preoccupations

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.

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