The Important Things from 2006
Important things from 2006 can be found in here.
2007 remains an unknown quantity.
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Important things from 2006 can be found in here.
2007 remains an unknown quantity.
"But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then - for there is no end to the folly of the human heart - seek another, find another, you. Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer."
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves.
Like beauty[1] [2],, pain[3] [4] and nomads[5] [6], love is currently undergoing a revival as a subject for academic[7] and pseudo-academic[8] inquiry. That's my call anyway, for post-neo-post-modernism; beauty, pain, nomads and love. And maybe the role of the auteur/author as well; those old structuralism debates that Sebastian Smee expounded beautifully in Wednesday's Lit Review in the Aust[9]. Anyhow, love. Love. LOVE. (more on beauty, pain and nomads later (maybe)!). After pondering the subject of LOVE over a number of years, in a personal rather than a didactic sense, this was how I'd ultimately determined it: LOVE (not unlike postmodernism) is not a theory, or an ontological condition that pre-exists you falling into it / falling out of it; it does not stalk about like some sort of invisible beastie, locking its teeth into your ankles to render you smitten. Such as to say, LOVE does not hang like a dust-cloud between two people, it is not the fruiting body of any biological imperative or social apparatus or even of your own intimate expressions. LOVE is a practice. LOVE is in the minutia of what you do and feel, it does not reside only in great romantic gestures. LOVE is in throwing the door open, a kiss behind the ear, the morning light on a bed, stillness and motion, joined fear+trepidation+pride in moments of risk, gripped hands, using up all the words, being together in crowds, introductions, fights+walking away, new ideas, a touch on the forearm and waking up, and more. These actions + infinite others are imbued with LOVE when LOVE exists simpatico.
The problem with LOVE-as-a-practice is of course, that when one party ceases its practice, there is no longer LOVE. You cannot speak LOVE and hope to supplement some pre-existing, external dynamic that has no grip on a person out of LOVE. There is no rebuilding LOVE because you cannot rebuild something that has no independence from the feelings and actions of the party who is no longer in LOVE. LOVE can morph into less-than-love and after that is deficient in its practice. Qu. Is this the same with the other high or pure emotions? A few nights ago I overheard RD speaking with a someone with skills in human/robotics interfacing and he said "but surely, an emotion is nothing more than a risk-taking exercise?" An emotion is nothing more than a risk-taking exercise. Recognising that this was said in a specific context, and in response to a specific question, recognising that and still, the comment works from the same basis as LOVE-as-a-practice. I have taken many risks on the basis on emotions, but is the emotion itself the risk, despite its seemingly organic genesis and demise? Can you decide to quell an emotion and not take the risk? It'd be a cold soul that could, I think. So perhaps LOVE is unique in this model. Then again, can you stop LOVE? If you're in LOVE with someone you shouldn't be? Are you still practicing a kind of frustrated LOVE in an unrequited relationship? Perhaps that is Love capitalized but not the vertigo-inspiring kind of LOVE. And no, I don't think you can hold it back, at least not in its grip on your subconscious. You can decide not to practice Love consciously, and eventually it will fade for lack of practice, but only if you sequester yourself away from the inappropriate object-of-your-affection. As with everything, in the end your subconscious either gives you away, or gives way.
Which moves me forward to my more contemporary thinking - does LOVE (and Love, but not love - equally potent but reserved for friends, family and the ilk) reside in loss? Two triggers have recently inspired this sojourn into thoughts entirely unrelated to my thesis: 1. I'm reading An Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai at the moment (the merits of which I could debate here or elsewhere over many hours), in which can be found this striking passage - "Romantically (she) decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself". It's an old Winterson idea. Take a line to ponder that
2. After too much daylight savings-inspired wine on Wednesday I came home and decided to iron clothes, burning my fingertips along the way, with the 7-Worlds-Collide DVD on (it's one of the few DVDs in the house). You can say what you like about the Finns, but with Johnny Marr, Eddie Vedder, Sebastian Steinberg and 2 fifths of Radiohead and on the stage in the St James Theatre, you can't deny there's a real millennium-music moment there (I can feel all pop-cultural cred evaporating as I write this). And maybe it was the wine and the steam from the iron, but when they're singing "Don't Dream it's Over", god that is one hell of a love-song. And it's about loss. And I'm counting the steps to the door of your heart seeking liberation and relief. I singed a skirt irretrievably while watching that track.
If LOVE is a practice, then loss binds that practice into abreaction and distils some basic love beneath the practice. Here I mean real loss, not just a denaturing of LOVE as so often happens at the end of a relationship - LOVE forced away by ego or happenstance. So I've moved from the very po-mo stance of denying any basic LOVE beyond its demonstration, to being open to the possibility that there is a kernel of love that resides in moments of loss, that exists when everything else is forcibly stripped away. Is it that the only open heart is a broken heart? No, not that. LOVE in practice is greater than love in loss, but that love, that risk, is when you test LOVE's truth, finding it to be a lie, an easy truth, or a hard truth worth going to the ends of the earth and the depth of your self to hold on to. Maybe. Anyhow, that's my thinking at the moment. Helium thinking, highfalutin words. We won't ever capture the experience of LOVEloveLovelove in words, but we keep trying.
Jack reaches the edge of the desert and finds there is a turnstile. It seems to be the only upright thing. He squints one eye, holding back the sinister hysteria of dehydration and heatstroke. Inside him his organs jostle for a position closest to his spine, expecting an alcohol solution. Everything is taut and one-dimensional. The earth beneath him is crisp and smooth, a thin crust over the marrowy underside. He crunches potholes from the van to the turnstile, like walking across the surface of a new cake. The heat covers his mouth and forces him to breathe through his pores. Sharp, subterranean smells and pockets of trapped air are released. Jack cracks through the panoramic flat and sees no other footprints.
He feels shone-through here, like a slide. He casts a dazzling anti-shadow out in front of him. He thinks, 'my body is a burning glass that pins light into tighter light and sets fire to ants'. And then he thinks, 'No, my body is a camera that snap-shots and pixel dots', and is happier with this explanation. The Jack-Lens, shedding screening, screaming photos of trauma and ecstasy across the sand on the way to a turnstile on the edge of the desert.
Did you ever add LASSITUDE on top of IMMODERATION, the preacher back in Esperance had asked, with his hand on Jack's forehead Did you ever know PROFLIGACY? I will take you THROUGH the corridor, as we have seen in Chart 3. And after that he couldn't keep his hands from shaking, fish-like, on the ends of his wrists. In his van, carpeted and clean, with all the world in tins. And then he bought whiskey and a new belt, and drove out to meet the edge.
The metal of the turnstile is as warm as a body. Eases over, grit and oil in the mechanism, clicks. No other sounds.
Jack walks for about an hour into the desert. On the way he finds things made out of rust; parts of a chain, old cans, a car axle. They corrode here the same way as they would if they were under the ocean. He captures them all in his body's bright-light, dancing around them silently. He comes to a well, dry and split in half by a tree. The tree is ashen and contorted. It licks its vegetarian teeth at him. He throws the belt over a branch and sits for a while. Everything is antimatter, thinner than cellophane. He watches the belt. He swims in the haze. He circles the tree. He is pellucid. Jack starts to dig a hole, a deep hole about the size of a dinner plate. As the sun descends in the sky his body's brilliance is fading, he is fading. When the hole is about a meter deep, he puts his face into it and starts to scream down into the earth.
All the apertures collapse.