In the months over the pandemic I engaged in a long distance correspondence on the nature and function of art and sex, and then love, which became in the rise and fall of days something almost like a religious practise. In our letters we made painstaking attempts to articulate our own understanding of love for which the other had become a symbol, like a stone under the tongue we tried to talk our way around it.
In another place, in another time, I would deny it. I would pace denial out on the street, following it down a thousand different blind paths. Ignoring the truth when it is looking you in the face was a kind of self-destruction I excelled at for a long time. But something about the present state of reality makes it hard to deny anything, hide anything. If I want to by cynical I could say that love was a lot of different things -- glitch of isolation and fear and strange circumstance, some kind of mad trauma bond, a trick of imagination and hope or self obsession
Impossible. But impossible seems to matter less and less.
what is the most extreme thing you can feel, how do you wrap your words around that?
I want to kill you and bring you back to life
And we did
Over and over
Fantasy but also this: we build memories of some future time. Love is actions / sensations / memories that trigger physical response, a specific literacy in another person, a collection parables and poems. Everything people do is about telling stories. One of the wonderful things about stories is their limitations, no one will ever know the whole thing all at once, see or feel the whole thing at once and this is also true of a self, and love. A delicate balance, words like scalpels are required. Let me put herself in order. Let everything be fresh and terrible.
Poems are equations, language geometry. Topology. Writing it down can seem such a waste of time, bloodless when what I want to do is feel. How much time have I wasted, thinking about, writing about love? For almost the last year I have thought every day about it -- is easy enough to have new thoughts, only the true ones are hard. I remember every last word, and all other things too, all the touches and long glances, the ones we have shared and the ones we haven't, in the metal trap of memory. Every little thing is marked, turned down like a page in a book. Everything. So many moments live their afterlife in my memory, they will live as long as I live, after images on a gazing retina.
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