GOTHIC FUNK EPISTLE #3, #4, and #5
15 April, 2007
My Dear Gothic Funk,
So I've been trying to define exactly what it seems no one else has been able to pin down. Wikipedia even says that love can't really be defined because there are as many different types of love as there are lovers. I really like this quotation I found on a cutesy, cliche site of quotes about love from kids, though: "Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day."
Beyond things of this ilk, the consensus on the internet seems to be that love is beyond definition. Is it some big, great concept that no one really understands? I doubt it.
I know exactly what I mean when I say love, and I am not particularly unique and special. Yes, plenty of people throw the word around without meaning it, never mind understanding. But just because it's often misused doesn't mean it's lost its meaning. Plenty of people type "allot" when they mean "a lot," say "e.g." when "i.e." is intended. The general population doesn't understand how the English language works in general - how can we entrust them to properly define and explain emotion when they don't understand the basic rules behind our system of communication?
I don't understand people and social systems very well, but math I get, and I'm going to make the analogy that makes the most sense to me - screw the general population. Matt said to me at one point that he needs to prove that induction can work in a given system before he'll allow himself to use it; this seems to me similar to what you've expressed about vocabulary. You're a Math/English major - you should not feel so horribly awkward using a similar solution to the one used in our aforementioned mathematical dilemma to fill linguistic gaps. Wikipedia said each love is different - show what it is, how it works in a given system, and then you can use it.
A common description of love is that it feels like you have butterflies in your stomach. This has never set right with me – I don't understand what feeling they mean by this, and I'm aware it's also a common euphemism for nervousness. I don't have butterflies in my stomach around you - just the opposite. I feel confident, secure, stable in your presence. You don't affect my digestive system; rather, from time to time, it feels like every cell in my body is dancing - trembling and smiling. Like when I close my eyes and stand still, I can feel the earth moving. Like I can fly. And sometimes I'll feel about you how I feel after working through a particularly tricky and elegant proof, after completing a worthwhile problem set or challenging contest. It's a thrill like something inside me was holding on to a railing, frightened, and has now let go. At the same time, it's as comfortable and safe as lying curled up in bed (with no chance of falling out). Being with you on occasion feels like waking up in the winter when everything is warm and tingling with half-asleepness and content, and I know that eventually I have to leave the snugly blankets and stand on cold floor in cold air or that eventually the bed will cool down, I'll wake up and the feeling will leave, but for now it's just happy and simple and good.
The specific feeling itself changes, switches, dances - it simply won't stay still, and I think this is part of why it's so hard to define. Sometimes it takes over completely, a giant wave of feeling that hits me so hard I'm surprised I'm still standing after it's gone past. And other times it's calm and quiet, still present but completely unassuming, a warm, comfortable bath of feeling. When most people try to describe love, I think they focus on either one particular piece of it, either the most extreme feeling or the one they're experiencing at the moment. This is from where the confusion and misunderstanding began. Love is not any one of those feelings – it’s the situation in which they can occur. It allows for a whole spectrum of sensation, but perhaps it itself is simply a condition, an opening of the part of your mind that then feels all these things. I stumbled upon this about four sentences ago, so please forgive me if it's a little shakily defined right now. I think I believe it, though.
You open up a part of me in a way no one else does. You make me feel - never mind what, exactly. You are one of the stored-up things in the back of my mind, a reminder that no matter how bleak it may seem, there's something good in the world, in my life.
This is how I feel about you, what love means to me in the given situation.
Maybe that helped.
I love you.
The Gothic Funk Movement needs to set aside, for the next year or so at least, I think, all that talk about Post-Modernism. Instead, it should throw more parties and do more projects with live music and dancing.
Why do we keep fighting? With the rise of secular humanism, even the most faithful of us must at least be aware of an underlying animalism, be it fundamental (in the philosophy of atheism) or incidental (in that of the faithful), inherent in our daily lives. For some, this animalism is deathly, in that it saps the spirit of hope with its lack of larger purpose, frightening and ultimately paralyzing the subject. In others, it is an expression of freedom from the oppressive moral confines of the authoritarian paradigm that rules over Abraham and his descendents. For most, I believe, it is pushed into the background, relegated to those times and places, if it is relegated at all, in which we pontificate on questions with no answers and the meaning of life. For considering the notion that we are animals requires considering the notion that we are alone, adrift and ailing on a mortal sea. What, in the end, is the point, if the end is so near?
I repeat: Why do we keep fighting? Why not succumb to the basest of passions, shun public life and the lives of others, and simply survive, passionately, basely? Why is the rule of law important, why the suffering of others? The reasons are in front of us, lurking among our queries. Did you notice? Did the questions seem odd, off, awful? Did they seem leading, obvious and obviously wrong? Or, if not that, did you find yourself filled with an urge to defend them to yourself and others? Did that defense seem dangerous and exciting, as if you were a rebel for even suggesting that which such questions suggest?
