Sunday, February 14, 2010
It is February 14th and I am meditating on love.
There are times when you have more romantic love than you know what to do with, and other times when you feel as if you exist between loves: loves past, loves future, and a seemingly empty present. I'm a romantic, almost a love glutton, and have been alternately spoiled by love and wrecked by it. But what does it mean to love? Roland Barthes' "A Lover's Discourse" explores an alphabet of states and feelings that a lover goes through, starting with Absence and ending with "Will-to-possess." According to Barthes, even the words "I Love You" can be broken down into a linguistic set-up that reveals the willing illusion that the lover engages in:
"I-love-you is without nuance. It suppresses explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples. In a way -exorbitant paradox of language- to say I-love-you is to proceed as if there were no theater of speech, and this word is always true (has no referent other than its utterance: it is a performative)."
Is love a performance, then? If so, that makes the emotional sphere pure theater, and love is only an expression from one human to another of our need to be observed. More than observation: we want to be altered by the process of love and by the actions necessarily taken. Together with the object of our desire, we script, step, and rehearse into a future in which we will be altered by what we have created together.
In the beginning, we write the love story piece by piece on a blank page. Toward the end of an affair, it's more like grasping onto the tail of a rocket shooting off into space; love has lost a controlled pattern and now moves in its own direction faster than we can keep up. I was in a relationship for the past two and a half years and I'm watching it grow up, rebel, and shoot out of my hands. As it comes to an end, I want to hold on, to collect, to store, to bank all of my understanding and memories against the current of fear and confusion that swells during such a time. I wonder what will change, what will fade? The distortions of memory are inevitable. The window of closeness to an event is brief.
So on Valentine's Day, with its unavoidably loaded implications, I meditate on love's nature and time's tides. The process of creating, losing, regaining. The life cycle of a feeling. The way memory layers with the present and the unknowable future.
Barthes writes that "The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn't move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory. From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory... This theater of time is the very contrary of the search for lost time; for I remember pathetically, punctually, and not philosophically, discursively: I remember in order to be unhappy/happy- not in order to understand. I do not write, I do not shut myself up in order to write the enormous novel of time recaptured."
Here's to each word and what it represents: love, remembrance, change.
There are times when you have more romantic love than you know what to do with, and other times when you feel as if you exist between loves: loves past, loves future, and a seemingly empty present. I'm a romantic, almost a love glutton, and have been alternately spoiled by love and wrecked by it. But what does it mean to love? Roland Barthes' "A Lover's Discourse" explores an alphabet of states and feelings that a lover goes through, starting with Absence and ending with "Will-to-possess." According to Barthes, even the words "I Love You" can be broken down into a linguistic set-up that reveals the willing illusion that the lover engages in:
"I-love-you is without nuance. It suppresses explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples. In a way -exorbitant paradox of language- to say I-love-you is to proceed as if there were no theater of speech, and this word is always true (has no referent other than its utterance: it is a performative)."
Is love a performance, then? If so, that makes the emotional sphere pure theater, and love is only an expression from one human to another of our need to be observed. More than observation: we want to be altered by the process of love and by the actions necessarily taken. Together with the object of our desire, we script, step, and rehearse into a future in which we will be altered by what we have created together.
In the beginning, we write the love story piece by piece on a blank page. Toward the end of an affair, it's more like grasping onto the tail of a rocket shooting off into space; love has lost a controlled pattern and now moves in its own direction faster than we can keep up. I was in a relationship for the past two and a half years and I'm watching it grow up, rebel, and shoot out of my hands. As it comes to an end, I want to hold on, to collect, to store, to bank all of my understanding and memories against the current of fear and confusion that swells during such a time. I wonder what will change, what will fade? The distortions of memory are inevitable. The window of closeness to an event is brief.
So on Valentine's Day, with its unavoidably loaded implications, I meditate on love's nature and time's tides. The process of creating, losing, regaining. The life cycle of a feeling. The way memory layers with the present and the unknowable future.
Barthes writes that "The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn't move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory. From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory... This theater of time is the very contrary of the search for lost time; for I remember pathetically, punctually, and not philosophically, discursively: I remember in order to be unhappy/happy- not in order to understand. I do not write, I do not shut myself up in order to write the enormous novel of time recaptured."
Here's to each word and what it represents: love, remembrance, change.
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