topic/love
Leonard Cohen,
Shirley Hazzard,
Lauren Elkin,
Phil Christman,
Karen Tei Yamashita,
Mark Doty,
Gina Frangello,
Tabitha Lasley,
Annie Dillard
the other side of heartbreak
It had not occurred to Paul that Caro's influence might increase with her submission. Or that she would remain intelligent. When she leaned her head back to look at him, he was aware of her judgment persevering like a pulse--even forming the most tender, if least magical, part of love. He put a hand to her face, his own fingers trembling with a small, convulsive evidence of unfeigned life.
"I've not seen you since."
It was the mingling of great and trivial that could not be misunderstood.
He went on, "Yet we are so close."
She fell silent, leaning back into colours and shadows of the room: not in fulfillment, which could hardly be, but in voluptuous calm, at peace. Her hand was outstretched on the table, the sleeve pushed up. It was the first time he had seen her inner arm. She knew it might be the only such passage between them, ever. If the usual griefs were coming to her at last, so was this unprecedented perfection.
He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
That strange word “believe,” with “lie” in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress, and spun her around, the dress slips over her narrow hips to the floor, and she’s standing in front of him in a little white slip. On the way to the couch they walk hand in hand through the dark corridor, and pause for a moment in front of the large mirror.
Do you suppose a mirror remembers all the people it’s ever reflected?
Maybe, he replies, but you know I — I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.
So will I, she replies.
And they go on.
His name is Weisz, like vice, and he is that, a wicked indulgence and something that grips me. I’ve never had such big hands on my body. We sit together in his office and he plays me his records and then he puts his hands on my body.
I am in love with him, I am in love with his shirt, with the way that it sits just so lightly on his torso, his collar that sits away just so from his neck. I’ve never actually wanted to rip someone’s clothes off before. He has a wife at home so I have to be careful or she’ll be wondering why all the buttons on his shirt popped off at the same time.
Desire makes us others to ourselves, the maestro says, and he is right, I am not myself when I desire Max, I am myself-with-Max, quite another person from myself when I’m without him.
Max went with me to see the maestro today, at the faculté de droit. He spoke before, I don’t know, a couple hundred people, mostly students training to be analysts, but also scholars in other fields, and even, I heard, some actors. He’s a man of science who speaks like a mystic. Every word has its weight, as if he were dropping iron plumbs into a sea to anchor his thoughts. He delivers his speech like he’s performing Molière at the Comédie-Française. It is often hard to follow. Today he talked about jouissance, and love, and the Other, and I stroked the inside of Max’s wrist with my finger, afraid to outright hold his hand, and then the maestro said there is no woman, and that it is the instinct of the mother that prevails in her, not her own sexual pleasure, which turns around the phallus, and that man cannot enjoy woman’s body because he is too busy enjoying his own enjoyment, and while I have known men like that, indeed sex with Henry has sometimes felt like that, it has not always been so, and I wrote it all down and put a question mark next to it and Max shrugged and I wanted to talk to him about it afterward but afterward he took me back to his office and I forgot all about the maestro and whether or not there are women with their own sexual desires because I was inside my desire, and soon Max was too.
jesus
My father, Jonathan says, is a womanising bastard. I love him but it’s true, he’s a bastard. He doesn’t see it that way, he says he loves easily and well, but he’s a serial cheater. He cheated on my mother, he cheated on my stepmother, he cheated on his first wife, and he invented a whole intellectual framework to justify it. He’s slept with his students his whole career. He’s completely unethical.
I let this sink in. But I’m not sure that what I’m doing – what we’re doing – is unethical. My instinct is that it isn’t. That something about living ethically together is bound up in not judging our desires, or controlling and punishing them. But maybe that’s just me justifying it.
So you think it has to be justified.
I’m not sure. Do you?
I’m not sure either.
Is it possible that infidelity isn’t something you commit but something that creeps up, a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts, the one that matters, that changes everything, you are too far gone? You are so deep in it but you got so deep in a kind of innocence. I think for a moment. Maybe the problem is the word. Infidelity. I never noticed before but it makes you an infidel, believing in the wrong god. But really it’s another kind of fidelity – to yourself, to your dream of yourself, to the other people you love. I get out my phone and look up the etymology. See? it’s an Old French word, that has to do with a lack of faith. But I have so much faith. I am full of faith.
ahhhh
This description of the five elements that make up our image of love, however superficial it may be, does seem to demonstrate love’s contradictory, paradoxical, mysterious nature. I discussed five, but they can be reduced to three: exclusivity, which is love for only one person; attraction, which is one’s fate freely accepted; the person, who is a soul and a body. But these elements cannot be separated; they exist in constant struggle and reconciliation with themselves and with others. Contrary, as though they were the planets of the strange solar system of the passions, they revolve around a single sun. This sun, too, is twofold: the couple. There is continual transmutation of each element: freedom chooses servitude, fate becomes choice, the soul is body and the body is soul. We love a mortal being as though he or she were immortal. Lope said it better: “To call what is eternal temporal.” Yes, we are mortal, we are the children of time, and no one is spared death. We know not only that we will die but that the person we love will die. We are the playthings of time and accident; sickness and old age disfigure the body and cause the soul to lose its way. But love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face. Through love we steal from the time that kills us a few hours which we turn now into paradise and now into hell. In both ways time expands and ceases to be a measure. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity: it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one.