This summer, I watched Twisters with my mom and sister. I had seen the trailer and thought it looked tacky and ridiculous, but our goal was family bonding and mild entertainment, so I didn’t need much. I left the theater as giddy as a teenager. I FUCKING LOVED IT. Why?! 

A few reasons:

1. Country music is my jam. I have no shame. 

2. Yes, I am v gay. But Glen Powell?! Woof. How can a man wear a white t-shirt with a cowboy hat in the rain and not be too cheesy to bear? Please read this amazing substack about why Glen Powell is a true movie star. 

3. I have a major hero complex. (Spoiler alert) A girl with a complicated and tortured past drives into the eye of a storm and pretty much certain death to save everyone she loves and redeem herself? Count me in! 

A little backstory: 

My hero’s complex has been a long time in the making. It started with Mulan. I had a drawing book filled with illustrations of Mulan with her horse, Kahn. I went to bed every night, fantasizing that one day, I, too, would save my country, my family, with the strength of my loyalty and the power of my convictions. I’ll Make a Man Out of You was the soundtrack of my life.

I’m never going to catch my breath, say goodbye to those who knew me.

The hero I found after Mulan was Alanna of Trebond. Alanna: The First Adventure was published in 1983 and written by Tamora Pierce.  Alanna cross-dresses as a boy and trains to become a knight. 

The final notch in my hero complex was delivered on my thirteenth birthday. My uncle gifted me The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on DVD. Every night after my family fell asleep, I watched the entirety of the film alone in my room (in addition to a hero complex, I might have a little OCD 😬).

Nothing in my real life could compare to the pure, unadulterated joy of watching Aragorn, torn and broken but still standing, arrive at Helms Deep and force open those great oak doors just in time to save the people of Rohan. I, too, wanted the strength to rally a wounded group of people! I, too, wanted to survive when all the odds were stacked against us!

I cried when Legolas—angry and resentful about being trapped in a palace of rock awaiting ten thousand, huge, blood-thirsty Uruk-hai to brutally attack—says to Aragorn, “They’re all going to die!” and Aragorn says, “Then I shall die as one of them!”

What loyalty! What selflessness! What a hero!

Listen to my Hero playlist

The problem with heroes:

A few summers ago, I attended a writer's workshop with a well-known queer author. It was a generative workshop, and I was looking forward to creating in a queer space. On the first day, the author told us all that if we ever wanted to succeed in publishing, we would need to follow the Aristotelian plot structure. She mapped it out for us: inciting incident, rising action, climax, blah blah blah. It was not the queer, genre-bending workshop I hoped it would be. Sure, she's most likely right. You need to follow the expected structure to get published, at least by the big publishing houses. This plot structure is so ingrained in our psyches that we notice when a film or book doesn't follow this pattern. If a movie doesn't have a dark night of the soul or denouement, you feel hungry when you leave the theater. You crave the seductive burst of serotonin released when you watch a hero assigned an impossible task struggle against all odds and ultimately succeed.

The Aristotelian plot structure is how I teach the students I tutor how to write. I often have them watch Lessons from the Screenplay, a YouTube channel that examines the plot and pacing of famous films. There's also a book called Save the Cat that many novelists use when writing their first novel. It teaches a writer to lead a character from an inciting incident through the dark night of the soul and out the other side. 

Who doesn't love a good hero? Like I said, I am a hero fiend—a wannabe. And we have had so many! Where to begin?! Odysseus? Moses? Jesus? Muhammad? But heroes have three major problems. First, the hero is always singular. Yes, they can have a fellowship (Lord of the Rings slightly subverts this, so LOTR fans don't come at me), but in general, the hero is one single being. He is also problematically often a he, but I don't have either the time or energy to get into that right now.  This singular being spends the entirety of the story fighting the villain. The big baddy. Think the Emperor in Star Wars or Voldemort in Harry Potter. This villain is his own entity that can and must be defeated. Sometimes, we get a little humanizing backstory for the villain, like Tom Riddle's mom was isolated by society and abused by her father, but aside from a few facts, Voldemort is just a tool to demonstrate that while Harry was also orphaned and raised by people who didn't love him, Harry was able to do good; Harry was able to stay true to his innocent, pure, authentic, heroic self.  And this takes us to the second problem with the hero: the hero is good. 

