is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Light and Dark... for Valentine's Day.
There are so many ways to give up on love. There may even be as many reasons to do so. But you know I am incapable of authoring such a set of assertions.
From Jean-Luc Marion�s The Erotic Phenomenon:
�Philosophy today no longer says anything about love, or at best very little. And this silence is for the better, because when philosophy does venture to speak of love it mistreats it or betrays it. One would almost doubt whether philosophers experience love, if one didn�t instead guess that they fear saying anything about it. And for good reason, for they know, better than anyone, that we no longer have the words to speak of it, nor the concepts to think about it, nor the strength to celebrate it.
�Philosophers have in fact forsaken love, dismissed it without a concept and finally thrown it to the dark and worried margins of their sufficient reason�along with the repressed, the unsaid, and the unmentionable. Doubtless other forms of discourse claim to recover from this escheat, and, in their own way, they have sometimes succeeded. Poetry can tell me about the experience I have not known how to articulate, and thus liberate me from my erotic aphasia�but it will never make me understand love conceptually. The novel succeeds in breaking the autism of my amorous crises because it reinscribes them in a sociable, plural, and public narrativity�but it does not explain what really and truly happens to me. Theology knows what love is all about; but it knows it too well ever to avoid imposing upon me an interpretation that comes so directly through the Passion that it annuls my passions�without taking the time to render justice to their phenomenality, or to give meaning to their immanence. Psychoanalysis is able to resist these rash movements and knows to remain among my lived experiences of consciousness and, especially, unconsciousness�but it does so precisely to verify more thoroughly that I suffer from a lack of words to tell of them, or indeed that psychoanalysis itself lacks concepts for thinking them. The result of all these failed efforts is that ordinary people, or, put another way, all those who love without knowing what love wants to say, or what it wants of them, or above all how to survive it�that is to say, you and I first and foremost�believe themselves condemned to feed on scraps: the desperate sentimentalism of popular prose, the frustrated pornography of the idol industry, or the shapeless ideology of that boastful asphyxiation known as �self-actualization.� Thus philosophy keeps quiet and in this silence love fades away.�
Some silences are grand, and important, and they speak volumes. Others are dangerous. Sometimes these silences are the ones I focus on myself, so that my own emotional life becomes a mystery to me.
Tonight I was talking to Marilyn on the telephone, and we had a long and varied conversation about all kinds of things, the kind of conversation you can have with someone whom you�ve known for almost thirty years. I told her I was surprised by the volume of excited phone calls and emails I got this week about me getting a job, by which I meant, it became clear to me that many of my friends understand, even if they aren�t living this academic life, how very unsettling and stressful it can be. Marilyn pointed out that it can be hard for people who don�t know me well to see my loneliness and the unsettledness of it all, but that anyone who spends enough time looking would see. And then she said that she thought I had been living an unsettled life since some time before Richard and I broke up (SEVEN YEARS AGO), and I knew she was right. It�s not that that relationship shouldn�t have ended�it ended because it was over, or because it had to begin again as what it is now�but that I have been drifting a bit ever since, and not only because I�ve managed to be mostly single for all these years, despite all the great and less-than-great singular individuals I�ve had dates or to-dos with.
So Marilyn�s excited that I�ll have a place that�s more permanent in a city already equipped with a support system, and also not so far from the people who matter to me here in Philly. I agree. And yet I still feel radically unsettled, because more changes approach, and these ones aren�t temporary.
And so, after having had a truly great weekend I found myself drifting into a low mood today. I couldn�t tell why. I was on the verge of desperately unhappy, and was of course looking for ways to feel better, none of which seemed to be up to the task I would assign it. I started to believe that I was feeling bad about leaving town when someone here needs me, but upon examining that belief I found it to be false. I�m not really needed, nor does leaving town for five days constitute betrayal or irresponsibility. That was just a crazy idea, the first thing the pain of my unsettledness latched onto in its search for concretion.
It had to end here: sometimes pain and grief just resurface because they can, and will. There is no equation for how or when it�s going to happen, and there is no final escape from pain and grief. They make us what we are as much as do our many loves (amongst which I include friends, lovers, music, philosophy, a really good and deep shade of blue, a scrap of poetry, whatever inspires you). Something you thought you got over years ago can hit you at the most unexpected moment, and there you are again, right back where it happened. It could be a lost love, grief over a death, even the loss of an idea you once had of yourself or your life that never proved true. It�s as if it came out of nowhere, but the truth is it has been there all along. I think you just need to let that take you over sometimes, because it�s the other side of what most of us can�t live without meaningfully: love. Anything capable of so much light has to have a dark side. That�s what loss and grief are.
And, as you age, they can gather speed like a snowball rolling downhill picking up the remnants of earlier snow-struggles. You grieve the loss of a love and wish you could talk to your grandmother. You have a brilliant idea but realize that it is so private you could never say it aloud except to the one person to whom you can no longer say such things. Few thoughts are lonelier than these.
Or perhaps the pain merely takes on the aspect of Sisyphus� burden: I�ve already done this sadness, I know it too well. Surely doing it again can�t be of any use, no use at all!
But if there is anything to be taken from all this dismal truth, especially as we round the corner to the holiday of the heart dreaded by so many, it�s this: darkness passes. So speak your love to people, or show it to them. It sheds light.
1:08 a.m. - February 12, 2007
jill - 2007-02-12 01:22:34
dear jill, so dismal lately? what gives?
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jill - 2007-02-12 01:28:52
yeah, i know. it is the mode in which my writing keeps appearing. but do not believe me if i try to tell you that i have not had many, many lovely hours lately. it's never all dark, it's never all light, ok?
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gskooler - 2007-02-12 03:21:37
It�s as if it came out of nowhere, but the truth is it has been there all along. I think you just need to let that take you over sometimes, because it�s the other side of what most of us can�t live without meaningfully: love. Anything capable of so much light has to have a dark side. That�s what loss and grief are.
that is very lovely. you're right.
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