The fact is, no amount of pontification, regardless of how relegated or how deeply pondered, will ever stop the passage of time. Life does go on, continuing with or without one’s individual attention. And the daily experience of the human condition will continue as well, whether we are animals or something more. Realizing the former does not change the latter: no such causal relationship exists. The truth of the one has no bearing on the truth of the other.
We feel different - we feel special. There is no denying that. That feeling of uniqueness is what I call “human dignity.” If being animals does not necessarily mean that we are ordinary, and if, regardless of our animal nature, we are going to be forced to participate in all of those human institutions that come from believing ourselves to be un-ordinary (the rule of law, commerce, traditions, mores and tropes), then, for lack of a better phrase, we might as well assume that we are, indeed, not ordinary. We must accept our own holiness because, in a sense, we have no choice. Holiness has chosen us - dignity has chosen us.
I repeat: Why do we keep fighting? Because the very act of asking the question is proof of our inherent human dignity, and because dignity demands that we commit that very act.
I like the rain more than anything else. My best friend and I used to go for very long walks together in the rain at night. We'd do this anytime we could, but it was always the best in June. In June, we never even felt the water as cold. It rolled off our eyelashes and into our eyes. We stopped for pop and we stopped for Little Debbie brownies, and walked past bungalow houses we'd want to buy and live in. Once, I walked barefoot, and got glass shards embedded in the soles of my feet. Once, we had to pee, and we went running into a backyard that was much bigger and darker than we had thought. There were big trees, and thick moss on the ground, a swing, a set of fancy furniture, and rain all around. Once it wasn't raining, but we found a huge sprinkler outside of the Chuck-E-Cheese on the edge of town, and we ran through it. It was wonderful to walk, and it was always the best to walk in the rain in June.
I had overstepped myself. I'd gone home shaking. I'd been bordering on convulsive when I went over it again. I wasn't cold, but I shivered uncontrollably. That may have been the day I connected my unmotivated shivering with the deeper motivations for it. But perhaps not. It's beside the point. That night, I worked up the courage to go back and talk to him. I was grateful when he suggested the walk instead of staying in.
It must not have been raining when we left, or I would have taken a coat. I don't recall much of the walk itself, though he was gracious and gentle with me as I quavered through. And he put me at ease, and it began to rain, and we just stayed on a bench by 58th on the quads. And we kissed, and lay down on the bench, and the driver of the E peered out at our adolescent fumblings perhaps five times as he went in and out of the circle.
And we got up again, soaked, as we had been when we lay down. He took my hand and we walked together. Just before we reached the dry haven between Ekhart and the building I would eventually learn to call Ryerson, he stopped. I turned to him, and he was smiling. I grinned back at him, at the very moment he leaned in. He kissed my teeth, just as some boy in a story I read once had kissed the teeth of the narrator, who had been mortified. I wasn't mortified; I was elated. As we made our way across the courtyard, he did it again, and again. This time I got it right.
We dripped through the Reynolds Club and we slogged past the Reg and he left me sweetly at my door. And that was mostly the last of it, and the rest of it was harsh and strange and sloppy and harsh perhaps again in turn, but the moment I was kissed on the teeth in a downpour remains the most romantic I've had.
CLARIFICATION, not an apology:
I guess it was a stupid thing to do. I've come to see that since it happened. I guess I wasn't thinking straight because I was pissed at him for wanting something I thought he should know better than to believe in. I guess I was looking for something I couldn't identify and I was looking in places where I couldn't see straight.
I guess it was a bad idea, but you should know that at the time I thought it would help you, not hurt you. I didn't understand how you felt, even though I thought I did, and I didn't understand my own power, even though I thought I did. I doubt I've figured them out completely yet, but I think I'm closer.
I guess I'd forgotten about what had happened the summer before because right then all I could think about was me. Everything was about to happen to me, and I thought I was thinking about other people, too, but I guess most of it was an illusion. I guess all the nights of sitting on your floor or your bed or your kitchen counter finally built up to a point where I couldn't (in that condition) put a stop to what we'd always been "jokingly" hinting at, what we still hint at because we don't know how to stop it.
I guess I wanted to put a stop to wondering if I could somehow fix you. It's what you always wanted me to do, even when you couldn't identify it, even if you'd never tell me so in words. I wanted to know if there was some way that I could make things better, and I guess I picked the worst possible way of finding out, but I'm still not sure if it could have happened any other way. I never wanted to "get you off my mind, off my conscience." I only wanted to be clear on what was real and what we were lying to ourselves about. I guess I wasn't too clear when I made that decision. It is small comfort that all my stupid decisions have been made sober, since I have been accused of drunkenness more times sober than intoxicated.