A hero is someone you can root for, so he needs to be good! He needs to be fighting something big and universal. Aragorn is fighting to defend Middle Earth from Sauron–a force that plans to destroy all that’s good and green in the world. Luke is fighting the Emperor, who wantonly blows up whole planets. And, except for the dark night of the soul part of the book or movie, the hero doesn’t stray from his good objectives. He is the champion who fights the unbeatable foe, who rights the unrightable wrongs! (unless you’re talking about the anti-hero, which is much more nuanced and arguably creates better fiction–think Native Son or Giovanni’s Room)

The third and final problem with this whole setup is the idea that there is an end. The hero goes on a journey, and that journey ends. An end means a beginning and a conclusion. The bad guy dies, the curtain falls, and good springs eternal. 

Why do I care that this structure is the dominant storytelling structure for Western civilization? I care because we expect it and if we expect something, it means that it's so familiar it has become invisible. There is a Fernando Pessoa quote: We are stories telling stories.  If that’s true, what happens when the story we are made of and the story we continue to tell contains three truths: that there is a singular good guy and a singular bad guy and that all suffering will end if the good guy murders the bad guy? We become a species that can't tolerate nuance, that can't understand our enmeshment with all the other living creatures surrounding us. No matter where we live or to which ideology we belong, we think of ourselves as the good guys instead of what we truly are: humans entangled in a world so interconnected it is impossible to be good, even if we want to. (Provided we could even align on a universal definition of goodness).

The first problem: A hero is good. 

Aragorn appealed to me because of his stoic strength. He watches, observes, and barely speaks, but when he does, he’s honest. He puts the whole of Middle Earth before himself. He loves Arwen and doesn’t want to see her suffer. He’d rather let her go than let her die. He’s not possessive. These strengths make him unique as a man and a king, leader, and warrior because he embodies historically and culturally feminine traits: putting the joy of others before his own, putting his pleasure last, fighting for those he loves when all hope is gone, being quiet, observant, and unassuming. 1

Who does this selfless martyr, the son of an ancient and revered line of men destined to rescue humanity, remind you of? Aragorn’s classically “feminine” traits—compassion, altruism, and generosity—are the tenants upon which Jesus based his actions and teachings. So, not only is Aragorn the pinnacle of masculinity for all nerdy boys aged 8-100, but he is also a feminine Christ figure—an image of purity and virtue. 

In our culture, we want to be perceived as good. Who’s to say if this is the influence of Christianity or our ego, but we’re constantly telling stories about ourselves to feel we are the valiant and virtuous hero of our lives. In bygone eras, we crafted our stories of ourselves through which neighborhoods we lived in, the events we were seen at, and the clothes we wore. How we physically moved in the world managed how well we embodied good thought and right action. But, with the dawn of Instagram, it’s storytelling on steroids. The internet has become the new place to flaunt our right ideas and our correct beliefs. Not only are we trying to prove our “goodness” in the material world, but the immaterial as well.

Heroes also get us confused about what it means to take action. To be a hero, you must take a stance! You must declare yourself against evil with grand and heroic gestures! You can’t just be good; you must put your character on the line! There’s nothing heroic about buying a coffee at your local coffee shop. That’s not action! Going to the grocery store, the atm—those aren’t actions! Who is there to witness me?! To take action must be radical and performative. And once we’re seen, we want to construct our character so as to put us on the side that we believe is good.

Some people believe that what I, as a singular individual, post on the internet is taking action and that by not posting, I am not only apathetic but committing harm. With Instagram and the internet, we all believe there is a right side and a wrong side, and not only must I be on the right side, but I must publicly posture this position. This is divisive thinking. It’s polarizing and dangerous, but is it unexpected?2

Problem two: A hero is singular

In her book, The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard says humans have two bodies. 

