Love is not an interior room
I.
Venus basket lives in the deep ocean. Naturally occurring glass, hexactinellid sponge, home to a single pair of male and female shrimp who grow too large to leave. Their offspring swim away, the parents spend the rest of their life together in a glass cage. Are you married? Would you like that?
There are funny ways of telling sad stories / there are sensible ways of being erotic. Still words mean things. There are people and ideas in the world and you want to understand them. So whence, and wherefore, "love"? You go to therapy, you meet a friend for coffee, fidget a little in the metal chair, listen to & then you hear yourself in a completely unattractive voice attempt to untangle the stories of your life and others. Seconds, minutes, hours, years. Zip codes, mothers, handcuffs, friends. Not a coherent story so much as a collection of phrases: well we never quite … and then … but how am I supposed to … when you …
Your friends are just as lost as you, buddy, and therapy is of little help, reducing as it does every social manifestation of desire to the frosted glass of childhood trauma, and moreover encoding — while refusing to recognize it — an entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats. Then what? Hannah Arendt: why is it so hard to love the world?
Erich Fromm: love is an art form.
Adorno: fidelity to love is the only means we have of resistance.
Auden: we must love each other or die.
Benjamin: we must love each other without hope.
Marie Howe: we’re walking along W 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say.
Dostoyevsky: love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
Memory of a man lying on a bed: I kind of want it to hurt
Chet Baker croons: but not for me …..
II.
Plato says there are 2 types of love, CS Lewis says there are 4. Unfortunately in practice it's impossible to distinguish one type of love from another. It's impossible to draw a line below which pleasures are sensual and above which they are aesthetic. It's impossible to deny the existence of eros in the relationship between teacher and student. How can you help it? Partial derivatives. So sexy. X changes Y changes X changes Y .. The ideal relationship between teacher and student is not a relationship devoid of eros. It is one where the teacher directs the libidinal energy in the room away from their own mouth and towards math, math, beautiful math.
You can, of course, thumb your nose at Plato and make your own rules. But do you have the ability to look at someone who tells you that they love you and tell them, no, you don't love me? I cannot do this. This isn't a virtue, I just can't do it. Therefore I must concede that there are as many ways to love as there are lovers in the world, wicked people love wickedly, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly..
Perhaps the only way to make sense of love is to rely on its self-eating grammar. Love loves to love love. An inherent insurance against semantic saturation – no amount of vague art or reneged faith can ever quite cheapen the word. But now I'm being inconsistent – or worse, lazy. Love isn't just whatever you feel like calling it!
Perhaps it would be easier to define what love is not? Like taking the partial derivative over and over again and looking at what's left? Shakespeare 116: Love is not love / which …
What distinguishes love from pleasure? All pleasure leads to the end of pleasure. Nobody keeps watching porn after they cum. No, you close the tab and stare at the wall. The smell of frying eggs is very different before and after eating. And I have never heard of someone eating 10000 fried eggs for breakfast. Not so with love. Love loves to love love – once you begin you can't get enough – even while you are doing it you want to do it more. In this sense love is like learning. There's no end. Why is there no end? The same reason as in learning. Because we perpetually fail. Because between man and love there is a woman, between man and woman, there is the world, because between man and woman and love there are walls, and we throw ourselves against them.
We don't understand each other. We are not, therefore, connected by love. We are connected by our failure to love. It's the same as learning. We are not connected because we all have learned so much. We are connected because we all struggle to learn. Sometimes miserable, sometimes stumbling over oneself with joy. Some go fast, some go slow. But the point holds. I love those Karpathy tweets about how to do better work: "The general point is that you have to recognize that you are dumb." Andrej Karpathy?! You?
III.
In Korea there is this word 한 (han). They say there's no English equivalent. Non-English-speaking countries like to say that nowadays, it's the consolation prize for colonization. "You may have gotten everything you wanted from us economically, but you don't understand this word ~han~, haha!" Uh huh, that'll show them.
