Unbelievable
Dec. 6th, 2004 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormThis is from greatpoets.
Address to Winnie in Paris
by Sarah Manguso
Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris, but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.
The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.
Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.
The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened.
Diderot writes that the word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.
In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in betraying. These hells comprise the world.
A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision.
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bullfinch's, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.
Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us for the one crime we all commit.
It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?
If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life, it would be the one where the jailor says to Socrates I can see that you are a good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.
These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.
Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the head of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.
What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/greatpoets/702555.html?mode=reply
Up last night talking to Chris. Irritable this morning. Lonely, too. This poem just hits the right place, and I love the formatting on it. The lines are so flowing, such lovely potent English.
Songs are still hitting me hard. I used to ride out these emotional times happily with Kynnin; particularly I remember one time when we curled up together in the bedroom on blankets on the floor watching Schindler's List, and the light was orange. We never finished watching Schindler's List. My mom came to pick me up for the night -- that was before I was allowed to stay overnight at boys' houses. It was such a close, precious moment, though.
I just don't get that close to people anymore.
In the car the other day, talking to Melissa, I said: Once Kynnin was on Commercial Drive and he got double-rearended: someone hit the woman behind him, who rolled forward into him. They all got out, and the guy who'd hit them said, let's go around the corner out of traffic and exchange information. Of course, the guy drove off while Kynnin and the woman went around the corner. They didn't get the license plate.
And that, I said, is the difference between he and I. He's learning not to do that, learning not to trust people as much, and me, I'm learning that it's occasionally okay to trust people.
Somehow, though, learning that in some ways I'm right and no one is 'trustworthy', they can only be trusted to do some things some times, kind of breaks my ability for deep intimacy. I can't let go of future absences, future emptinesses, future too-busies and don't-cares, enough to be wholly and completely there -with- them. I retreat into my own head a little, keep a little distance now, and look: when I do it my life is easier and happier, I think.
Tillie made mention of a shirt for me: emotionally unavailable men make me hot. No one is always emotionally available to -me-, though; they have their lives that eat them up, wives which take up emotional energy or exams which take up time and attention or whatever, but of course sometimes people who have interesting lives are not available. So the question then is, what is acceptable? What is this supposed to look like?
The answer is that I don't know. I'm not unhappy now, and I'm frequently happy, but I find myself so frequently nostalgic. What Kynnin and I could have right now is not what I want. What we did have is not something that, I think, real people with lives can have. I miss that, though.
I guess this is grieving the loss, finally. I keep wanting to talk about it, and everything that happens to me these days feels like a pale shadow of then.
I'd thought that, in Chris, I'd end up dating someone as intense as myself and thus retrieve some of that intensity of relationship that Kynnin and I had. It doesn't quite work that way, though. Bah, I'm getting into subjects that words have trouble covering. It sounds wrong, up there. What I'm trying to say is that only time and mutual experience breeds familiarity, and the time when experiences were happening so fast and yet we had the luxury to devote so much time to each other and make it a shared time, that is over. And who am I kidding? That sort of seven years' togetherness is only created with seven years, anyhow.
I wish there had been something really -wrong-. I wish it had ended in a bang rather than a whimper. I wish I was still in the angry phase. I wish when I'd seen people from high school the other night that two of them hadn't said they were sure we'd get back together. I wish he wasn't dating Mouse. I wish this was behind me. I wish... well, I can't wish it didn't happen, but it's so much a part of my identity. So much of my life was with him.
I wish love was a commodity that, when you had too much of it, you could package it and sell it so needy children or uberrich yuppies could get it for Christmas and you could get some spare cash.
Address to Winnie in Paris
by Sarah Manguso
Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris, but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.
The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.
Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.
The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened.
Diderot writes that the word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.
In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in betraying. These hells comprise the world.
A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision.
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bullfinch's, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.
Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us for the one crime we all commit.
It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?
If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life, it would be the one where the jailor says to Socrates I can see that you are a good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.
These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.
Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the head of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.