In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside it's own skin… You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself to be whole, to be one. You need to take care of yourself, it says. You need boundaries. You have to be either here or there. Don't be all over the place…. Even the patient who is aneasthasized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeon's lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on Earth…. You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach.

I read this book, loved it, logically believed it, and still didn’t feel it to be true for me. I thought that my body, my life, my self, was contained within the boundaries of a white, medium-height, thirty-something woman. I thought I could choose what actions I wanted to take, for good or evil and those actions would be enacted by my physical body moving around in the world. Ultimately, I thought I had the power to control the impact of my body. 

I “daylight” as a technical writer. For a long time, I avoided truly learning about technical stacks, frontend, backend, blah blah blah, until it became clear that if I didn’t begin to take my work seriously, I’d be out of work. But I didn’t want to work for the big bad tech company. I did want their amazing health benefits and competitive salary. I thought that if I didn’t fully understand the work we did, it would be pretend and I wouldn’t really be participating. I wouldn’t be a character in the story that destroyed San Francisco, that contributed to the ever-growing wealth gap, to a downtown Seattle where men and women park their Teslas and then literally step over the body of a houseless person on their way to the office. But passivity does not negate complicity. So, I started to learn how applications are built.  I studied computer architecture to understand how technology works: everything from your phone to the place you host your blog to the app that holds your bus pass. Once I had a basic understanding, I wanted to laugh at my naivety.

Imagine you are buying a coffee at your local coffee shop. You’ve picked this coffee shop because it’s not a chain, and you want to support local businesses. You also know they use compostable cups and energy-efficient practices. Sounds great! So you buy the coffee, a physical action made by your hand and the baristas. But wait! That action is then broken down and sent all over the world. Something as simple as a transaction at the company Square might be created from a hundred or more tiny pieces. Each of those pieces has a little job and a destination. There is the physical you standing in the coffee shop and then there is an army of yous feeding off the energy in rural Virginia, stored as data in Amsterdam, sorted through a data table on a computer in Hyderabad. In the modern world, our bodies and the consequences of our actions are nearly infinite, and to completely abstain from harm, we’d have to make like Into the Wild, and we all know how that turned out. 

I’m not trying to justify my choice to work in tech (although who am I kidding? Who doesn’t want absolution); I am trying to suggest that now, more than ever, the idea that any human could be considered boundaried, singular, or wholly good is the stuff of myth. We are enmeshed. Every choice we make, even one so seemingly innocuous as ordering an espresso, has a consequence. Everything we do–from ordering a cup of coffee to opening this newsletter has a global repercussion. Post whatever you want on the internet, but no amount of political posturing on TikTok can make you the hero. Our complicity and our responsibility are much more complicated.

The third hero problem: The story/time ends when the hero kills the villain

But I didn’t just love Aragorn because he is good. I wish I could say I admired him for his demure acceptance and quiet fortitude. But at that moment in The Two Towers when Howard Shore’s score quickens and Aragorn raises his sword, I get a thrill because I know he's about to beat his enemies back! In a series of glorious shots, you see Aragorn’s bloodied knuckles against the hilt of his sword as he slices through one Uruk-hai and then another, all perfectly timed with the beat of the drum. Heads roll.  It feels good. In this violence, there is the physical expression of a body fighting back against the world, saying: I'm alive! I'm here! This is the life I will fight for! You shall not pass! 

Even though the battle scenes in Return of the King won the film an Academy Award, mass cinematic death and destruction didn’t really take the stage until the dawn of Marvel. Marvel movies are frequently featured on the YouTube channel Lessons from the Screenplay. These films are basically designed as a crash course in Aristotelian plot structure. There's always the bad guy, and there's always the hero, even if they have some dark, complicated past like the black widow or they’re insufferably cocky and arrogant like Tony Stark. 

