things that bind us; difficult to assess what kind of binding makes us live more intensely and what kind of binding, in contrast, merely constrains us, keeps us from that fuller life. Letting go makes room for something, and the whole point is that it’s a gamble: you don’t know what you’re making room for. That determinacy is, among other things, what you’re giving up. Similarly, in a different idiom, the classic definition of melancholia is built around a refusal to let go: a refusal to acknowledge what is gone as gone. But in the background of every question about letting go, another question lurks: how do we know that something is gone? And how, by the same token, do we come to terms with the very real presences that continue to surround and define us? That is to say, if melancholia misses its mark because it will not surrender what it aims at, even when what it aims at is gone, there is a kind of complementary malaise that is too cavalier about its terms of surrender, that wants to aim at nothing at all, that wants to give it all up, even those things without which life is, strictly speaking, unimaginable. In these pages I’d like to ask this question, among others: is there a way to honor the risk, the gamble, implicit in our ges-tures of relinquishment while also affirming the ties that continue to bind us—for the best—to the world? Or, to put it slightly differently, can we let go of certain things—certain professional outcomes, erotic futures, grudges, habits—while holding on to others, without this diminish-ing our relinquishment?
Page rangepp. 63–71
Print length9 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Cary Howie

(author)