four quotes from love dog

Masha’s book Love Dog is a different book to me each time I come back to it. I’ll start flipping through it, looking for some half-remembered passage that something I’m feeling or dealing with has reminded me of, and lines pop off the page with new relevance. The book always seems to be speaking about my life in one way or another. Perhaps this is something like the relationship Masha has had with Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, one of the inspirations for Love Dog

Two days ago I went to the book in search of something in particular. These were the things I found. 

“Does love make you exist?” 

(from Behind This Scene, Dec. 31, 2011)

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This is what I think Lucatiel meant when she said she wanted to exist. This is what I meant when I said “Me too.” To exist in the sense of loving and being loved. This is what the quest in Dark Souls II meant to me, and this, more than anything else, is what I am looking for in my life right now.

“A text is for someone. Not for everyone. The way someone is for someone. Not for everyone.”

(from By Heart, March 11, 2012)

Recently I told someone that I am concerned about my writing because I realize that the writing I’m doing lately, while it feels like the only honest writing I can do right now, is also for a very rare and specific type of reader, a reader who understands and is interested in the kinds of quests and questions that I’m trying to work through. I am looking for a particular type of reader, one who I make sense to, like I am looking for a particular type of person, one who makes sense to me. 

A reader, like a friend or a lover, is not interchangeable.

And as a companion quote to that one, something about the way I love:

“People who are like forbidden cities. People who only love people who have the key to them.”

(from On Friendship (Ithaca, New York), June 22, 2012)

And then this, the entry I actually opened the book looking for:

“I want to be saved. Not in the way men are supposed to save women. But in the way we are supposed to save each other.” 

(Dec. 3rd, 2012)

Two weeks ago I posted some images from the film Beyond the Lights, and it’s true that Kaz prevents Noni from falling, rescuing her, saving her in a way that men are supposed to save women…

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…but the real salvation here is that he really sees her. Love is about seeing and being seen. I want to save and be saved in this way.

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