Love

Dear Will --

Back around the turn of the century I trained my heart to stop falling in love.  Or rather, I trained it to tell my brain when I was falling in love so that I could stop having a relationship with the person it was reaching toward.  I did this because I loved you and I loved god and I wanted to be a good person and I had come to understand that the poets were wrong, that the movies were wrong, that the entire romantic industrial complex was a fraudulent enterprise.

Loving you and caring for you was a different kind of love than the one the movies were about. It wasn't as pleasant. It didn't come with any highs. It never saved me from my depressions. But it was holier and better for me.

Unfortunately, the other times in my life when I've been as sad and frightened of the world as I am now I was able to move forward by falling in love.  I won't do that anymore. Probably can't.  I'm hoping that the new puppy will serve something of the function of a beloved object.

I've been cleaning up downstairs and I ran across your old teaching Norton and took some pictures of your notes on Andrew Marvel's "The Definition of Love."

I see where you have written "Despair, hope, & fate control Love's whole world." I wonder now if this was what you were feeling at the time you were teaching. You so rarely said anything at all about your feelings, good or bad.  You just seemed to act on them and left me trying to interpret your actions to figure out your emotions.

The book marks I found were from a 1982 desk calendar, though there is nothing to indicate when you wrote these notes -- they could have been written anytime before you retired, anytime you were teaching BritLit. Nevertheless, I like to think of this as part of your lecture during our separation, because the poem speaks of spiritual connection through separation.  It's a paradox of the sort that the metaphysical poets liked.

I know you enjoyed teaching these poets in part, as you once said about Donne, because they required interpretation.

I was always touched by poetry.  Whatever I read under a teacher's guidance became important to my thought.  I drew it in and considered it.  I didn't understand that people who actually taught poetry or any other form of art appreciation, could become impervious to the meaning and feeling contained within the poems. They could talk about what they read without needing to be moved by it. I always had trouble understanding that - the idea that you could teach something and not understand that people might be moved to act upon the text that you were teaching. If something is important enough to be taught, it's important enough to be taken in, thought about, and acted upon. But when I would ask you what you personally thought about certain ideas you talked about, you would say, "read so and so" about that, rather than giving your personal opinion. I didn't understand why you would do that.  I still don't.

There's so much else I never understood about you. I didn't understand how your brain worked. I didn't understand why you would get so angry at certain things and people. I didn't understand, through the first 10 years, why you wouldn't talk to me about emotions or relationships, why you would listen to me share big heart things with you and then go on talking about the garden or dinner. I didn't understand why you ignored me, why you were silent, why you didn't seem to care about my thoughts and feelings.

If I'd been an adult when we got together, and if I'd had a completely formed brain, I really would have left you early on. We probably never would have married.

But I wasn't and we did. In my 1970s letters to Lee I regularly wrote that I needed to leave you. But something in both of us kept us together, as though it were important to the universe that we remain bonded. Later, when I asked you why you never divorced me, you gave me two different answers at two different times: "Because I didn't believe in divorce," and "Because I loved you."

I never looked into your eyes but I felt that chain of love connecting us, a chain that prevented us both from abandoning the "project" of our marriage (oh, you would have hated that term, but there you go.)

The feeling of "being in love" was, for me, the tip top of the mountain emotional experience ... and I know it was absolutely heroin. I knew this by 1982 when we saw Liquid Sky, a film that made the link between love and heroin explicit. Romantic/Erotic love made me happy, got rid of my underlying sadness about being myself, made me feel worthy to be alive. I remember your explanation, back around 1980, about why companionship was better than being in love.  At that time, at the age of 27, I didn't accept or believe you and we went into the hard time of C. and separation.

But C. turned out to be just what my heart wanted -- an abusive narcissist who "love-bombed" me, used illness as emotional blackmail, and once I left you started telling me what a terrible person I was.  He too was a gift from the universe -- attractive, intelligent, Harvard educated.

I remember when I read that poem at the free read in the Bengal Lounge.  He had liked the poem and I read it very dramatically and got applause and as soon as I sat down he slammed my reading, telling me it was horrible. I wasn't demure enough.  He was a person who, unlike you, seemed to find me attractive (which you never did, as I was always too fat) until the time I said I was attractive as a friend of ours and he laughed at me and said I wasn't and never would be. And then, in Utah, there were all the terrible arguments with him telling me the he loved me but that I was a terrible person. Finally he said we should break up and I said that was a good idea. I remember a final meeting with him in my apartment where I was so scared he would do something violent and I was agreeing with everything he said just to get him out. 

And after that there was J. and dead Mike and getting out of Utah.

And it all worked out.  Sure, there was the bump of S. and my deep embarrassment over that. But by then you had accepted without approval my wandering heart and it's peccadilloes. It was after that experience that I finally studied the concept of romantic love and realized that it was a mental illness. Even though "falling in love with" C, then J, then S, helped me initially, motivating me to continue with my life at difficult times, it wasn't a helpful strategy in the long term. These loves were ultimately damaging to me as each one began with the other treating me as wonderful and ended with the other treating me as a monster.

When I am in love I am a monster. Only you, Will, had the magic to tame that monster by considering me a beloved, if bothersome, friend.  We were indeed parallel lines who could never completely meet but were forever bound. 

Are forever bound.

Love,

Kake