I guess I've gone on long enough now. I doubt there's anything important left for me to say. I just thought you should know.
I left campus after class one Tuesday in April, eleven years ago. I stumble at the realization that it has been so long. I cut down the alley to my house. No one home. With no one to inquire about my day, or distract me otherwise, I was left alone, pacing, my mind locked on a girl, my hormones racing. For three weeks, I had been unable to tear my thoughts away. If I didn't do something, say something to put my mind at rest, I was certain it would end in a breakdown.
I knew she would be home by now. I asked myself twenty times if I was really going to do it - something I had never done before. I knew I had to, or my angst would grow visible to everyone around me, if it hadn't already.
It was pouring, really pouring out. I started pedaling, with a sense of having passed all points of return. It was a cold rain, just like today. In less than a quarter mile I was soaked. Every time I pressed the pedal, it was like wringing a sponge.
For three miles, my thoughts were silent, for the first time since I fell for her. I rolled into her alley, dropped my bike, and climbed the steps to the side door. I must have been barely recognizable, with streams of water running from the ends of the long hair across my face. strangely, as chilly & terrified as I was, I no longer trembled. I knocked.
She answered the door, just, "hi." I followed, "hi." Then, after a breath, "I love you." Still shocked that I was standing there, she had no visible reaction. I turned and headed back to my bike.
Nothing could have been more comforting than the cold rain for the ride home. Questions were still unanswered, but I felt free. I would never fall in love again. I would never be so foolish and irrational again. I knew I was young, so I couldn't blame myself for my follies, so long as I learned from them. To think I had started to believe that there could be anything better in life than to be alone, flying through the city in a rainstorm.
I miss you like whoa. From the crown of my head to the tips of my toes, every last atom of me wants you back by my side. I miss you so much right now. I should sleep, but I don't want to get in our bed without you. I sleep with pajamas on to keep warm without the heat of you. For crying out loud, I miss waking up in the middle of the night to elbow you for snoring. Du fehlst mir is beginning to feel too flat to convey how much I miss you. Achingly, stomach-turningly, viscerally, I miss you. You cannot come home soon enough. And when I have you, I'm going to hug you so hard and just hold onto you. I pine for you, mein liebling.
You know what Annie Lenox says about the rain.
What are we gonna eat t'nyte?
Also: Did you tape the show last week?
I should get in around 7-ish.
Rain:
(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)
(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)
(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)
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I can only hope that my peregrinations are sufficient for my own preservation, that my perambulations carry me fast to my destination. For it is my singular designation, stated here without obfuscation, that I move on many iterations, not for progress but for recreation. If I may supply annotation, and let's be frank: it's my inclination, then I'll give my most audacious clarification, a simple and sweeping explanation, an electric and ecstatic evisceration, a plastic and elastic consummation, a pure milk-and-honey revelation. That is, we must live life without pagination.
And now it's hitting me.
I'm a horrible person. No... I don't know. I just have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea how to fix this... fix anything. Everything was so perfect - I don't think there's any way after this things can go back to how they were, and I don't know how to accept that yet. And I have to have this permanent mask up at home, around Sarah and my parents and myself, I guess, pretending everything's fine because how on earth can you explain something like this to anyone? And I hate the idea of anyone else knowing before him. I was upset at myself for telling one of my old best friends I was in love with him before I told him. I'm upset at myself for showing you his Christmas present. How could I tell anyone else this first? But I need to get this out. And I don't even know if I should let myself talk to you about it because I feel in part like maybe this is what I should do for 3 weeks and just sit stewing at myself as punishment. But then I don't feel like that's even enough and like it's not accomplishing anything and I want to see him right now because I can only do this in person if I can do it at all - I need some way to tell him where I can be there to take anything he's going to throw at me, and to hang on if he tries to run away, because then I get anything I deserve (except I'm sure whatever he says to me I deserve worse) and I still have a chance of keeping him - I'll at least have been able to try. And I don't know what to do right now and it's 1:30 in the morning and I can't sleep and I want to cry and I can't and I feel like I'm in middle school again except there's so much more going on and I'm doing this all wrongly. I'm a six-year-old playing a grown-up, and I don't understand any of the rules and I'm just handling everything so very poorly. Oh god oh god oh god... I don't know. I'm going to force myself to send this, even if maybe I shouldn't. I don't know. Egad.
I broke up once in the rain. It was the second worst break-up I've ever had. Our hair and cheeks were wet. I drove her home and squealed out of her driveway. The sky was lumpy like week-old sandwich mold and the ground was so very green and black. So spongy and cold. It was so cold, and if it had been any colder it would have been snow and not rain. I drove right back home and went straight to bed. I had a cat who curled up next to me, quiet. I had all the lights out. I had some sad songs on my CD player. Outside, it rained all night long.
With Love,
The Gothic Funk
