2003-08-01 - 2:31 p.m.
love is not the easy thing...
many apologies for my long silence. there has been too much to tell and too little verbal dexterity or eloquence with which to tell it. i think the only pain about which one can write intelligably (unless, of course, you are one of the great poets) is that which is, in one way or another, peripheral. to talk about a thing, one cannot do it from the absolute center, it has to be done from a sufficient distance. otherwise it's like waking with your face on the concrete in a pool of your own blood. i suppose you could say, "it hurts," and if pressed you might be able to recount the events that led up to you being where you are. but you could hardly, from your place on the pavement, say how you feel with any sort of precision.
i realize that this is a nearly absurd case of stating the obvious, but love is so hard. i don't think i could have imagined the difficulty involved in the choice between love or apathy when i was nineteen reading:
"there is no safe investment. to love at all is to be vulnerable. love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. if you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to nothing and no one, not even to an animal. wrap it round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your own selfishness. but in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. it will not be broken. it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. the alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. the only place outside of heaven where you can be absolutely safe from the dangers and perturbations of love is hell... I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness… We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.”what does it mean to lean into pain, to accept it, but not become apathetic or hard? what does it mean to offer it to God?
i feel like i know less now than i ever have in my life. even if life was a mess, i had an idea of what it meant to "do the right thing". now, i have no advice for anyone.
another strange element of my life as of late is the reappearance of an old friend whom i have not seen for four years and have not really hung out with since i was nineteen. and this wouldn't be so strange, except that he insisted on knowing all the significant things that have led up to the person i now am. not an easy task. you try summing who you are and why... he can't believe that i swear or drink or cry. and though i tend to feel like i've lost something since i was that bohemian bastian of feminine fortitude, on closer inspection, i am forced to remember that i was not a very good person then, either. nor was i innocent, content, or carefree. i was different, that's all.
movie update: saw wings of desire again. i love wim wenders, have i said that? of course i love him, i think of my life in terms of obscure lines in u2 songs and so does he, though i have to say that he may have a little more reciprocal of a relationship with bono than my own. but which ever way the pendulum swings, i love it. i was watching the best of u2's music videos and came across two little inside jokes between the two of them. the video for 'where the streets have no name' is a live performance on top of a liquor store in downtown l.a.. however, in the background among the dirty neighborhood buildings is the million dollar hotel. and the video for 'all i want is you' has the trapeze artist from wings of desire and far away, so close, though she is now the love interest of the circus midget. i also noticed in wings of desire, a sign for zoo station and the vacant lot used in one of the videos for 'one'.
i also saw a mid-winter's tale and 2001: space odyssey, the former of which i loved; the latter made me want to kill myself.
cheers, friends. or friend. or whoever.