The Marvel series started with a villain we could understand.  The first Marvel film, Iron Man, came out in 2008 when we were all still painfully aware of the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. The villain in Iron Man is Terrence, a corrupt weapons manufacturer–pretty human scale. Yes, there were a lot of explosions, but not too messy or too bad. Then you have the first Thor, and aliens get introduced, but it's still pretty tame. The little New Mexico town is destroyed but looks mostly abandoned anyway, and no one really dies. Plus, Natalie Portman is a hot scientist. But the villains had to get flashier and bigger as the series progressed. Soon, you have an alien spaceship swimming through the skies of New York, crashing into hundreds of buildings and flattening them into cement dust. People are screaming. The death toll of such a battle has to have been in the millions. But by the time we have gotten to this movie, we are nine movies deep into the Marvel universe. Suddenly, when people get squashed and flattened, they're just little CGI blips, snuffed out in a nanosecond before the next shot. It didn't take very long, but in less than a decade, global, planetary warfare became something that didn't even phase us—instead, it’s a blockbuster.

Then something very interesting happened.

For millennia, the hero's journey has always had to end. It was a one-way road. Villain vanquished, hope springs eternal. Then came Marvel’s Infinity War. At the end of the film, half the population of the universe (not just Earth) is turned to dust. Dead. Never to be seen or heard from again. Can you imagine the gravity of such a loss? Could you imagine if half your family, half your city–just died? One minute, you’re looking at your wife over a cup of coffee, and the next, she is gone.

A little aside about death and loss: 

When I was young, my family went to a church called The First Divine Science Church. One of the ministers, Karl Kopp, wrote plays inspired by William Blake; he honored children and made sure there were roles for young people in all his plays. After my parents got divorced and my dad moved to California, I latched on to Karl like his very own imp. I stole into the church library to pour over his books of poetry, which, while beyond my comprehension, I cherished in my bones. I still remember when Karl, my hero, over 6 feet tall, a gray-haired giant, was standing on stage with us at rehearsal when he suddenly collapsed. It was like watching a tree felled. He suddenly caught at the knees. We all ran to his side. When he stood up he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a little smile. I never saw him again. He was the first person I ever loved and lost. He was diagnosed with ALS and went quickly. I tried to visit him at the hospice, but he wouldn't let me in the room. I remember being so angry with him for not letting me say goodbye, but now, after holding the hand of three dying people, I can see why he wanted me to remember him as the lyrical, nerdy giant, not a man who couldn't move. 

After Karl died, I started having panic attacks about death. I began to think I was dying at night, that my heart had stopped, and it was the end. I had panic attacks in physics class, before bed, in the park. Periodically, these panic attacks will return the way they did when I was 15, and I'm faced with the truth that this life of mine will end. 

The self-centered aspect of death is still there for me–what will happen when I lose my own life? What will happen to my memories, etc… But now, after the death of my father and several friends, I am learning about what it’s like to lose the people we cherish the most. Losing a being you love is a grief so profoundly painful you have to escape your body to lessen it. It’s why when people grieve, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they literally want to deny their bodies.  

We can't live constantly awake to the truth that one day we will lose everyone we have ever loved lest it paralyzes us, but we can't escape the truth of it either. Because if we ignore death, if we don't give it our attention, we also don't give life attention. Death grants life weight. And vice versa.

Back to the third problem: 

In Infinity War, half the population of the universe dies. Imagine what it was like to lose your parent, your sibling, your friend. Now, picture that on a massive, interplanetary scale! Is there a name for that colossal grief? Until now—for all of history, the story was the story! The hero dies, and then they’re dead forever. But suddenly, in 2019, the Marvel movies declared that the dead don’t need to stay dead! Half the POPULATION OF THE UNIVERSE dies, only to be resurrected in the next movie! 