What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/greatpoets/702555.html?mode=reply
Up last night talking to Chris. Irritable this morning. Lonely, too. This poem just hits the right place, and I love the formatting on it. The lines are so flowing, such lovely potent English.
Songs are still hitting me hard. I used to ride out these emotional times happily with Kynnin; particularly I remember one time when we curled up together in the bedroom on blankets on the floor watching Schindler's List, and the light was orange. We never finished watching Schindler's List. My mom came to pick me up for the night -- that was before I was allowed to stay overnight at boys' houses. It was such a close, precious moment, though.
I just don't get that close to people anymore.
In the car the other day, talking to Melissa, I said: Once Kynnin was on Commercial Drive and he got double-rearended: someone hit the woman behind him, who rolled forward into him. They all got out, and the guy who'd hit them said, let's go around the corner out of traffic and exchange information. Of course, the guy drove off while Kynnin and the woman went around the corner. They didn't get the license plate.
And that, I said, is the difference between he and I. He's learning not to do that, learning not to trust people as much, and me, I'm learning that it's occasionally okay to trust people.
Somehow, though, learning that in some ways I'm right and no one is 'trustworthy', they can only be trusted to do some things some times, kind of breaks my ability for deep intimacy. I can't let go of future absences, future emptinesses, future too-busies and don't-cares, enough to be wholly and completely there -with- them. I retreat into my own head a little, keep a little distance now, and look: when I do it my life is easier and happier, I think.
Tillie made mention of a shirt for me: emotionally unavailable men make me hot. No one is always emotionally available to -me-, though; they have their lives that eat them up, wives which take up emotional energy or exams which take up time and attention or whatever, but of course sometimes people who have interesting lives are not available. So the question then is, what is acceptable? What is this supposed to look like?
The answer is that I don't know. I'm not unhappy now, and I'm frequently happy, but I find myself so frequently nostalgic. What Kynnin and I could have right now is not what I want. What we did have is not something that, I think, real people with lives can have. I miss that, though.
I guess this is grieving the loss, finally. I keep wanting to talk about it, and everything that happens to me these days feels like a pale shadow of then.
I'd thought that, in Chris, I'd end up dating someone as intense as myself and thus retrieve some of that intensity of relationship that Kynnin and I had. It doesn't quite work that way, though. Bah, I'm getting into subjects that words have trouble covering. It sounds wrong, up there. What I'm trying to say is that only time and mutual experience breeds familiarity, and the time when experiences were happening so fast and yet we had the luxury to devote so much time to each other and make it a shared time, that is over. And who am I kidding? That sort of seven years' togetherness is only created with seven years, anyhow.
I wish there had been something really -wrong-. I wish it had ended in a bang rather than a whimper. I wish I was still in the angry phase. I wish when I'd seen people from high school the other night that two of them hadn't said they were sure we'd get back together. I wish he wasn't dating Mouse. I wish this was behind me. I wish... well, I can't wish it didn't happen, but it's so much a part of my identity. So much of my life was with him.
I wish love was a commodity that, when you had too much of it, you could package it and sell it so needy children or uberrich yuppies could get it for Christmas and you could get some spare cash.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 07:50 pm (UTC)I think that over time, my definition of 'emotional availability' has shifted. It seems to me that only in the Dreamtime of High School is one able to put their relationships at highest priority, as it is a time where most of our physical necessities are handed to us, and face it, the 'life work' of negotiating high school is relatively easy. As I've gotten older, I've noticed that things like subsisting (whatever work I do that furnishes my material needs) and my individual passions take up time and energy. Since I can't guarantee that my lovers share my individual passions, and I want to encourage their individual passions, I must accept that 'sharing' my life with them means diffrent things.
However, this doesn't mean i can't rely on people to 'be there'; just sometimes a phone call or an email is 'being there' instead of their physical presence. It means sometimes that I DO get lonely, am alone, and I realised that part of accepting this life (especially as I've chosed to do it) is to learn to accept the loneliness, or to develop my own tools and resources (that are not dependant on my partner) to deal with it.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 08:41 pm (UTC)