I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.
-Carrie, Sex and the City
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought.
-John Keats, Bright Star
This movie is so full of wonderful tension, I love it. It’s ridiculous and it’s inconvenient and it’s consuming and it’s all of those things.
When I first heard that quote on sex and the city I rolled my eyes, she delivered it in such an over-the-top manner. There she was, skin a little leathered from years and years of jaded relationships, still babbling like a teenager. That’s not love, I remembered thinking, that’s just good old fashioned horniness.
But then who am I to say what love should or should not be for someone? Maybe that’s just what it is. Bright Star certainly convinced me that it exists in that form. Perhaps it would’ve had a short fuse anyway, regardless of John Keats’ inevitable end...but
but it was so real. I felt it past the penetrable camera lens and computer screen, in the light, weightless drapes rippling with the spring breeze, in the soft candlelight when she sewed quietly, in the bed of violet wildflowers that cushioned her fall when she read his letters.
So who am I to say if that was not real love simply because it had not outlasted time? I feel like I have these fixed conceptions of what love is, when really, I have no idea.
My professor today said that there is nothing we could say about love that hasn’t already been said. But despite all that, who can really say something about it? That middle-age, jaded woman looking for a childish, disney ending? That ill-fated lover of one of the greatest poets of all time, who was dying from tuberculosis? That twenty year-old whose preoccupation with it far exceeds her experience?
In the end, I think the closest answer I can grasp lies in the violet flowers, not these tangential, irrelevant thoughts in my head—the most ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming of all.
**
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
disconnect
To be honest, I tell you these things just to tell them, to give them something of an audience so they can be let go. And isn't that just the point of being the other? just taking this one seriously?
One of the reasons could be just that you've got every aspect of life figured out, and it's probably hard for you to imagine wasting time on anything less. But for those who don't have everything in life, or barely floating above the line of average, little things become just parts of our lives, and I'm sorry if they seem insignificant or petty to you, but at the same time, I can't apologize for thinking about them. And even if they're not the most fairy-tale ending of stories, will they not yield a reaction besides one of impatience? Things just happen, and if they've happened for the first time I look at them with a view of partial awe, but I can't share that feeling honestly with you if you're going to have a laugh at them instead.
It's one of those ironic things where the person in question is so open minded and easygoing that they can't understand anyone else who's not like that, which, ironically (always ironically, because I can't have my inner life be any other adjective) becomes a kind of naivete or narrowmindedness on their part. Whatever the label, these miscommunications become inevitable from time to time. And maybe the only thing I should be letting go of is not my overly analytical thoughts, but their way of listening.
**
One of the reasons could be just that you've got every aspect of life figured out, and it's probably hard for you to imagine wasting time on anything less. But for those who don't have everything in life, or barely floating above the line of average, little things become just parts of our lives, and I'm sorry if they seem insignificant or petty to you, but at the same time, I can't apologize for thinking about them. And even if they're not the most fairy-tale ending of stories, will they not yield a reaction besides one of impatience? Things just happen, and if they've happened for the first time I look at them with a view of partial awe, but I can't share that feeling honestly with you if you're going to have a laugh at them instead.
It's one of those ironic things where the person in question is so open minded and easygoing that they can't understand anyone else who's not like that, which, ironically (always ironically, because I can't have my inner life be any other adjective) becomes a kind of naivete or narrowmindedness on their part. Whatever the label, these miscommunications become inevitable from time to time. And maybe the only thing I should be letting go of is not my overly analytical thoughts, but their way of listening.
**
Friday, March 19, 2010
dronish gadflies
Deep breath, set, wait.
What a frustrating process, am I supposed to come to peace with that? Though let's face it, the alternative is admittedly, much, much worse, something about go-getting (or desperation, to snooty people) makes one want to slap a huge yellow "UNSEXY" sign on the offender's forehead, it's just not how we operate.
The higher up I go, the more waspish my life becomes, the drones infiltrate every last opening standing. And the compressed mess of unoccupied passions remain the attractive, polished queen bee it always seems to be.
