wine dark sea
Earlier this evening, I had on one of my tabs a website for a bed and breakfast near the site of a wedding I've been very much looking forward to attending. It'd long been a dream of mine to do that thing, retire for a night or two, a weekend maybe in serene New England, and I'd wondered at bringing Her, so this seems rather serendipitously placed. When I told Mom about the upcoming nuptials and their location, we laughed at how much of our family history (immediate and extended) could be traced back to that span of Massachusetts. Thoughts of that place, even absent its associations with a joyful childhood laden with contentment, bring to mind peace and simplicity and the precise opposite of New York's pulverizing anonymity. My picture of myself in that span of Massachusetts, that slice of New England, is that of the individual comfortable in his rainboots, hardy, eager to be outside and pass the time, surrounded by kinder earth than he has known since he was a kid playing in the backyard of his home in New Britain, smashing stones open to reveal their iridescent insides. It was during this same conversation that I showed Mom a picture of a woman next to whom I'd sat at my cousin's fashion show, and not only had the woman known me when I was little, her and her sister had served as flower girls at my mother's wedding. I am perhaps being overly sentimental in making Tolstoy's Levin from Anna Karenina a consonant part of this vision. Of flowers and little girls and kind earth.
“He thought of nothing, desired nothing, except not to lag behind and to do the best job he could. He heard only the clang of scythes and ahead of him saw Titus’s erect figure moving on, the curved semicircle of the mowed space, grass and flower-heads bending down slowly and wavily about the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the swath, where rest would come.”
No matter how many wondrous and kaleidoscopically healthy displays of love I witness, I'm always returned to the notion that it is, in a certain line of my experience, an amalgamation of flat and short-sighted ideas of personal happiness. "The greatest lie about love ever told," writes Zadie Smith, "is that it sets you free." And yet one persists.
Back in 2010, Habibeti and I dialogued, as we were wont to do, about the intersection of the cosmic and the terrestrial. Conventional wisdom had us flesh and blood beings at the mercy of the Gods of Olympus or karma or the Abrahamic Heavenly Father, and, to have some fun, I wondered if perhaps it were not the other way around, "What if we who are composed of flesh and blood and bone are the true masters of the universe, not the other way around? What if it is our anger and indiscriminate malice that killed the dinosaurs in a shower of meteors? What if our playful stomping about separated tectonic plates and what if our hands joined together, fingers intertwined, erased entire oceans and bridged continents?" Ending of course with the image of us birthing the universe every time we opened our eyes and whispering galaxies out of existence every time we fell back asleep. Discussion spun out to prophecies and how we no longer read them in the stars but in our genetic coding. Oedipus Rex becomes "hurt people hurt people." A more recent conversation with another beloved turned a deeper look to the notion of genetics as prophecy, and there was banter and self-deprecation, but love hummed underneath it, in so many varieties.
Moments like what occurred during those conversations and what I expect to witness in October feel very much like that bit in First Corinthians Chapter 13, verse 12: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
There is stress and fighting and learning, sure. But there is also knowing, or at least the promise of it. Perhaps we were just victims of poor timing, or, more unforgivingly, two temperaments ill-suited for that sort of endeavor.
It often feels during those fights like the earth is cracking beneath us, that the sky is being rent asunder, that we are extinguishing the dinosaurs, and the immediate aftermath carries the finality of apocalypse. This one felt different, not because of its severity and the way it smelled of the End Times, but because it started with an attempt at helping, at bridging a gap in understanding, proffering, however innocently and without malicious intent, an explanation for certain mysteries. But moons in their orbits meet wandering asteroids by chance, and suddenly, the cretaceous period has ended. She will think I didn't care or that I'm profiting from this or that this cataclysm was the result I'd quested for all this time, perhaps reading the word 'cataclysm' in dark recognition. Thinking, suddenly, of prophecies. She will think I wanted this. It will not be my job to disabuse her of that lie.
What she was looking for here, she can now quest for elsewhere, and my hope is that the thought of it (and its eventual finding) fills her with the same ease, pleasure, and peace that I get whenever I think of flowers, and family, and New England.
“He thought of nothing, desired nothing, except not to lag behind and to do the best job he could. He heard only the clang of scythes and ahead of him saw Titus’s erect figure moving on, the curved semicircle of the mowed space, grass and flower-heads bending down slowly and wavily about the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the swath, where rest would come.”
No matter how many wondrous and kaleidoscopically healthy displays of love I witness, I'm always returned to the notion that it is, in a certain line of my experience, an amalgamation of flat and short-sighted ideas of personal happiness. "The greatest lie about love ever told," writes Zadie Smith, "is that it sets you free." And yet one persists.
Back in 2010, Habibeti and I dialogued, as we were wont to do, about the intersection of the cosmic and the terrestrial. Conventional wisdom had us flesh and blood beings at the mercy of the Gods of Olympus or karma or the Abrahamic Heavenly Father, and, to have some fun, I wondered if perhaps it were not the other way around, "What if we who are composed of flesh and blood and bone are the true masters of the universe, not the other way around? What if it is our anger and indiscriminate malice that killed the dinosaurs in a shower of meteors? What if our playful stomping about separated tectonic plates and what if our hands joined together, fingers intertwined, erased entire oceans and bridged continents?" Ending of course with the image of us birthing the universe every time we opened our eyes and whispering galaxies out of existence every time we fell back asleep. Discussion spun out to prophecies and how we no longer read them in the stars but in our genetic coding. Oedipus Rex becomes "hurt people hurt people." A more recent conversation with another beloved turned a deeper look to the notion of genetics as prophecy, and there was banter and self-deprecation, but love hummed underneath it, in so many varieties.
Moments like what occurred during those conversations and what I expect to witness in October feel very much like that bit in First Corinthians Chapter 13, verse 12: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
There is stress and fighting and learning, sure. But there is also knowing, or at least the promise of it. Perhaps we were just victims of poor timing, or, more unforgivingly, two temperaments ill-suited for that sort of endeavor.
It often feels during those fights like the earth is cracking beneath us, that the sky is being rent asunder, that we are extinguishing the dinosaurs, and the immediate aftermath carries the finality of apocalypse. This one felt different, not because of its severity and the way it smelled of the End Times, but because it started with an attempt at helping, at bridging a gap in understanding, proffering, however innocently and without malicious intent, an explanation for certain mysteries. But moons in their orbits meet wandering asteroids by chance, and suddenly, the cretaceous period has ended. She will think I didn't care or that I'm profiting from this or that this cataclysm was the result I'd quested for all this time, perhaps reading the word 'cataclysm' in dark recognition. Thinking, suddenly, of prophecies. She will think I wanted this. It will not be my job to disabuse her of that lie.
What she was looking for here, she can now quest for elsewhere, and my hope is that the thought of it (and its eventual finding) fills her with the same ease, pleasure, and peace that I get whenever I think of flowers, and family, and New England.