Every entrance is an exit
Dedicated to the strange beauty of our time
You may think that I stole the title for this essay from Anne Carson, but you would be wrong. I didn’t steal it because, for something to be stolen, it needs to be claimed as someone’s property first, and can anyone really claim the words they use as their own without sounding like an autocratic twat? Language is a slippery slope, but one that anyone is invited to climb, a democratic open field, if you will. You arrive empty handed and leave with your own bouquet of flowers: no one can blame you for picking tulips in the same shade as theirs. You’ll both go to your homes and make your own silly arrangements, grab your own overpriced vases, leave different kind of space between each stem. You’ll look at the remains of your effort the next day and think your own thoughts, make your own assumptions.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s not words that define what we call intellectual property, but the meaning we assign to them, the ideas and worlds they articulate.
On this note, let me point out that Anne Carson’s famous essay is titled “Every exit is an entrance” and is, essentially, a beautiful and haunting praise of sleep: same words + different arrangement = a new, possibly even opposite, meaning. As Joan Didion wrote, “to shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object.”
Like Anne Carson, Tom Stoppard too reminds us that “every exit is an entry somewhere else,” and the phrase has become a popular mantra everywhere, invoked almost as a spell to ward off the evil spirits of loss and rejection. While it’s helpful to remember that endings are not always final but a redirection towards something new, I want to paint a different picture, remind myself that every entrance is also, how can it not be, an exit.
This feels important for many reasons. First, it’s a good thing to keep in mind as the relationship you entered and envisioned as an equal partnership starts to turn into a competition for control: when the man you thought you loved is only capable of a kind of love that feels a little too close to possession, or worse, resentment, you need to be able to find your graceful way to the closest exit. Or, say, your date is cute and has a brain, but likes to hear himself talk a little too much and every time you try and make a point, he cuts you off mid sentence: no matter how inappropriate it may seem, you can turn on your heels and leave.
On the other hand, when I say that every entrance is an exit, I mean it quite literally. Just like we’re born into this world, we’re also removed from it, erased like a badly traced line, a thing too weak to stand the test of time. It seems almost impossible to fathom death and tragedy when you’re young, pretty and white. Until it touches you and you quickly realise that there is none of us whom life regards with any partiality. If the only person who loved you without borders can die on a clear Sunday morning, what else can happen?
The sky, once a square of blue so limpid it bit your eyes, has now clotted with clouds the colour of gunpowder. I can’t see the rain, but I can feel the moisture sink into the street and over the edges of the city, which are now blurred into an eerie softness, like a face swiped into a beauty filter. Everything passes. Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die.1
I’m not a Stoic and I have no affinity for the Buddhist practice of death meditation, but as long as I’m alive, I want to remember that this little life of mine is dispensable, a thing of the past already. Not as a nihilistic effort, but as a way to look for more life, make something out of this scrap of time I’ve been given, let it not pass without a record, even if for my eyes only.
Earn, in other words, the right not to die.