*
archive
*
random
*
profile
*
notes
*
*
diaryland
without people like us, there wouldn't be people like us
29 January 2007 - 07:58
Last night I was chatting with one of my dearest friends, and I said this [lightly edited]:
Perhaps this is true on some level about all artists, but I feel that the art we make is for us, Nicholas, for you and for me and for anyone like us, but there aren't many people like us. Yet when people with this kind of bond know each other, somehow that is art, too. Sometimes I feel as if I'm not supposed to reach a certain goal, but must instead surround myself with people with whom I have a certain rapport. It's as though we're hammering out the details of a language only we can speak in our day to day lives.
Before I went to bed, I opened my inbox to this: "I am coming to believe that, just possibly, there is no point or purpose or meaning to the universe at all beyond the company that we are privileged to keep and the awareness that we bring to it. Everything beyond the story we tell each other -- a story whose telling is itself the story -- is just so many empty gestures to our inner ghosts." -- the ever eloquent Abadger
Becky called me from her train ride here (!!!) and told me she has been thinking of the same thing.
***
I have been contemplating certain words, words that ricochet between me and the Notable Passerby or swim beneath the surface of what we say: Certainty and doubt. Exposure and reticence. And how the parts of myself that are the most painful to show someone are the parts I love the most. Maybe everyone is like this, yearning for someone who can see what is in her and *recognize* it from the inside.
The best definition I have found for love distinguishes it from affection. It is a very simple definition: To love is to know and appreciate. Knowing to me implies certainty, and it cannot exist without exposure, vulnerability (and that is why I find it so painful to hide things or deceive anyone; to me, those actions preclude love and are anti-life).
(For Becky) Does that mean nostalgia is love in the past tense? Perhaps not. Perhaps that line of thought exposes the exquisite simplicity of my definition. Longing for something might not be the same as appreciating it. I don't think it is. In fact, I know that in my past I've had longing quite obscure love altogether.
Let's quote this into the ground:
Jared: We are all spiritual partners.
Donna: Then why do I take some people as lovers and not others?
Jared: Fantasy.
I will go so far as to say that anything beyond knowing and appreciation *is* fantasy, and that fantasy at times can be delicious, and at times devastating.
***
And yet I say, and perhaps I am alone in this, that memory and trust are the same thing. When asked what on earth that means, I reply: Those words came from a place that is a bit to the left of verbal thought or even logical reasoning. Perhaps a dream place. But more like the inner recesses of a soul. Perhaps we trust each other as we do because there is something we remember, without explicitly remembering it.
"At the end of the night/ When words become syllables/ will you remember our dance?" -- Wax Tailor, "Our Dance"
