The Love Below

It’s a topic that literature is known for making famous. It’s something we love to think about, to believe in and to look forward to. It is also, I suspect, something that is written about more in anticipation of it, in reverie, than from having truly had an encounter with it. Those who have had an encounter with it go silent, both for not being able to put a finger on its overwhelming ongoingness which they are deeply involved it, and for knowing that what we write about is so small a part of it — a part that either disappears or dissolves in what our experience truly is. The fact that most romantic movies/films focus on the headiness of the “getting together” part of things than what happens afterward, and that the most famous plays we know not only focus on this part of things but end often in tragedy should tell us something. What we spend all our time talking about is only the surface. This is not to say that there isn’t beauty in what lies beneath it, but it is a more complex beauty. Perhaps even more important is that it is a beauty that we don’t get to stand off to a side and watch or dream about (as one can do when anticipating a love he has not encountered or fully gotten into as yet). Love’s beauty, if there is to be beauty, is something we have to be deeply and constantly involved in creating. & what we have to do to make it beautiful is not always beautiful, or enjoyable, sometimes because it requires us not merely to see beauty, but to be it — sometimes under the ugliest of circumstances. Consequently, our idea of beauty has to expand, become more capacious & multi-faceted. Now how many artists — so gifted at speaking & imagining — live as beautifully as they speak? How many poets lead lives as elegant & graceful as their verse? & more importantly how does it feel to live elegantly? Does it sometimes hurt?

At least in my experience, and my understanding, the love we encounter beyond what much of the literature and films show us, is hardly different from life itself. This may spoil all of the reverie and the specialness love is imbued with, or it may not. It depends on how we are choosing to look at things. The Love Below, below all of that — dare I say — propaganda, is a whole love as whole as life is. This means it has a bit of everything in it: boredom, terror, hurt, hypocrisy, unfairness, happiness, madness, ecstasy, grace, clumsiness, rage — the whole nine. Now how to write about that? It certainly isn’t impossible — nothing is. But it requires of the artist more than a smug dependency on eloquence. It requires in fact a more whole eloquence which comes with experience where what you learn, what you know, what you have known with more than just your mind or imagination, begins to inhabit your whole body, the whole day, your whole life, your interactions.

Anyone who has watched African films not-of-the Nollywood variety would notice a certain slowness in those films, and a kind of abundance of space. The plot is there, but it isn’t as close and asphyxiating as moving from one street to another in Manhattan with tall buildings all around one. We have “space” from the grid of the plot as it were. Timbuktu is perhaps one of the more obvious examples of this, but there are several. Touki Bouki, Hyenes, Un Homme Qui Crie — they are several. In fact, I have noticed it in other films from the non-Western world quite often. This perhaps comes closest to what I mean by a whole love — there’s a lot of “empty” space in it, its plot is not always clear at all to the point where it could feel like you are “getting by”, or “passing the time”. That ampleness of space and time surrounding the meaning-and-resolution-giving plot is, for me, a kind of respect for the reality of things that both surrounds, outlives and is ironically the source of any imaginative truth. On the other hand, a film such as Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage shows not this kind of space, but a kind of starting and stopping, fumbling, paroxysmal version of this. Their love goes on by a constant refusal to let in that nameless ampleness of space & time you can see in the African films, and therefore starts and stop like trying to “bang start” a car. I don’t know if this is a function of the city-focus of Western consciousness or not, but its an interesting enough distinction.

I can go on, but lucky for us all, we have an iconic interview that gives us a glimpse into this love I’ve been trying to explain, & it manages in describing this love to achieve the grace & beauty of poetry. The interview is an underestimated and under-utilized, if not “perversely utilized” art. It is seen as where we talk about art, not where we create it — maybe because we think about art’s creation as coming from an “individual.” In any event, I need not say more, except to quote a passage from this interview.

Baldwin: If I love you, I can’t lie to you —

Giovanni: Of course you can lie to me. And you will. If you love me, and you’re going off with [another woman] someplace, you’re lying to me. Cause what the hell do I care about the truth, I care if you’re there….What does the truth matter? …You lied when you smiled at that cracker down at that job, right? Lie to me. Smile. Treat me the same way you’d treat him.

Baldwin: I can’t treat you the way I treat him —

Giovanni: You must, you must, because I’ve caught the frowns and the anger….you come home and I catch hell. Because I love you, I get least of you, I get the very minimum. And I’m saying ‘fake it with me’.” Is that too much for the black woman to ask of the black man, for 10 years so that we could get a child on his feet, that says “yes, father smiled at mother.”

What the Black woman is calling on the black man to do in Giovanni and Baldwin’s manifestation of them here is ironically, is to imagine while in the maelstrom of reality, while in the thick of something else, and in so doing, create a reality that another — the child — can believe in. When we say — often disingenuously — that love is bigger than us, and when I say that love is very close to, if not synonymous with life, this is what we/I mean. Ultimately, our task as humans and our tasks as lovers are the same: to imagine amidst the ugliness, boredom, rage, terror, banality, ecstasy, joy & the whole confusing, undefined mass of it all that is life. & in imagining amidst all of this & to not believe that we were merely “faking” love, it would become necessary at some point to believe that all of it belongs to love, as it does to life — the ugliness, the boredom, the rage, the hurt, the error, the ecstasy, the joy, the pleasure. It would require that we conceive it all as amounting to a sort of beauty. Or at least something we can accept as still, ultimately, worthwhile. Like life. Like ourselves.