I fell in love with the world again
Dear beloved,
These last weeks have felt like part of a cliff finally giving in to the salty air, the bruising waves. A seismic shedding that had me blinking in the light, surveying the debris, wondering how much solid ground is left. I’ve felt the distance between us acutely and in this shedding, I started wondering if I’d ever be able to build a bridge to you.
And then, in the space, I felt myself falling – not into the sea, but in love with the world again.
Chance, who has many names, has brought me gifts today. The first landed on my doormat, a conjuring trick – from only card and ink, I ached with laughter, became salty with tears. I missed you, I wanted you to hear my raucous laughter. But I also knew you were here in a way you could never otherwise be, in a two dimensional portal. The second gift had spurious physical dimensions. Following a link, I spent time on screen with Cortney Cassidy, and through her visual and verbal poetics, I came in contact again with Donna Haraway. It seems she is haunting me, and what a welcome ghost. Cassidy – in placing her life practice as an artist and her work practice as a graphic designer side by side – muses:
Following Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto theories, after I raise my awareness of a set of differences, I am better set out to make a new category that includes all of them. Then, the differences will no longer make a difference. My new category can consist of everything I need and choose.
I feel into the gap between your presence and your absence, like it’s a crack in my lip that my tongue is worrying at. The difference between them is abundantly clear, but there is no easy preference and Cassidy’s creation, with a backdrop of the spaciousness of clouds (those formless forms), helped me find that new category that includes all. Because when you aren’t here, I can sense you more acutely, focus on you more sharply.
And let’s face it, you’ve never been here, in this physical space, in reality. But I’m beginning to wonder if the distinctions between the real and the imagined aren’t also arbitrary, differences that can coalesce into an all-encompassing inclusion.
If the real and the imagined can be drawn together, then why not here and there? Berger says:
What is in motion is neither in the space where it is, nor in the space where it isn’t; for me this is the definition of music.
For me, it is also the definition of love. Love is dynamic, always darting between here and there, between me and you. Neither in you, nor in me, but making that space between us buzz with electricity. How long I have lamented that I can’t be here and there. Now, I wonder if this is a category mistake – thinking about love as though bound by its physical dimensions.
Cassidy also relayed the words of Rebecca Solnit – Cassidy, voicing Solnit, to say that voice is made from “why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for.”
I write for you, I always have. You, with an evergreen inked on the inside of your wrist. You, with the severe haircut. You, placing my stud on your lobe, saying ‘arete’. You, texting ‘I will follow your words to your mouth’. You, looking up as you order your thoughts into sentences. You, saying we’re making meaning all the time. You, combing comic back hair. You, walking quietly beside me as the dog jogs ahead. You, always disagreeing with my opinion of a book. You, mirroring the silent tear I’m shedding as you turn up the King of Cups. You, sending me recordings of musical improvisations. You, serene in a clearing in the woods. You, standing back from your easel and tilting your head. You, hoping Cromwell rests in peace. You, offering. You, accompanying. You, comforting. You, reading. You, with me. Me, with you.
And noticing the thickness of your presence, even in absence, also highlights your multitudes – all the people that you represent, just as Cassidy represents Haraway and Solnit.
You layer in Camus, and I promise I will call you. You speak in awed terms of Teddy, and I salute him, too. Your dresses speak of eyes we both want to see through. You tell me of your Grandfather, the way he loved, the way he painted, and I’m affected by the gallery in my heart. You call in the bandit, and I quake in mirth. You bring the wolf home, and we rest, resplendent, in our recovery. You gave me your life vest and we get ourselves to shore. You and I, together, are not two people, but the world.
As we’re talking of the tapestry of voices that we absorb and project, and because absence is such a close cousin of loss, let’s re-visit Berger, prompted by Silverblatt, paraphrasing Rilke writing to Balthus (you’ve heard this before):
Loss has a very strange and not contradictory relationship with the opposite of loss, which is possession. When we lose something important, we begin to possess it, internally, much more strongly than when we possessed it ‘externally’.
We never really know if we’ll see each other again and these times have made us ever more aware of the precariousness of our physical presence in each other’s lives. I’m learning to revel in your absence, because I can dwell upon you, come somehow closer to the you that resides in me. And lest the contained and predictable version of you becomes too seductive, I ask you: don’t let me hold on too tight. The bridge between us, I understand, can be built on air.
Though I find richness and an overflowing love with your absence, I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to see you again. I want my hold on you to be loose and lovely. But while you’re gone, permit me this white knuckle grip. Ideas, like sand, can resist the tight fist, but loved people are like spring air – you can’t grab them, you can merely step inside their radiance.
With all love as this new era dawns,
B
Normal service may resume in time. Thanks for your poetic accommodations.