is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Something That Repeats But Is Never The Same.
Something That Repeats But Is Never The Same.
Right now I�m in a hotel in Syracuse, NY. Another conference.
When I wrote about What Distance Does, a few of people I know who have had to move away from a beloved city and friends wrote me to say �thanks,� or, in one case �amen.� Still, just so there�s no misunderstanding, I want to stress that the bulk of my thinking was about the experience of time. Both this year in QB and last year in Amherst, many conversations I had with friends made me think that time moves more slowly for the person who has moved away (moved away when she would rather not) than it does for those who haven�t had to go anywhere or make big changes. Of course, the difficulty here is that since I�m talking about my own experience of time, it is difficult for anyone to confirm or disprove what I�ve said. (If my friend Lou were here right now, she�d have many complex and smart things to say about how time passes and how we experience it, and maybe someday when I�ve read the books she thinks I should read, I�ll understand what she�s saying.) My main point is that I wasn�t trying to make a statement about what anyone thinks.
Anyway, my account of my experience of time as compared to what seems to me to be the experience of time had by others is as hard to define or dispute as a comparison of experiences of pain, perhaps. The closest we can get would be a series of only-so-helpful metaphors. There is something about inner or corporeal experience that isolates us. No matter how much the �who� of who we are ends up being the result of how we are linked to others, there are things that none of us can ever share or communicate successfully. That�s just how it is. We are isolated by virtue of being individual beings enveloped in our corporeality. Something about our very existence is incommunicable. Even physical experiences that require the presence of another human being (let�s say SEX) are also inherently private by which I mean experienced in the isolation of one person�s existence (even while being shared).
(What did that feel like for you? It felt like X! What does X feel like? And so on.)
That�s why love is not fusion (Jerry Maguire was wrong, ha, no one completes anyone) but rather is meaningful in part because there is a separation that can never be bridged. And that is also why some desires are never finally satisfied. The fact that they are never satisfied is what makes them what they are. If we think of desire only as something that must be satisfied we have missed the point (or, let�s say, we have missed part of the significance of the experience, since perhaps it is better not to expect that there is a �point� to it).
This will come back around to love. I was at an academic dinner last night back in QB. It was funny and odd on so many levels, but here�s the first one: I was the lone female sitting at a table with four married academic men talking about the Marquis de Sade. Sometimes just being female (and academic) makes existence surreal. Anyway, it�s interesting to think that, if we allow de Sade his own definitions, we can�t define him as a Sadist according to contemporary psychiatric categories. Blah blah and a couple of jokes about coprophilia. Anyway, talk turned to movies, and we had the standard arguments about Crash and Brokeback Mountain. It is amazing to me not only that everyone argues about these movies, but that the arguments are always the same.
Something else happened during the Brokeback Mountain argument, however. X says �if it weren�t about homosexual love it would be utterly banal.� I say, �the movie is a movie about love that happens to be homosexual rather than the other way around. It�s about how when you fall in love with �the wrong person,� or someone you cannot be with, it tears lives apart.� Or rather it causes a deep and abiding unhappiness that stays there beneath all the happy events of a life. And X says, �what�s not banal about that?� And I said, �How is the one thing that is always different, which is the experience of love, banal?� My friend W jumped in and said, �Jill is right, banal doesn�t work to describe a real love, whether or not the love succeeds� and then made some really smart theoretical comment about things that repeat themselves but are never the same. And X held his ground. It made me wonder about his inner life. He admitted that someone might fall in love with someone at the wrong time or in impossible circumstances, but he would not allow that whole lives could be ruined and/or transformed by that. But at some point he said, �Well I don�t see how that is anything new. Didn�t we learn about this from Shakespeare or Milton?� I said, �Is that banal?� And so on. It was fairly clear that we weren�t actually arguing about Brokeback Mountain, and I am not even certain that X had seen the movie. But it was a work dinner so at some point I said, �I think we have to let this be an admission that you and I do not think the same things about movies or meaningful stories!� And I went back to my mint chip brownie sundae.
Speaking of which, if you�re interested in having an exceedingly pleasant but not entirely communicable experience with yourself for a small amount of cash, I recommend the Star Anise Pink Peppercorn Truffle at Recchiuti in the Ferry Building, San Francisco. It�s not a love affair, but it is inspiring, and it won�t hurt you or disappoint you.
And if you meet a lovely stranger while sampling truffles, I advise you to risk the hurt and disappointment. It's usually worth it.
12:27 a.m. - March 17, 2006
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