Wintersonian love

The woman I love rode this way, carried off by horsemen. If I do not find her, I will never find myself. If I do not find her, I will die in this forest, water within water.

*

It was Winterson who showed me something about love and passion. She revealed to me something of love’s nature. Love's nature and its exacting, beautiful forms through an exacting, beautiful prose. She showed me that love is exacting and beautiful. To Winterson, a precise emotion seeks a precise expression. Yet, she renders the ideal kinds love that many of us will precisely fail to attain, offer, and experience. Hers is a love of biblical proportions and Elizabethan tragedy powered by lyrical intensity. But is that not love? Yet, if we all lived and loved by Winterson’s standards, we might well end up mute and miserable, if not shattered. I understand that love is not the same for everyone; we love in our own ways and in the ways that we know. Instinctive and natural, we all can love as long as it’s true. Winterson demanded truth, and courage, and her language possessed a power and an intensity that helped me decipher my own feelings.

So that when I met you, her language became a language of recognition.

So that when I met you I felt you were my destiny, and this feeling has not altered.

When I met you, I found myself at a loss, and at a loss for words. I found myself chasing after the myriad echoes of your sounds. They were like butterflies. A bar of music. A run of colour. A line of poetry. Gone.

When I touch you, my fingers don't question what you are. My body knows who you are. You are a pattern to yourself. You are known and unknown to myself. You are a shape I understand. You are a private geometry that numbers mine. You are the place that I am. You are a stranger, a strange that I am beginning to love.

In your face, in your body, as you walk and lie down and eat and read, you have become the lineaments of love. When I touch you I touch something deeper than you. This touches something in me otherwise too sunk to recover.

Love without thought. Love without conditions. Love without promises. Love without threats. Love without fear. Love without limits. Love without end.

All human love is a dramatic enactment of the wild, reckless, unquenchable, undrainable love that powers the universe. If death is everywhere and inescapable, then so is love, if we but knew it. We can begin to know it through each other. The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire.

So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

The woman I love rode this way, carried off by horsemen. If I do not find her, I will never find myself. If I do not find her, I will die in this forest, water within water.

master and margarita

St. petersburg is your favourite city, you said, wearing an expression I can't quite describe. Or remember. A strange mix of awe, resignation, love. You said something about the architecture, and that I must visit some day. There're trams in St. Petersburg too, aren't there, I asked. You looked at me and nodded, wondering if I'd been there. I think Dostoevsky wrote about them in his novels, I said. You said you didn't like Dostoevsky. Too depressed and depressing.

Later I went online to have a look at your favourite city. Now I know what you meant by architecture. It was Vienna on a grander scale. I couldn't really tell from those photos, but I could see why you fell in love with it. I would too, I think, and now I badly want to go to St. Petersburg. Not just because of the city, but because of you.

I'll think of you whenever I traipse across a Russian square, or pass a village that is your hometown, or whenever I read a novel like Master and Margarita that you love but can't explain why. Neither can I explain why, and if I can't explain it, how can I know? I don't know, but I know I'll think of you whenever I remember you, your lips, your quietness, and how we drank to our health and happiness and fell into bed and everything was white and time left us and all around us was burning, and burning, and burning.

two januaries

eight years since I lived on that street, walking to the cafes, the uni, coming back from the city, alighting from the tram, coming home at night. that summer was a particularly enjoyable one. i had nothing to do but novels to read and cafes to go, every day, loving those aimless, reflective afternoons while eagerly waiting for the new term to begin. there was an album of songs then that i kept listening to, put on repeat and repeat and repeat so much that that summer became those songs. and for a long while afterwards, after summer had ended, after i'd left, listening to those songs brought me back to that summer and those breezy days. i walked past that street yesterday. i thought of those saturday afternoons years ago when i had nothing to do but novels to read and cafes to go and had all the time in the world on my hands. i put on those songs that accompanied that summer. the magic returned, that afternoon light, those colour of leaves, fragments of images of that time, those songs and her voice, and how those times are gone now.

new year's day

I stood in the gardens in the highlands. Child of this land, son of ancient kings. Coronation ode, Elgar. The tune. The march. Your face. It was New Year’s day 2011. The night was warm, and spread out before me, the stars.

flame, a thing of dark imaginings

When he returns she is standing at the bookshelves, head on one side, reading titles. He puts on music: the Mozart clarinet quintet.

Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages. But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he prepared for that?

-- J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurled;

A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped

By choice the perils he by chance escaped.

-- Byron

you've been away

and you have been in my thoughts, i think about you every day, i fantasise about you, and hold imaginary conversations with you, i look forward to hearing from you soon, and seeing you, and giving you a hug like that night, closing my eyes and finding my way up the trail of your neck to your face and taking in your scent that has stayed in me since then, and how i love the wine bars of melbourne that would intoxicate me to this extent to write these things in the middle of the night.

beautiful

been thinking about getting one for a few years now. still thinking.

seconds

It's your eyes, I said, and I could say no more. That moment, that atmosphere, suspended on itself. Charged. Electric. I could've leaned over - just leaned over. But that space opened like a gulf. It became precipice and brink, vortex, and void. And it would've been a great, great fall. From reason to desire, an impossible crossing, from universe to universe. Instead I let our silence fall. I remained where I was, leaned back, hesitant, desiring, scared. Almost, just almost. The moment passed. The moment was over.

M.

___

Nose, lips, pressed into the horizontal of neck. An undulating parallel, merged, made invisible, replaced by scent, softness, and six seconds of youth, fleeting, made indivisible.

E.

like what i did today

You're in my mind everywhere I go it's as though that night never ended and we never said goodbye.

___

Been a long time since I last read a new novel. Been re-reading the novels that I'd read long ago, have grown to love, and would never tire of - Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Passion, As a Friend, Giovanni's Room - novels that have become my talisman and map, novels that I would always want to have around me, to comfort and accompany when I'm lonely, lost, loved, unloved, unwell, dying, dead.

___

Bought two books today. One's an anthology of short stories written about and around a local bookshop that has over the years become a Melbourne institution, and the other's a novel.

And here, smelling of shampoo, entrusted to Peter's care, is the last-born, the most ardently and wrenchingly loved; the object of the Taylor's grandest hopes and darkest fears. The child who might still do something remarkable and might, still, be lost - to drugs, to his own unsettled mind, to the sorrow and uncertainty that seems always present, ready to drag down even the world's most promising children.

-- Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

Cunningham writes beautifully, and has a delicious rhythm. And I like the fact that all these novels somehow has a tender thread connecting them across space and time.

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And it's been a long time since I last wrote a diary-like entry. Like what I did today.