Han is the grief that arrives with knowledge in childhood. The world should be a certain way and it is not. Some small furry part of you will cry over this fact forever. Han is the knowledge that life is short but suffering is long. You hear it when you listen to Korean women at funerals, it sounds like they're singing, and you hear it in some of the folk songs, which sound like inarticulate wails. Now, Koreans like to say that because 한 is a Korean word, it says something unique about the Korean experience. But un/fortunately grief – even this specific kind of grief – is not uniquely Korean.
Saudade, Portugal and Galicia: "a nostalgic longing to be near again to what you have lost, the love that remains",
Hiraeth, Wales: "a homesickness for a home to which you can never return",
Senshuct, Germany: "strong longing" (das Sehnen) + "addiction" (die Sucht), yearning to the point of nostalgia, nostalgia for a person or a place one hopes to find in the future,
Կարոտ, Armenia,
the mestizia of Turin,
the Traurigkeit of Vienna,
the depression of Boston,
the Hüzün of Istanbul,
Little girl I used to babysit looks at me one afternoon, says "I want to go home", we're sitting in the couch in her living room, "you are home", what do you even say to that
And isn't it funny how every single person on earth is capable and worthy of love so sacred and holy that it's almost indecent
And isn't it funny how despite this fact, or maybe even in part because of it, everyone still suffers?
And finally I realize that this phrase "I love you" has nothing to do with good feeling. "I love you" does not mean "I like you", "I appreciate you", “I accept you”, "I want to fuck you", or "You make me feel good." Loving you means I will be bereft in a world that does not have you in it. Love is characterized not by warmth of heart, endorphins, helpful action, or even understanding – it is characterized by grief.
IV.
10% people over the age of 65 are affected by Alzheimer's disease. This percentage significantly increases with age, reaching ~50% of people over 85.
Maybe in a few years you will call your dad. You will call him instead of visiting him because you live very far away. This isn't because you hate him, you love your dad, that's just how it worked out. You call him, and through the shitty phone speaker you hear his sentences getting hazy. You listen to him lose his way. Your beautiful, gentle, strong father! Your confusion makes you angry. Your anger makes you merciless. At last you realize that he has no idea that he is speaking to his own child. You realize that you are full of rage because you are full of grief. This knowledge, just like grief itself, does you no good.
Maybe in a few years, your dad won't remember teaching you how to play chess as a child. Maybe he won't remember how you looked at your wedding, or how he loved to embarrass you in front of your friends. Maybe in a few more years, you won't remember any of it either. But remembering it isn't the point. The point is that it was worth remembering.
V.
The truth is that love, like technology, creates problems as soon as it solves them. And like technology, it is wrong to expect love to come without problems, or to ask love to fix our life. The request itself reveals a desire on our part not for love but for normalcy. We continue to want love to give us something besides love. "There is a painting in the Whitney of a family in the screened in porch of a summer home. They are white and healthy but they don’t look at each other and behind the painting, nobody speaks."1 We don't want love, after all. We want the screened in porch of a summer home. But love is not a summer home. Love is not an interior room where everybody smiles and nothing happens. Love is not a little table in a nice restaurant where the waiter pours your water into a crystal glass and nods demurely when you thank him without lifting your head.
In the Abrahamic religions, the history of the world begins with a wedding and it ends with a wedding. The metaphor of marriage means that we are more than subordinates and more than superiors. We are lovers. To love your child is to love all children. To forgive your father is to forgive not only his deficiencies but the deficiencies of the world which you inherited. You are being pulled outwards. And called to throw your body and your mind, again and again, against the difference between life as it is and how it could be. Sorry, did I say "throw"? I meant to write "thrust." Or was it "trust"? Whatever it is, it has a lot to do with movement.
I'm trying this new thing where I don't reread any of my writing after I publish it but I force myself to publish something every day. Also, I expect my views on love to change as I become more competent and less cowardly. I’ll write this essay again in 5 years.
Rachel Calnek-Sugin