Cetaceus

As I have been very busy lately studying, I have not written much here lately. As such I want to reprint a very brief essay I wrote a month ago, originally composed as an email on some going thoughts that I have, in fact, not expressed in public at all, but only in very special and specific private conversations with certain individuals. As the response that I got from the best of interlocutors was positive, I thought I would put this out here. I’ve preserved the original email’s short contextual opening.

On the #6 bus home last night I was thinking about love and when I got here I wrote a few paragraphs I thought I would share with you. I think a serious re-defining of the term is in order, for pretty much everyone’s sake:

On Love as Reciprocation
About to go to sleep I had some thoughts on the various issues that have been, for some time now, at hand in these and other conversations. With regard to both the idea and the execution of love, it strikes me that in fact love cannot be lop-sided, and if it is, it is not love but rather something else. What I mean to say is that the directionality of love must be considered, and more so, must be factored into its very definition. Love cannot be a one-way street; it cannot be something that is being put out or projected onto another person without return. This phenomenon, though often enough called love, is in fact something else. Love is, and I mean is, a reciprocal relationship, and the paths back and forth and the nexuses of human beings that it traverses do not and cannot exist in any form of hierarchy. Rather the movement between people of certain feelings, thoughts and actions, of varying proportions, are what concretely constitute love. Putting those things out onto someone else who does not, or does not equally, send them back, is not love but something that we do not have a word for. Taken this way, we see that love is like light: its energy is its mass and its movement is its being. Once it stops, by hitting a wall or another person, and is not re-routed and returned, it in fact ceases to exist. Unrequited loved is a misnomer, and the phrase makes no sense. It must be seen in this way, and I repeat: love is by definition an exchange, and if it is anything else, it is not love.

This is important for understanding some of the prime characteristics and concrete manifestations of love. When seen as necessarily an exchange, a perpetual movement that does not and cannot cease, so much is made clear. Take for example the reverie of love-making, at its best anyway: by this definition, one cannot revel in another who does not themselves revel in the situation, the act or the moment. Very concretely, if one’s partner’s heart is not in it, the experience itself does not reach its full potential. One cannot truly hold another in one’s arms whose muscles fail to fully leap at the sensation of being held. One cannot, I think, cook dinner for someone (in the context of love, at least) who cannot or does not taste all of the small ineffables that have gone into the preparation. Perhaps most of all, can one genuinely “be with” someone else if either of the people involved aren’t “all there” in the fullest possible sense.

Most of all, and this is a second addendum to this definition of love I want to explore, love is, like meaning and friendship, not something that is uncovered, but rather something that is built, crafted, made. One doesn’t find love. In fact, “one” doesn’t do anything, and this is the point. We are talking about an edifice that requires the rolling up of sleeves and finishing the day with dust in your eyes and dust on your hands. It is the type of construction work that cannot be soloed. The lines have to be too straight, the foundations leveled just right: this is a job for two. And again, if it isn’t, or if one decides to attempt this kind of work alone, he or she is building something completely the hell else. And even if it doesn’t seem that way, the final product of any such endeavor will always be something strange, maybe interesting, maybe in rare cases beautiful, but absolutely not what the single builder set out to put together.

Maybe it sounds sad, but I think it is the sort of truth that should be liberating: you cannot be in love with someone if they are not in love with you. It just doesn’t make any real sense. In those cases, folks are just projecting.

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I’ve decided to repost some other brief posts on the same topic here. I don’t think it makes sense for them to stand alone and out of context, and I want to clear up some clutter.

12.31.08 Two Further Theses on Romantic Love

We all have things that we want to say, or rather need to say, and as such will say. Our entire lives consist, if not wholly in large part, of needing to express various certain things, and is an ongoing movement of things we have said and needed to say, will say and will need to say. The issue with regard to the possibility of romantic love is one of finding that person or those people who will listen, and to whom you will listen.

But there is a danger here: we cannot be mislead by the one who says, “I want to listen because it is you who says these things, and because they come from you, who I love, I want to hear them.” This person has hopefully misspoken, but if not, and if what they say here is true, then it is not possible that there is love between you. The person who is bound to you, and you to them, by love is the person who wants to, and perhaps needs to, hear the things you say not for you, but for their own sake, because he or she is taken by the inherent value, beauty or insight, or is perhaps simply comforted, by these statements regardless of who they come from. It may seem paradoxical, but this is of vital importance, this must be the case because to a very large degree (I balk at saying “above all else”) we are these things that we are compelled to speak.

We must disabuse ourselves of the idea that we have already once (or twice) discovered that person with whom it is our destiny to fall in love, or more simply that “is the right person” for us, but that circumstances have barred the path for you both. More likely, we have not yet encountered such a person.

1.19.09 Another Thesis on Romantic Love

Romantic love is like a mix tape you have been working on your entire life, in anticipation of finding the right person to give it to. You know the extent to which you’ve discovered that person by the level of anxiety experienced when, in the first moment after finally gifting the collection of songs, you genuinely realize that the compilation cannot be completed. And you are certain you’ve found it in the moment of accute doubt experienced when questioning, probably for the first time, the validity of the project itself.

“It’s always night or we wouldn’t need light.”

–Monk

I now feel as though I know what this means.