elemental

“To have a philosophy is to know how to love, and to know where to put it, because you can’t put it everywhere, you’ve gotta be a priest, saying, ‘Yes, my son’ or 'Yes, my daughter’ or 'Bless you.’ But people don’t live that way. They live with anger and hostility and problems. Lack of money, lack of–you know, tremendous disappointments in their life. So what they need is a philosophy. I think what everybody needs is a way to say, 'Where and how can I love? Can I be in love so that I can live? So that I can live with some degree of peace?’ And so that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other… and the rest of the stuff really doesn’t interest me. It may interest other people, but, y'know, one track mind. That’s all I’m interested in, is love.”

–Director John Cassavetes on filmmaking, as heard by me in this audio tribute to Masha Tupitsyn’s book Love Dog

One woman I know says that to her, love is like metal. Once in a great while, flames come along and heat the metal she carries around in her heart so that it melts, so that it wants to be poured out of her, to forge something with someone else’s love. But always for her the person she yearns to fashion something new and beautiful with isn’t invested in the process of creation, and the flames die out, and the metal hardens again into nothing useful or beautiful, just a weight she has to bear.

Another woman I know says that to her, love is like water. When she loves someone who loves her, it’s like the creation of an oasis. It’s rejuvenating. It brings about new life. But always there are so many people who want her love, more people than she can possibly love in return, but she can’t help wishing she could love them, that she could quench all their thirsts, and the thought of all of them longing to drink at her pool leaves her feeling cracked and parched.