And just like that, superhero movies entered a battle with time. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the superhero movies now have to do with time. Time has become the villain. Because that’s what we’re really fighting, right? This is what we’ve been at war with all this time. Our true enemy is this: that there is only one time, and it is now. There is only one choice, and it’s the choice I’m making right now. And the present isn’t something you can make more of! It’s not something you can put in an accelerator program and grow. You can’t put it in a high-yield savings account and check on it five years later. Now isn’t something you can buy or multiply; it is singular and defined only by one thing: our attention. 

Our fear of our finitude is not new. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrestled with it in the 1800’s. Dante confronted death in his own way in the 1200’s. What’s new, I think, is our belief that we can stop our own death, that we can prolong our experience in time. Modern medicine, our ever-increasing lifespans, botox, and a capitalist society obsessed with exponential growth have given rise to the belief that our battle with death is a fight we can win. And now, our stories have shifted too. Now, when the heroes lose, there’s a second chance. 

Sure, there might be a multiverse. In a book I read about time, I learned that it moves slower at sea level. The moon is making our days longer. It’s true, time is fluid and not linear, and maybe it’s theoretically possible for you to die in this universe and still be a famous chef in another, but the truth is that our perception of time, in this universe, in this now, can and does end. One day, there will be no more now. 

The moral of the story is:

The problem with the hero's journey and stories about the one righteous hero fighting against the villain is that in real life, when that villain is vanquished, the story doesn’t end. The curtain doesn’t fall. Time goes on. The only thing that ends is that person’s, that “villain’s,” now. 

I think we’ve lost our cultural understanding of what it means to die. This isn’t a Marvel movie. We can’t turn back time. When people die, those deaths aren’t something that happens in a nanosecond before we cut to Robert Downey Jr’s face.

Marvel is proof that in fiction, at least, we’ve run out of villains. There’s only time. Which isn’t really a villain, provided you can look it straight in its toothy, scaly jaw and recognize: I cannot run, I cannot fight—I can only surrender. And when we surrender—surrender to this one, precious now—it becomes even clearer that if there’s anything we should not be doing with our wild, precarious present, it is depriving someone else of theirs. When we end someone’s life, it’s over. This is not a game. They’re not a number on a chart. Their now is just as fragrant and rich as this moment of mine: sitting on my front porch in the sunlight, my dog at my feet. I don’t want to lose this experience, I cherish it. So what right do I have to take it from somebody else? And I’m under no illusions. That is what I am doing. While I sit here, with my coffee and my pup, I am depriving someone else of their now. Because I am not singular; my body and my actions are nearly infinite, and my tax dollars, my 401k, and my newsletter hosted on servers powered by Amazon are all politically and financially entangled. The multiverse is already here in our present. Yes, my body is here in Olympia, Washington, but it is also in a bomb dropped on a country I have never seen with my own eyes. 

I no longer want to teach my students to model the hero’s journey in their writing. It’s barbaric to me now: two forces–one for good, one for evil–pitted against each other. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, she sums up the history of literature as having two essential pieces: a hero and a conflict. She says, “I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag… A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” 

I don’t want to teach young people that stories need to follow a structure I have blindly adhered to for most of my life. What if we wrote without antagonists and heroes? What if we wrote as if we were beings held in a powerful relation to each other? What if we lived this way, too?

In high school, my teacher, Jana Clark, had us read an Ursula Le Guin story called The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas. In the story, we’re told that the prosperity of one little town is dependent upon the extreme suffering of a child. The people of the town are given a choice. They can live with the knowledge that their world, their laughter, and their joy are contingent on the misery of another, or they can walk away, never to be seen again. My teacher asked us if we would walk away. As young, idealistic teenagers, we all said Yes! I will walk away! But the truth is, we don’t. This is Omelas, and none of us are walking away.

I've recently been attending ACA meetings (Adult Children of Alcoholics), and we have our own serenity prayer.

Higher power, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one that I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me.

It’s true, I can’t be a hero, and you can’t be either. And it’s also true that I have very little control over the infinite versions of myself scattered across the globe. And, while I don’t have a solution to the problem of Omelas, I know that, at the very least, in the end, it’s just as Gandalf says: the ultimate choice is what to do with the time that was given to us. And, as much as I can, I want to choose to commit acts of kindness from within the body I can control.

