Love Dog notebook, 7/10/2014

Back in January, I said of Masha Tupitsyn’s book Beauty Talk & Monsters that I needed to converse with it. Now, as I’m making my way through Love Dog, I feel a similar compulsion, to not just jot down notes in the margins, but follow the associations the book triggers in me and see where they lead, what they add up to. Like I’ve done with some of bell hooks’ work recently, I like to type out passages that speak to me even though I could just copy and paste them, because the act of typing them out is another way of processing them, a way that is different from just reading them.

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In the December 13, 2011 entry, Tupitsyn quotes from a poem by Fanny Howe:

Love is the green in green. Does this explain its pain?

Tupitsyn goes on to say of green that it

thaws you. Wakes you. Is your awakening. Green allows things to grow and live again, if they’ve died–if you’ve died, if something has died in you–and also if they’ve never been born before, or yet. Red and green alert you to the world, so they are the colors of being alert. If you are in love or awake, you’ll notice these colors around you. See them everywhere, on everyone.

I took these two photos yesterday on my walk home, in the same spot, at the same moment, with my phone’s camera calibrating its colors differently:

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I think green is the color that I need right now.

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In an entry from December 15, 2011, which Tupitsyn wrote after watching the documentary Light Keeps Me Company about the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, she says that although his films are full of color, “As a person, as a man, Nykvist seemed recessional. So starved of light and color.” She goes on to say, “It’s hard for me to imagine that kind of stark contrast between life and work. Life pallor and cinematic (artistic) vibrance. Why were the films so bright and saturated and his life so wan? So washed out." 

I can’t understand that kind of divide either, between work and life. I can’t compartmentalize anymore. Life is a collision of love and work and politics and ideas and connections. ("Maybe the world is full of food and sex and spectacle and we’re all just hurling towards an apocalypse,” Lloyd Dobler says in Say Anything.) This is what I meant in March when I said that the heart is not a TV dinner. That’s a big part of why Broadcast News is one of my favorite films. Because for the people in it, their ethics, their standards as professionals cannot be wholly divided from their love lives. “There is love and there is work, yet we have but one heart.” I only know how to love people that I admire, people I believe in. (“Respect, admiration and trust equal love.”) 

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In the wonderful December 20, 2011 entry, Tupitsyn quotes from the preface to All About Love by bell hooks:

When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.

I quoted this very same passage in my own post from May 26 of this year. Revisiting that now, I think about how I sometimes get the sense that the importance that I place on love makes a few people uncomfortable, and am struck by these other passages I quoted from All About Love, these words from hooks herself:

“When I talked of love with my generation, I found it made everyone nervous or scared, especially when I spoke about not feeling loved enough… most folks were just frightened of what might be revealed in any exploration of the meaning of love in our lives.” 

and these quoted from Diane Ackerman:

As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush… Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.

I said then and I say again, “I’m fumbling for the words, but I have to try.”

In that same entry, Masha goes on to write,

In November, a Tarot card reader told me: “There are 200 hundred men, right now, in New York City, who you could fall in love with. Who could make you happy,” which fundamentally goes against all my core beliefs about love. How can so many people all do the same thing? And, according to the Tarot reader, at the same time and place, no less.  How can so many men all make me feel the same way? And if that’s really the case, if love is one-size-fits-all, what makes love so rare, so unique, so hard to find–so difficult to recover from? If there is something that makes someone singular and unique–for you–then the inverse must also be true: everyone else cannot be singular and unique–for you.

This idea also goes against both my beliefs and my experiences of love. At times I’ve gone years without meeting anyone I can see myself being in love with. Love is rare. Love is hard to find.

This afternoon, a friend who lives in New York City and who is going to see a band we both love in concert alone (again) texted me:

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Yeah, I said it’s all right 
I won’t forget 
All the times I waited patiently for you 
I think you’ll do just what you choose to do 
And I will be alone again tonight my dear 

Yeah, I heard a funny thing 
Somebody said to me 
You know that I could be in love with almost everyone 
I think that people are the greatest fun 
And I will be alone again tonight, my dear 

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One of the entries from December 29, 2011 is called The image of love I live for, and it consists solely of this image:

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That’s the image of love I live for, too. How Diane and Lloyd are both fighters, in their own way. I love it when a person is willing to fight for something they believe in, or, if I believe in them, I love it when they’re willing to fight for themselves. I love that Diane and Lloyd are fighters who find strength in each other.

 I look to the time with you 
to keep me awake and alive