WHAT IS LOVE?
A very close friend and teacher asked me to write about love. I said to him that “I don’t think I know enough to write about it”. Still, it is worth exploring although it feels a bit like spelunking without a headlamp. The three creatures in my photograph represent three creatures that I love. The man and the cat on top of the other cat are alive and well. The underneath cat is gone and I still choke up when remembering her waning moments. The images are still nearly unbearable to summon, and when they arise in my mind, I shut them down quickly.
The dead cat’s name, Sita, is still very much alive in my mind and in her relative, Magnus. She hasn’t been gone that long, and my years of joy with her have stayed on the surface, playful memories that are easy to carry around. Memories that are clean, unpolluted or challenged by associative anxiety or fear. That’s something remarkable, isn’t it? Also in the photo is proof that both cats adored the sleeping person whose name shall be S. They were highly attuned to his nap taking and rushed in to get into the crevices of his body. Never in their little cat minds did they think there was a human being who slept as soundly as they did and were ecstatic at their incredible luck. Magnus has continued on with the joint power napping that arrives at around 1 pm every day.
I envy the relaxation that is necessary for power napping. My nerves are on a low quiver most of the time. Whenever I try to nap, I am able to drift off but snap to in a matter of moments. Losing consciousness during the day for me is too difficult for the body, it seems. Perhaps exploring what’s behind the quivering and hyper alertness is what also keeps me from the dissolution that is not only necessary for sleep but is also necessary for allowing the warm embers of love to enter into the body. I keep trying on for size what that state of love is with another creature or being. It is more in the body than in the mind, perhaps. It is not a mind grab of an idea. It is a body thing, maybe. And that is where it is lurking for me, and hard to release into the bloodstream. Love is too much of an intellectual proscriptive and even performative state for me. Still, I know it is elsewhere and I am trying to locate it now.
My great friend and teacher asked me what I do, what I like to do for pleasure, for release from the often disturbed nature of my self. Some answers came to mind — I cook for S., I clean the house and restore order around me, I am more of a seeker in a clean house and can read more easily, for example. I read a ton, but often get restless and go back and forth like a darting fish from book to crossword puzzle to work to eating. I have marked those times (and this was quite a while back) when I could tackle a big book and get lost in time and space. I enjoy that but it scares me as as well, apparently.
I say all this because (I think I am getting to something here) love is like getting lost in an enormous, fat 19th century novel. It is discovery of another character, another point of view, another inhabitant of another country. S. inhabits such different worlds than me, although we cross over a ton on a Venn diagram. But there is unknown, vast territories that he travels across and sometimes when he wants me to go with him, I don’t. I am too frightened. It isn’t my trip, it isn’t my vehicle. My boundaries don’t count. I remember going away with my ex-husband to Nova Scotia, where we set up camp on the most extreme point of the peninsula, at Money Point, Cape Breton. There was no other person around, just the wild surf, and dwarf deer and one visible shipwreck that had crashed against the shore way below the cliff were we perched on. I drank copious amounts of cheap whiskey while the Aurora lit up the sky at night in technicolor green and ultimately made him take me back to Halifax and then home. This fear, this running away from the moment by moment terror of two poorly assembled humans united in a fraudulent relationship defined the seven years of that, my only, marriage. I left when I was 32, and nearly drank myself into a permanent coma the next four years.
This memory is far away, but near as well. In anticipation of our upcoming trip to Jackson Hole (and Yellowstone), I envision the park’s thin veneer of earth that allows the earth’s magma to erupt in thousands of steamy vents — beautiful but too dangerous to really touch. Is this what I think of love, I wonder? Does my love burn those around me? Must it be kept under wraps?
No, I am not sure at all of what I write here. First it is like a 19th-century novel, then a vast wilderness filled with hotspots. Well, what is it? Is it both? Is it neither?
I often think in terms of hot/cold, cool/warm. He’s warm, she’s cold. My early search for love was to get the cold to thaw, through sheer determination and a kind of sneaky manipulative persistence. I think of one woman whom I have known for many years — a stellar intellect with a a formidable mien and not-so-hidden mean streak. My anxious self around her would already be dimished before a conversation began, so the only recourse was to be compliant, agreeable, non-adult. Only to walk away from most interactions in anger and resentment. This pattern was the main path I trod for many, many years. It superceded all else, this frantic determination to get her to relent, to yield, to bestow her charm and support on me for, what? As I write this I see the ludicrousness of it, and yet I can’t finish the thought. I wanted her complete attention, I suppose, and yet absolutely hated her with the greatest conviction that I have ever felt. I have never loved with so much passion as I have hated. So, in my lived experience with this woman, a tortured seeking of some warmth directed to me, only for me, the essential folly of the pursuit lasted for years and years. It got in the way of any spiritual progress I had made, or maybe it had to be part of my spiritual “cleaning out”. And now, as I write about these decades of boomeranging self-doubt imposed by my compulsive pursuit for what could never be, I am looking back and also looking at my feet. Without her, who am I? And where am I?
I have moved, if ever so stealthily, into a new land of possibility. I know that, and yet I feel timid and trepidatious about it all. I don’t think I really have a pioneer spirit, or, if I do, it is underneath something hard, unyielding. This love that I seek, self-generated, generated for others and by others, is still peering at me from a distance, or maybe I am peering at it from a slight remove.