Afterthought:

There is an end, but there is also a way to make time, if not grow, at least expand. Attention. 

Mary Oliver wrote:

It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. 

P.S. I didn’t think of this all on my own. Duh! I am greatly influenced by the work of my dear friend, Daria Reaven. Listen to her here and read her here. 

I also loved Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell and The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard.  

This essay is very old but I watched “The Iron Claw” over the holidays and it sent me into a rage about stories and the way we tell them and reminded me of what I wrote in this piece. So, if you’ve already read this, move along :) If not, this is Part 1 of a new series about fiction, stories and dreaming.

p.s. the audio crackles. I still haven’t bought a fancy mic/podcast set. Perhaps one day! For now, pretend I am FDR and these are fireside chats and that this is the best audio quality the 30’s have ever seen!

Ninety percent of what I thought to be true about the world I learned on a blue corduroy couch in my grandmother’s living room. Every winter we moved the couch closer to the fire and my mother, sister and I would huddle in the heated refuge and watch the only genre of movies I believed existed: romantic comedies. For most of my young life I thought a hundred years of cinematic history was comprised solely of The Sound of Music, When Harry met Sally, Notting Hill and South Pacific. We’d spend our sick days under heavy denim quilts watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice.

My father gave my mom the 6-tape VHS set for her birthday and it was one of her most treasured possessions. He could be a very tender man, my father. I still remember sitting next to him on the couch as he watched Mr. Darcy tell Elizabeth, I’ve been a selfish being all my life… Such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth. Comic, big tears pooled on his chubby cheeks: You’re choking me up, he said.

My father left my family when I was nine. We moved into my grandmother’s house and the rom-coms accelerated. The highlight of our week was Sunday evening when we were allowed a bottle of root beer and a movie. Even at nine years old it was not hard for me to see what my mother loved about these films. Two people from irreconcilable backgrounds and prejudices meet under unusual circumstances and are presented with the opportunity to change. And if they resist transformation? They lose the privilege of a future where the world turns out right. My mom was a single mother who allowed herself to dream in movies.

I still remember her pausing Jerry McGuire in outrage, standing before us in the disconcerting darkness, her face illuminated only by the fire in the fireplace and blue glow of the screen.

“No one completes you,” she said, pointing at us in her flannel pajamas. “You are a cake.”

We laughed and hoped she’d press play. “You are a cake and you are delicious. There is nothing you need. Nothing could make you taste any better.”

A cake. It’s not hard to see what I loved about those movies, those characters, magnetically drawn to each other, overcoming insecurities and past traumas, choosing, despite it all, to run through a sea of New Year’s party goers to tell their beloved, I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. They did what my parents couldn’t.

*

At fourteen years old, two significant things happened. I was accepted into an all-girls leadership camp in rural New York where I watched But I’m a Cheerleader for the first time and a beautiful Norwegian girl, a year older than me, asked me to dance. She stood behind me, both her hands on my hips, and pulled me towards her while she whispered in my ear, be loose, be free. Something happened that had never happened in all my years of watching screen kisses. I felt a belly seizure: both internal fire and field of worms simultaneously.

I still remember huddling around the TV in the camp living room with twenty other girls. The room was muggy and mosquito ridden. We sprawled across the floor and ratty couches in our bathing suits or sports bras. There were no men here. We could wear whatever we wanted. Our counselor pressed play. When the film’s main character Megan is sent off to True Directions, a camp designed to “rehabilitate” her by seizing her queerness, we all felt it — the room buzzed. Soon, Megan meets Graham, the only queer at True Directions who seemingly doesn’t want to be rehabilitated. When Graham, alluring and confident, crosses the distance between their two bodies to give Megan a tender and yet assertive kiss, I swear you could hear our brains click, like a train changing track — suddenly, there was another direction available to us. I spent the rest of that summer sleeping in a tent surrounded by young women from all over the world. We danced under the full moon and ran barefoot through the woods. I was fully awake to my queerness for the first time in my entire life. I felt powerful — a sexual magic flickered through me as I unraveled, bit by bit, the varied paths that were now seemingly open before me. When I returned home to Denver, Colorado I started dating a boy and didn’t kiss a girl for thirteen years.

