...of red balloons and plasma mebranes, Edinburgh Festival 2008 CC Cláudia Vieira
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Blogging at dawn from my office of light. A friend left me two gifts a couple of nights ago. One, the hand-written version of an untitled poem by Denise Levertov below, the other, a copy of the Nan Goldin interview ‘The Labour of Love’. They sparked ideas about love, networks and magnetism.
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For those of you who prefer text, here is an electronic version of Denise Levertov untitled poem:
'Often you seem to be listening to music
that others cannot hear. Rilke would have loved you:
You never intrude, you never ask questions
of those, crying in the dark, who are most near.
In electronic bars, even in bedrooms.
Rilke would have praised you: your nearness is far,
And therefore, your distance like the stars.
Yet some things you miss and some things you lose
By keeping your arm outstretched, and some things
You’ll never know unless one, at least, knows you
Like a close up, in detail –
Blow, by human blow.’
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The second text is ‘The Labour of Love’, Anja Cronberg and Christian Barbe’s interview with Nan Goldin , published in Acne Paper, No.7, Autumn 08. I stopped reading after the lead quote: “What we call falling madly in love with someone is not so much evidence of how deeply we care for our lover, but more the relief that we’re not alone anymore.” (2008: 107). I could have read on but there are so many other things I'd enjoy more.
There was purpose in each of these gifts. I think I thought I knew why my friend had offered me these gems from her scrapbook of dreams. Shared experiences; sharing experiences. I recalled one person in particular, and sensed my friend had made that connection long before offering this poem to me.
Yet, re-reading Levertov makes me think we all shun close-ups to a greater or lesser degree, we all distance ourselves from each other sometimes, oftentimes, sometimes. Some people we let nearer, some less. So near, so far. Attraction and repulsion. Our psycho-cultural metanarratives often enact this self-protection, both from harm and from the dilution of self in polyvalents. Sometimes it’s about preserving that space in which each of us just is. Alone. That space, fresh and stale, where only ‘I’ breathes. And some things we do miss and some things we do lose. Many things trail into the tragic pelagic.
There are moments when people connect fundamentally, others when it seems entirely impossible to relate each other's inner worlds. Lately, I’ve recalled the rule of attraction, and close encounters of the first kind drift into the current. Though sometimes against it, still.
If Denise Levertov is my new muse, Nan Goldin is my choke. Nan seems bitter, her feminism, hyperbole. Falling in love to me isn’t something that fills in the loneliness and emptiness (or not just that in some spaces, places, cases). It’s far deeper, mutual, selfless and selfish. It’s understanding one’s body, letting someone else understand one’s body, understanding a body that is different to one’s own, letting one understand it. This body is our own, tuning in and out of singularity, in waves of meiosis and fusion. We interconnect through light and magnetic force, perhaps close to the one the Sanskrit call Prana. At the cellular level, meiosis and fusion recur: constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing; fizzling plasma, realigning ourselves perpetually along the magnetic line of force.
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And so, we have different experiences of love, Goldin and I.
To me our ways of seeing are our 'reality', we evoke it. Positive charge leads to/is led by positive push/pull.
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But then I do sit alone at dawn in my office of light.
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