My head feels about to burst with the number of different narratives and parallel realities coexisting and coursing through my brain: there is the world of the stories, and the need for them to ‘compost’ slowly and vegetate slowly in the back of my mind. Then there are the more philosophical questions that my brain keeps asking about life and love, especially love. Then there is some need to sustain an account into the at times rather interesting, at times frankly boring nature of my life here in Ghent. My brain is pulsing and dilating with this tumultuous mixture of thoughts: from Proust, to plates of hamburgers, from turn of the century London and Paris to Arnaud’s bottomless irony, from Tintin and online translation applications, to what the stomach wants to eat for lunch.
I cast an eye over the small heap of books I have accumulated during a short ten minute browse among the public library book-shelves, and they seem to testify to my fragmentation of spirit and mind: Henry and Jane by Anaïs Nin; The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane; How Proust can change Your Life by Alain de Botton; England, England by Julian Barnes; Pulp by Charles Bukowski, The Infinities by John Banville. Here I am – reified, constellated, riven.
Some thoughts in passing:
Alain de Botton has absolutely put his finger on it here (through his avatar-medium Proust):
Q: Did he think that love could last forever?
A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn’t lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.
(How Proust can change Your Life by Alain de Botton, p.175).
Absolutely perfect, and it returns a memory from last month, that of the conversation with the blonde cellist I met in a hostel in Toulouse. In the opinion of this polite German musician, the great problem of love could be summed up thus: how to get the balance right between dependence and independence. It is simple, but it struck me at the time as being entirely right and resounded with some of the same thoughts that I had been turning about in my head at the time. Some of these were discussed by Josipovici in Goldberg Variations.
But then I realised that Alain de Botton was closer to the really profound difficulty that love presents us with, namely that of familiarity. I realised that the single most healthy decision that any of the couples I knew had made, was not to live together. If you live apart from your partner you preserve your independence in a fundamental way, but you also prevent love from becoming stale or wrecked by over-familiarity and petty domestic routines.
So habit and familiarity are the most dangerous things in the world, romantically-speaking. They are the despoilers of love.
The question is not: is there someone out there for us? There are hundreds, indeed perhaps thousands of people eligible for the job of loving you. It is a question of time, perseverance, some degree of sexual attraction and intellectual compatibility. The real question that we need to address is practical and behavioural. How did we keep our understanding of the one we love, fresh and exciting? How do we, as Botton so excellently puts it, keep the thing we have beside us every day not quotidian, but extraordinary; receive them not as a habit but as we found them at first ‘swan-like’? [In the context of this discussion of Proust, how ironically does this old term of laudation from Harry and then later dire opprobrium – the demise of the swan within – haunt me. But Harry, aren’t swans meant to die, isn’t that when they sing best?]
These thoughts recall another memory, a sad one. It was Harry and my final night together. But indeed, at the end, there were no words left. Just the spectre of a vanished swan that was too beautiful and too good to live forever.
This break up has precipitated more self-questioning than any other heartbreak of mine in the past. Before, discontinuation made sense, we were bound for very different lives or we did not share the same basic instinct for life. But with Harry, it was different for in many ways, we seemed so perfect together. This makes me want to, perhaps unfairly, bring Love itself to tribunal. I mean why did it end? Was it our fault or was it Love’s? Was it some fundamental incompatibility and misunderstanding, or was it our inability to understand the true nature of love and adapt our behaviour accordingly? How do we reconcile human nature and our longing for fun, adventure, novelty, beauty and intimacy with the notion of immutable enduring love. Is this a farce? Is it accomplishable? If it is accomplishable (because most things are if you really put your mind to them) is it actually enjoyable?
What went wrong? Throughout these months of self-examination and cross-questioning, I feel that I have sustained a pretty thorough enquiry into the nature of Romantic Love. I have become a sort of detective of the heart. A love detective.
I turn to Henry and June, and open a page at random:
“Sunday. Hugo goes to play golf. I dress ritually and compare the joy of dressing for Henry to my sorrow at dressing for idiotic bankers and telephone kings. Later, a small, dark room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove. Immediately, the richness of Henry’s voice and mouth. The feeling of sinking into warm blood. And he, overcome with my warmth and moisture. Slow penetration, with pauses and with twists, making me gasp with pleasure. I have no words for it; it is all new to me.
The first time Henry made love to me, I realised a terrible fact – that Hugo was sexually too large for me, so that my pleasure has not been unmixed, always somewhat painful. Has that been the secret of my dissatisfaction? I tremble as I write it. I don’t want to dwell on it, on its effect on my life, on my hunger. My hunger is not abnormal. With Henry I am content. We come to a climax, we talk, we eat and drink, and before I leave he floods me again. I have never known such plenitude. It is no longer Henry, and I am just woman. I lose the sense of separate beings.”
(Henry and June, Anaïs Nin, p.76).
Reading passages such as this makes me question whether women can ever really write about sex. But, of course it’s not just women, it’s men too. It is a basic paradox of writing that sex is one of the most fundamental aspects of life; yet it proves (with just a few exceptions), almost impossible to write about. Removing an illicit copy of one of Nin’s novels from my mother’s bookshelf, preserves one of my earliest memories of and encounters with, erotic writing. She is a classic, though probably by today’s standards, very staid (I’m afraid that I have not read Fifty Shades of Grey). Yet this description seems to me fundamentally inadequate, it is swathed in abstract scales and metaphors: of largeness, of fusion, of oceanic enjoyment; yet it is not real. Must we always read about sex behind this satin blindfold, tickled by its semi-translucency, by what is half-disclosed and half-undisclosed? This is an erotics of suggestion – it is not sex. I believe that sex is anti-poetry. It is vulgar, animal, necessary; completely alien to the glamorous world that Nin really lives in, of powerful men and beautiful women. Even if she wanted to, could she really, given the pretension of her social position, write a really honest and convincing account of female sexual enjoyment?
An honest portrayal of female sexuality – that is what my most recent story is about.
It occurs to me suddenly that we cannot ask questions of love as a philosopher or as a detective. We can only be sentimental about it. I have a memory – a churlish one. Sitting beside a young journalist, awkwardly, in the morning; watching (inappropriately) Four Weddings and a Funeral. Perhaps a sloppy British rom-com offered me the most recent convincing litmus-test of true love yet. As Matthew said to Charles, the question is simple, and it is a lusciously sentimental one:
Do you love her with your whole heart?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter what ‘love’ is. The question is, whatever it means to you, do you love that person with you entire heart?
833 words a day 