But I’m a Cheerleader is a fantastic work of cinema. Its wit, playfulness and camp critique the very real and damaging practice of reparative therapy. The movie is, in and of itself, a queer interrogation of a violent heteronormative practice, and through its satirical approach, the film manages to reclaim ownership and power over this narrative. But director Jamie Babbit’s genius and heart does not negate the fact that our two heroes exist in a world that denies their right to be heroes at all. I watched these two beautiful women tentatively kiss one another, afraid of what we’re all afraid of: relinquishing the boundary between one and the other and engaging in symbiotic vulnerability. They’re tender and shy. But they exist within a narrative that makes them choose between this new beginning and the love and understanding of their families. There is no winning in this story.

Recently my friend Daria organized a queer virtual watch-party of Happiest Season to celebrate her birthday, a film that would supposedly bring queer love to the holiday movie limelight. We were hoping for a movie like The Family Stone or Love Actually (a film whose storyline about a lesbian principal and her terminally ill partner was removed) where characters wrangle with the very real problems of grief, familial obligations and the fear of rejection. Not ironically, Daria and I met at the summer camp in New York. We are both queer and yet, after leaving that green and sacred place, it took each of us over a decade to separately acknowledge and embrace our own queerness. She and her date were watching from New York City while my girlfriend and I watched in Denver. We had all been waiting for the release of this movie for months. Daria and I shared memes and watched the trailer on repeat. We were excited to see Clea Duvall’s, Graham from But I’m a Cheerleader, directorial debut. We hit play at the same time.

The film begins with a series of images depicting the year-long relationship between Abby, played by Kristen Stewart, and her partner, Harper, played by Mackenzie Davis. They’re seen exchanging necklaces, moving in together, playing games with their friends. It looks like a charmed and loving relationship. Abby hates Christmas. Her parents died when she was eighteen and she always feels outside during the holiday season. Harper doesn’t want her to be alone and invites her to spend Christmas with her family. Ten minutes into the film, the premise is clear: on the way to her family’s house, Harper admits to Abby that she has not told her parents that she is gay. What follows is an hour and a half of pure torture. Abby is relegated to the closet (literally) while Harper publicly denies any connection the couple share. Abby is erased and her disappearance is orchestrated by the person she loves most. It is an age-old tale of denial and isolation and it was almost too painful to watch.

Not long into the film a collective, virtual shudder rippled through our group. It was abundantly clear that we were about to watch another movie where one protagonist is either ashamed of their lesbian identity or hiding their true self from their family. While But I’m a Cheerleader took on the isolation of the queer experience by structurally and thematically setting itself outside the rom-com genre with its camp and satire, Happiest Season, released twenty-one years later, is still the same story and much less original. Happiest Season failed to center the experience of its queer characters in any meaningful way outside of fraught alienation.

“Here we go again,” Daria said.

*

Maria Tatar, who chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, wrote that the fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, is “celebrated as the quintessential story of romantic love, demonstrating its power to transcend physical appearances. But…it is also a plot rich in opportunities for expressing a woman’s anxieties about marriage, and it may at one time have circulated as a story that steadied the fears of young women facing arranged marriages to older men.” The debate about the true meaning behind fairytales is long and burdened, but a great many folklorists believe that these stories were often used as allegories designed to teach children how to live. The goal of a fairy tale was to relieve the fear of leaving home, their first sexual experiences, and childbirth. Tatar says of Cinderella, “In this splitting of the mother into two polar opposites, psychologists have seen a mechanism for helping children work through the conflicts created as they begin to mature and separate from their primary caretakers.” Throughout human history it is through story and, more recently, fiction, that we learn how to live.

