eros, logos: my alchemical romance

Saturday, February 24, 2007

my alchemical romance

After this, we're very careful around each other. We stopped using the word love, the one which is both too much and not enough.
We didn't discuss the reasons why. We didn't discuss it at all. It felt natural to stop. I did not have the sense of us each waiting for the other to use it. It was just understood that we couldn't say it again.

I had the sense of us as two animals warily circling something and watching each other. Whether we'd fight or fuck seemed both equally probable and equally likely to cause lasting damage.

I had been so angry, and this anger didn't go away. It stayed with me, and I couldn't expiate it--I saw things now I had not before. I came to understand him better, and myself, and most of all "us", that strange hybrid entity uneasily compounded of two.

I haven't been able to write here about it--the demands of work and of life, but I will. Catching up.

[...] and I can make no headway
in this heady grammar [...]
Gillian Hanscombe & Suniti Namjoshi , All the words

posted by O @ 07:10


5 Comments:
At 24 February, 2007, Mu Ling said… "Expiate" -- that's a good word. "Love" -- I am not sure that this is a good word. At 24 February, 2007, O said… The word which is too small and not enough. I've alluded to this poem in this post and also elsewhere, but it is worth quoting in full: This is a word we use to plug holes with. It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed- seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute. Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. this word is not enough but it will have to do. It's a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go. Atwood, Variations on the word Love No, it's not a good word. I agree. At 28 February, 2007, Anonymous said… What about insanity? That is what it boils down to- a longing that drives us totally batty. ;) -p At 01 March, 2007, Robert Allen Zimmerman said… I miss you. At 07 March, 2007, Anonymous said… that poem is absolutely worth quoting. i like her poetry better than her prose. and that previous post? is why i don't play with floggers and paddles even though i rather like them
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