**
What a frustrating process, am I supposed to come to peace with that? Though let's face it, the alternative is admittedly, much, much worse, something about go-getting (or desperation, to snooty people) makes one want to slap a huge yellow "UNSEXY" sign on the offender's forehead, it's just not how we operate.
The higher up I go, the more waspish my life becomes, the drones infiltrate every last opening standing. And the compressed mess of unoccupied passions remain the attractive, polished queen bee it always seems to be.
**
Sunday, March 14, 2010
coming of age
It's so weird to see people break out of the canvas of the two dimensional painting you held in your mind. The gaps filled in by your imagination become torn apart before you, and new puzzle pieces fall to your feet. Some surprisingly elegant, and some a little vulgar and offsetting.
At the same time, these new pieces presented to me might not hold any more truth value than what I had beforehand, so who's to say the new construction will be any studier than the old?
Still, (I don't know whether it's because I am becoming wiser in my perceptions or if these people have genuinely captured my heart more strongly than I realize)--I'm not so disappointed by this shattering disillusionment as I used to be.
And this is perhaps the most startling revelation of all: could this be (gasp) something like maturity? Are the strings that clung to fairy tales finally becoming untied?
**
At the same time, these new pieces presented to me might not hold any more truth value than what I had beforehand, so who's to say the new construction will be any studier than the old?
Still, (I don't know whether it's because I am becoming wiser in my perceptions or if these people have genuinely captured my heart more strongly than I realize)--I'm not so disappointed by this shattering disillusionment as I used to be.
And this is perhaps the most startling revelation of all: could this be (gasp) something like maturity? Are the strings that clung to fairy tales finally becoming untied?
**
Thursday, March 4, 2010
summer storm
(I don't know what suddenly came over me. Maybe because I just saw an overindulgent film, and now I want to indulge my moodiness, or melancholy, I don't know. Or maybe I needed a few hours to recharge by myself and I just never got any.)
Do you know what it's like to have such rage and urgency to move and yet nothing they could be directed at? It's terrible, like a famished, fantastical beast that doesn't know what it should devour. Worst of all, I don't know how many chances I get before I'm labeled unintelligible. Or irrelevant.
These are such dark thoughts to wrestle with, and they descended upon me so suddenly, like a summer storm, the perfect kind where the drops come crashing down, so violently they burst into bubbles the moment they touch ground. Like a pot of unstill, boiling water, they squeeze and seep into every crack to make room for more more more. So maybe, like a storm, it will also cease as quickly as it came. Leaving wherever it touched slightly more cleansed.
When I was a little girl I stood under the front entrance of grandma's house, watching the flood rush by, fascinated by the sheer intensity of it all, willing myself to be swept up in it. When the wind snaked into the space between my neck and where my hair falls, wrapping itself around me, I swear I felt it calling.
To give up such control is, admittedly, uncharacteristic. Still, this peculiar desire rages on, at once desperately appealing and unattainable.
**
Do you know what it's like to have such rage and urgency to move and yet nothing they could be directed at? It's terrible, like a famished, fantastical beast that doesn't know what it should devour. Worst of all, I don't know how many chances I get before I'm labeled unintelligible. Or irrelevant.
These are such dark thoughts to wrestle with, and they descended upon me so suddenly, like a summer storm, the perfect kind where the drops come crashing down, so violently they burst into bubbles the moment they touch ground. Like a pot of unstill, boiling water, they squeeze and seep into every crack to make room for more more more. So maybe, like a storm, it will also cease as quickly as it came. Leaving wherever it touched slightly more cleansed.
When I was a little girl I stood under the front entrance of grandma's house, watching the flood rush by, fascinated by the sheer intensity of it all, willing myself to be swept up in it. When the wind snaked into the space between my neck and where my hair falls, wrapping itself around me, I swear I felt it calling.
To give up such control is, admittedly, uncharacteristic. Still, this peculiar desire rages on, at once desperately appealing and unattainable.
**