Full Rainbow - Tim Baker (mp3)

Merry (midnight of) Christmas! This song is generously earnest, a little beam of contemplation shining upon the new year, and I knew I had to put it on the mix when I listened to the chorus:

Love, let me see you
Love, let me see you again
Let me see right through you like a lens,
and then let me see everything again

This points at something I want from love. In several wedding cards this year, I have excerpted a section of The Third Thing, Donald Hall’s essay remembering his marriage, which describes that concept of a “third thing” thus:

We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.

Third things come and go as couples join and separate. I find I have different interests depending on who I’m dating; I love noticing things that a partner would want to pay attention to, gathering world-fragments to bring back to them. Sometimes I feel a bit sad about the interests I lose after a breakup; I care more than I once did about Slavoj Zizek or monetary policy or story structure or folk music, but less than I did when I was dating someone who was invested in them.

I place a lot of importance on gazing into each other, as well. I want my relationships to provide a stage for my partners to grow larger and more stable, ever truer to the self they aspire to. The chorus of this song brought to mind a James Baldwin quote I came across in a substack essay called the key to love is understanding:

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

I crave the ability to see right through you like a lens, right through to everything again. A beautiful consequence of deep intimacy is a vivid understanding, not just of one specific other, but of the world as viewed through the beams of their attention.

Let us look on,
Tessa