I am surrounded by love. I know that it is everywhere that I am. And yet, I read a column yesterday by the masterful and brilliant Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times. In it she quotes Hannah Arendt, who states that “ self-centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation”. She was referring to totalitarianism, and how authoritarian figures such as, in Arendt’s time, Hitler, Stalin, Moussilini, can rally the masses around their deadly brand of nationalism and destroy whatever fragile sense of self-preservation that exists within them. I know what that is to some degree. I have thrown myself into the arms of others whose intentions were questionable, or cruel, who had some kind of power over me. Who filled some kind of void with their low-level bullying and confidence and oozing authority. Somehow sinking into those relationships like a sleepwalker, it temporarily made things easier for me. I didn’t have to think or take responsibility or take a stand. My integrity was at risk and I couldn’t even see that at the time. And, mercifully (as I now see how much of a crap shoot life is. Indeed my vulnerability to those in power could have turned me into the ulitmate victim — a wholesale loss of self to a malignant cause, like Trump, or stuck in some horrible relationship or dead), I have emerged from the underground of denial and despair. Love is mercy.
I have also spent far too much time trying to unearth other people’s abnormalities and sub-texts instead of just living in exploration. This is a form of toxic play, a dystopian drama that has availed little pay-off for me, for my restoration. It undermines the chances for connection that come and go as swift magic. One has to be on her toes. So love is an action, an awareness of the needs in others you can relate to, speak to, and by addressing them, you are addressing yours, as they are the same. My S. has so many traits that I have — timidity, a certain kind of shared aesthetic, and some other traits that I don’t care to list. Those traits are targets for me, as I can’t really tolerate them in myself. For that reason, he becomes target practice too.
At this juncture, I feel the need to discuss time. Time is a series of dots in space — dots you cannot see but nevertheless are standing upon moment by moment. Some dots that are behind you revisit hundreds of times. Those dots represent the shards of memory, beckoned by current emotional upheavals. Therefore, S.’s traits that I don’t care to discuss are those traits that I revile in myself. Do you know what I am talking about?
Many, many enlightened thinkers speak about being in the present — the non-liminal space where you are aligned with the past, present, future (future does/does not exist). The future exists as a concept but has not happened. In traumatized people, the future is bleak. It will happen this way, not that way. The bad way, the unrewarding, sad, lonely vision of what is to come. I know from where I speak.
I can’t easily shed those projections. Too many “what if this happens”, “what if we don’t make it”, “how will I survive”. These questions, carried around for centuries, are kept alive within me. And yet, in practice, I am very present with (most) others. I am attuned to their voices, expressions, their dimensional selves. I generally throw myself into a conversation and enjoy jumping into the deep end with them. In fact, if someone doesn’t want to engage, I get bored and restless. Where’s the fun, I think?
Existing in my own locality doesn’t work very well. I tend to sink into minor depressions and follow old, useless jumbles of thought that lead me no where. It becomes an effort of will to respond to stimuli of any sort — human or otherwise.
And yet, with all the effort that I put into grinding myself into a state of anhedonia, it appears I keep saving myself over and over. Or my body (there is the body thing) not my mind takes over. I have worked efficiently and rapidly to create a home a deux, pas pour une. When you are one, you let things lie and gather dust, items that were ready for the trash bin remain in some suspended place of humiliation, waiting for retrieval (or redemption). Being the permanent part of a twosome-a state that I have longed for since I was a little girl immersed in fairy tales, has activated my need to create a nest, like a feathered creature, flitting about from online store to store, an obsession for the right bit of color or shape that will satisfy the hunger for symmetry and my own esthetics. Which only happens if there is someone else to share in the bounty. Objects that unify a house only have meaning to me when someone else is present to validate or comment on. Meals take on larger statuses when others eat the food you have prepared — they can even be over or under seasoned and still create a touch point for humor or identification. I am very good natured when I cook and fail, and grateful when the outcome is praiseworthy. I am a happy cook, not an angry, competitive cook who is outdoing a fellow host who can roast a better chicken. If I may, the person that I am in the kitchen is in her element. I am not too perfectionistic, I use my executive functioning to coordinate the timing of dishes, I am thinking of the meal holistically — as a peace offering. Mostly I lose my self-consciousness in the act of chopping, tasting, trussing and stuffing. The aromas of garlic and onion perfume the air, S. comes around the corner following his nose and asks “What’s for dinner?” The cats too know that there is food being prepared and runs to see if it is for them.
I believe that I am coming to an end of this phase of re-settlement, or the late-stage growth spurt of my capacity for psychic enlargement. I am questioning less about my capacity for this, for that, and the personal pronouns are getting tiresome. I will say that it occured to me as I was changing the litter box this morning, that there is no conclusion to the examination of love. It changes, it disappears, it comes back, it hides, or is hidden from you but not others. It reveals itself in sneaky ways, too. I was despairing just two weeks ago that I couldn’t FEEL love, as if love is always a feeling that is obvious. And this morning I believe that love is the backstop for all emotions. It is the lens in which we are constantly straining to wipe clear, to re-calibrate our disturbed insides. This is not a particularly brilliant insight, but it is my insight. Each person needs to discover its’ absence to know about its presence. Am I right?
