ever since i can remember, i have been trying to figure out love. i’ve turned the concept over and over in my head, analyzed it from every angle, written papers on it, and read countless books about the subject. many times i thought i’d finally figured it out, only to discover later that i was just as clueless as ever. even now, with years of experience under my belt, i am still not quite sure if love is the ethereal, omnipresent force i’ve often thought it to be, or a manufactured delirium, a clever invention meant to distract the female masses from our own subjugation. if someone were to ask me for advice about the subject now, i’d hardly feel qualified. at only 23, i’m far too cynical to say anything level-headed on the matter. but, although i’ve become jaded about romance, i still find myself thinking about it now more than ever. all this to say: the more i love the less i seem to understand it.
a big part of love, i think, is the act of mythologizing. lately, i’ve been reading a lot of joan didion, and a common theme in her essays is her deep reverence for her home state of california. in her writing, california is God. it’s the axis of her world, infiltrating everything she does even when she is not physically there. she spends countless paragraphs trying to capture it accurately, painting us a portrait of a dry, arid oasis filled with movie stars and cowboys, serial killers and folk singers. california looms large in everything she writes - expansive, ominous and beautiful, with eerie santa ana winds and the kind of heat that drives people to mad passions.
her writing is often personal but detached. she wasn’t a maudlin woman, by any means. her words are cool, calm, and carefully crafted. but her attention to detail reveals a thread of sentimentality that weaves itself through her work. reading didion reminded me of a quote from greta gerwig’s “lady bird,” where the titular character has also grown up in california, and is all too eager to flee it. however, when her teacher reads her writing, she notes the careful detail with which lady bird writes about the place where she is from. “I guess I pay attention,” lady bird offers, to which her teacher replies, “don’t you think maybe they’re the same thing? love and attention ?”
years ago i had a dream in which a man, faceless, nameless, had developed an infatuation with me. he bought beach house tickets just to get me to go out on a date with him. he wrote to me about how he was at a party, and a girl held her hand out to shake his, and her elbow looked just like mine. icy blue veins and a mole in the same place. he said it made him so dizzy he had to sit down. even now, thinking about this dream brings me some small private joy i don’t quite understand. i suppose i enjoy the idea that emotion so large could hinge on a detail so fine. that something as massive as love could be present, and seen, in something miniscule. to hang your existence upon the particulars of another person; the indescribable rasp of their voice, the way their hair smells, the sleepy way their eyes look, only in the mornings. the idea that someone could fixate on another person this way, devote undivided attention and take notes. the concept of studying another person. it’s so terribly romantic it makes me dizzy.
if you asked me what art is really all about, i’d tell you it’s death. writing, songwriting, painting, sculpting, drawing, what have you - every single one comes back to death. art ensures immortality. a feeling, once channeled into something tangible, never dies. listening to love songs moves me to tears at times, not because of any personal ties to the songs, but because i know there is a history behind them, some depth of feeling that eventually came to pass, and although it may have died out completely, it still exists forever within those three minutes of music. this way, love never dies. i’m writing about you just to keep you alive as long as i can. the more attention you pay to something, the more time you devote to it, the longer you’ve preserved it. it’s capturing something ephemeral, like encasing a butterfly in glass. there is no greater act of love than taxidermy.
in this way, writing, art in general, is more delicious and intimate than anything, even sex. sex is about being alive, about throwing your body around while you still have it, and letting someone catch it. creating is about dying, and remembering, but something else, too. primarily, writing is about getting the insides outside. showing others a glimpse of your soul, or something near it, and entrusting them to understand. this part, the reaching out, this is the part of writing i find less satisfying. the scariest thing you can do is reveal yourself. coincidentally, it’s the one and only path towards anything that matters.
once, i spent a whole year acting solely out of my own selfish interest. i decided i no longer wanted to think about love. i was tired of it, exhausted by the whole concept. i wanted to learn about other things for once, like friendship, and what it meant. i wanted to know what the relationship was between intimacy and sex, and if the two could be divorced from one another. i wanted to know what desire was, what dictated it, its origins and limitations. i wanted to explore selfishness vs selflessness, unconditional love vs basic animal instinct. i let myself be guided by impulse alone, love be damned. i did go a little insane. dyed my hair blood red and spoke in religious metaphors. all my writing became dark and spidery. by the end, I couldn’t stop crying. I felt angry, like I’d been betrayed by my own passions. I smoked like a chimney, then got devastatingly sick for an entire month and coughed up what looked like viscera. that whole year tasted like booze and black cherries. I felt like a deer biting into a fruit that’s gone off, and getting drunk on its bitter juices. all this to say that what this one year taught me was that, in the end, it comes right back to love. it’s inescapable, you can’t outrun it. it’s massive, frightening, beautiful. like the ocean, or california.
as humans, we tend to appreciate things more once they’re lost to us. i’ve noticed this in my own life recently. i moved out of my hometown, which i’ve always resented, and suddenly i love it dearly. driving through it brings tears to my eyes. my head is full of poems about its cherry trees, its pines, its eucalyptuses. document everything, now, while you can. take pictures, paint a portrait, write it all down. it’s foolish, the way we all seem to think that all of it lasts forever. it doesn’t.
often, people find it difficult to pay close attention. life is less painful if you let it pass quickly. when you take notice, you slow things down, and when you slow things down you can no longer ignore pain. this is mostly solved by learning to revel in it, sit with it, stare back at it. i’ll leave you with a quote i think about a lot:
“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
―Joan Didion