5 Extremely Scattered Thoughts on Love
A 5 Things essay about stuff I've been thinking about recently with a very obvious throughline
I.
Is there a lyric that exemplifies love more than “I don’t believe in an interventionist God/But I know, darling, that you do”?
When we love each other, we don’t always have to believe the same things or find the same obscure lines interesting or fall to our knees in prayer to the same entities. We have to see the differences in our partner and love them, maybe even more than we love all the ways we fit together where we are the same.
I don’t know why I’m trying, why any of the saccharine balladeers are also trying to write love songs, when the man that was once part of “the most violent live band in the world,” Nick Cave, already wrote a song as full of tenderness as this.
II.
Love is a concert.
Love is crying along to “Into My Arms” with someone I met yesterday.
Love is jumping around on the edge of the pit, trusting a bunch of strangers that I won’t get pulled in.
Love is occasionally jumping into the pit even though I know my back will hurt afterwards because I want to lose myself completely, to give the gift of sweat and complete abandon (the latter of which I do not give very often) to the band that I love most.
III.
Agnes Varda is the filmmaker that made me actually pay attention to movies as art. Agnes Varda is the filmmaker that made me start paying attention to movies beyond bits
of pop culture that I was woefully behind on. When I watched “Cleo de 5 a 7” a few years ago, I was struck by how full of love the movie was. Varga’s protagonist is sometimes silly, but the movie treats her with so much love—the kind of loving kindness few other directors would bestow on a main character who is (by necessity) obsessed with her beauty and youth. That loving treatment allows the film’s feminist message to shine through, more than condemnation would.
I was reminded of this love when I watched “The Beaches of Agnes,” her autobiographical film. Agnes Varda resonated with love: you can see it when she talks about Jacques Demy, when she and her family dress up all in white and dance together, when she interacts with the people of her film company, when she talks about her working-class neighbors or the Cuban socialists she met. You see it when she talks about her art.
Forget about her fame or artistic achievement. How lucky and how rare it is to live a life so full of love.
IV.
I’m reading War and Peace now (I promise this whole essay was not just an excuse to mention that I’m reading War and Peace, first of all I have already tweeted about it and second of all this essay is a conglomeration of art that has stayed with me recently as well as my feelings and I have resigned myself to the fact that War and Peace will be a book that stays with me for the next few months as I lug it around). I’m only part of the way in but I’m struck by the love with which Tolstoy treats his characters and his readers, inviting us into this world as it unfolds. Slowing down is an act of love.
If only in real life Tolstoy would have been as appreciative of the love and labor of his wife Sonya, but I digress.
The first Russian literary work I read was Anna Karenina, after I got my heart broken by a man who while we were together used that book as an example of why he didn’t read because he found its endless descriptions tedious. I read it during my midterm exams my second year of college out of spite and fell in love, realized too late into my political science degree to change tracks that words would be my passion, after all. Even failed loves teach you something, and some lead you to truths you’ve been hiding. Mine led me back to words (the other truth, that I’m a spiteful bitch, was not hidden at any point).
V.
Love terrifies me. Love fucking scares me. Love means showing someone the
unvarnished aspects of the self. More terrifying than the prospect that someone will run away at seeing this side of me is the prospect that they will stay and continue to love me, even when I am terrified, and lashing out, and petty, and angry, and indecisive, and willful, and as cutting as an animal pushed into a corner. Because if someone is willing to love me then, what does it say about all those times I stayed with people who pushed deeper on my hurts, reasoning that I couldn’t possibly expect any better? What does it say about the fact that I find it easier to list my faults in an essay for public consumption than love myself regardless of them?
Love is terrifying, love is disorienting, love means taking those little definitions of self I finally got comfortable with and flinging them out the window.
Love is terrifying, but love is also leaning over the edge of the ferry and feeling the sea spray on your face.
Love is terrifying but at least I don’t have to do it alone.