No Ordinary Love
Song of the Day 07/25/2022
I woke up this morning in a state of hazy incognizance, halfway between dreams I couldn’t remember and reality I wanted to forget. I did the rational thing and turned my phone on. If only coffee could appear out of thin air. After scanning the headlines from this past weekend, I read a few short articles. One was a first person account by a 27 year old Muslim woman who recently had sex for the first time, and another about a German Jew who learned magic in Auschwitz (‘having a deck of cards in Auschwitz was like finding a gorilla in your bathroom’). The Muslim woman talked briefly about ‘hijab fetishists’ which was an interesting phenomenon I had never heard of before. The world is full of stories, so many stories, I thought.
The third piece I read was another article told in the first person from the perspective of a man in his early 30s who broke up with his therapist after a tumultuous decade-long relationship—he found himself in tears for weeks, unable to leave his apartment. ‘It was the right thing to do, though. We’d outgrown each other,’ the no longer analyzed man said. I sighed and then wrote a few pages of a book I’ve been working on, before taking a walk to clear my head of all the noise.
On the walk, I remembered that I read another article, A.O. Scott’s review of the new Jordan Peele movie, Nope, which was more of a plot summary. The film isn’t necessarily ruined for me, but like the effect of a lot of movie trailers nowadays, the mystique is gone. One has to give a hand to A.O. Scott; while his ability to write good criticism has diminished, he’s not bad at phenomenological description.
As I kept walking, I admired the bright sun's reflection on the Lachine Canal. I thought of a good string of rhymes that I would like to one day attribute to an unwritten character: I’m depressed, I can contest, due to being the subject, of a molest, oh yes oh yes, I now confess, at a young age, I was put to the test. I’ll continue workshopping it.
I’m always trying to escape my mind. One time I wrote a 20-page short story about an awkward encounter between two strangers that culminated in one saying to the other: Have you ever realized that the word therapist is just another way of saying the rapist? I ended the story there.
Life in this over-technologized world has turned everyday experience into one big scrapbook of unorganized thoughts, thoughts with no focus, thoughts with no end. It’d be nice to become a Luddite. I think of what Virgil told Dante, how all the souls in hell remain there by choice, how they’re all unable to let go of the very thing that damned them in the first place, how we’re all makers of our own destiny. I thought of the interpretation, of how heaven and hell exist not in the afterlife but on this planet, how people in hell are already alive, living in a world of their own creation.
Off this idea, I’ve recently been trying not to judge people, thinking of how an outside perspective that exists in judgment leads to an inside perspective of, well, hell.
Thinking, thinking, thinking.
Further along my nice, musicless, podcastless morning walk, my dog takes a shit. After picking it up, I buy a cup of coffee. Sipping it outside in the sun, I wondered for a while if writing was just another form of playful antagonization, it really is the perfect outlet. But that’s not only it, it can’t be. As so many writers love to say, we’ll never really understand the reason we write. Like vigorous exercise, it’s rarely enjoyable to do but always cathartic afterward.
I remember being in a yoga class five or six years ago at a studio in NoHo called Three Jewels. At the end of the class, the teacher played This Ordinary Love by Sade. I’m not a fan of speaking to an instructor after any type of class, but I had to ask about the song. There was something about it that, for lack of a better phrase, touched me. It seemed that this singer expressed herself in a uniquely vulnerable manner, where like a lot of the best yet most tragic artists, she had no boundaries or protection against the world. In other words, the song had a very pure quality. I inquired with a sense of embarrassment.
‘Oh that’s Sade!’ The instructor answered me.
‘A what?’
‘Sade, honey!’
‘That’s the name of the singer?’
‘You’ve never listened to her before?’
‘No.’
‘Ohhhh you’ve got a lot of wealth ahead of you this evening.’
I asked her how to spell Sade, and then wrote the name down on my phone. I guess that night I had plans, or had just forgotten to look her up. Four years later, halfway through covid lockdowns, I found the note on my phone and got into somewhat of a Sade wormhole for a few days, which was pleasant but very emotional. There’s really something striking about artists who in their work, portray no real emotional defenses. It’s hard to do, probably a quality that can’t be learned. People often correlate this lack of an emotional defense with the act of writing about intimate personal experiences or trauma. But that correlation is incorrect. It’s not the content of a work that shows a sense of vulnerability. It’s not necessarily the tone either. It’s merely the ease of how an artist is capable of transferring a particularly complex set of emotions to an audience. There’s no formula for this.
Continuing along my walk, I thought of how deciding what to write about was similar to choosing what to watch on Netflix. There are so many immediately accessible titles that often I end up watching nothing, similar to ideas and writing. Nothingness is easier than an endless array of choices. Unfortunately, though, I’ve decided to spend my life writing, my decision is conclusive; there’s nothing that can happen that will change my mind. It’s important to show up and write, no matter how difficult it seems to be. Bolaño said that writing is like going to war. To write, especially a book, one must be prepared to go to war. That might be a bit dramatic. But if war involves showing up for a cause you have agreed to fight for but don’t truly understand, I suppose he’s correct.
Regularly, I have thoughts about evaporating, about vaporizing peacefully into the world around me, about living but not fully existing, a form of transcendence, I suppose. This thought is a desire, and this desire is very strong. To manifest it, writing’s a start, a productive scream into the void.