We look to origin stories in order to understand our physical world — they tell us what will harm us and what will heal us. Our ability to provide a narrative for our human existence both validates our experience and also informs our future.

Growing up, my mother was the librarian at my elementary school. The school had just opened after being shuttered for over thirty years and the library was filled with the dust of decades. She was a single mom and didn’t have the option for daycare, so every night as she perfected her little world, my sister and I spent hours hidden under tables reading every retelling of Cinderella, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Rumpelstiltskin that we could get our hands on. We had an entire universe open to us. As a child, I loved fairy tales for their beauty, for their inexplicable sadness, for women discovered and redeemed through their love. Every day I was able to enter the lawless domains these tales provided and feel like I belonged. Fairytales offered the escape I so desperately needed.

Notting Hill is not so unlike the fairytales I gorged myself on as a child. Watching it with my mother and sister in that familiar living room, we loved the scene when William Thacker and Anna Scott break into the secret garden and find the bench that reads, For June who loved this garden, from Joseph, who always sat beside her. Anna wistfully sits on the bench and says, Some people do spend their whole lives together. We watched this scene with a kind of hunger. There was a palpable want in our attention. All three of us wanted to fall in love and have someone always sit beside us. We wanted to go back in time, rewrite history, and have our father, here on the couch, watching with us. What I learned from romantic comedies is that when women are loved by men, a cycle is complete and what was broken is rendered whole again. More than anything I wanted to be whole and I thought to be whole, I needed to be loved. Until I was fourteen, I had never seen two women kiss on screen nor had I seen a movie where two women loved each other and lived happily ever after. Instead, I watched Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility on repeat. I began seeking that revelatory acceptance that would come when a man would walk through my doors and say to me, I’ve come here with no expectations, only to profess, that my heart is, and always will be, yours.

*

On our second date, my girlfriend and I went to see Call me By Your Name, a film in which a teenage boy enters into a summer affair with an his father’s older male graduate student and experiences his first deep feelings about love and sexuality. She immediately took my hand in the theater, curled into my body, making nothing of the armrest between us. It was monumental, to see reflected on screen, a version of love that felt familiar and beautiful and real. The question posed, to speak or to die, felt like the question in our new, careful relationship — will we put ourselves out there? Will we risk exposure in order to draw closer?

Now, whenever we search for a movie, we always look through the LGBTQA section of every streaming platform. Stories of LGBTQA love are out there, but, with the exception of Call Me by Your Name and the 2015 romantic drama Carol, they don’t often reach the mainstream. They’re frequently sectioned off into their own category. A specific section designed to contain the weight and breadth of queer life is problematic — it reinforces the idea that this love belongs outside.

More often than not, my girlfriend and I find ourselves cuddled up together in bed watching as Cate Blanchet lights Rooney Mara’s cigarette in Carol, melting under their visible tension and Carter Burwell’s score that oozes longing and desire. We’re hungry for a love story in which two women struggle to overcome insecurities, fear of vulnerability or childhood trauma in order to draw closer. Instead, what we find is movie after movie depicting women who are afraid to own their queerness — or who are punished for their lesbian identity. Carol loses her daughter. The redemptive quality of these films is not the humanity of the protagonist, but her ability to accept her queerness. The antagonistic force is not the death of a parent, a divorce, or the fact that one of the characters is a movie star with a fear of intimacy — no, the antagonistic force is always the protagonist herself. Before there can be love, before there can even be a story, she must accept the fact that she is queer. The central question is: am I acceptable despite my queerness? It is never self-evident that these characters are loveable, whole and worthy regardless of their sexual identify or gender. Before we can even get to the queer equivalents of Notting Hill or When Harry met Sally, we have to muddle through entire films in which characters grapple uncomfortably with the question: is my queerness wrong? From Better than Chocolate to Imagine Me and You, Saving Face, or Kissing Jessica Stein, we watch our heroes wrestle with their identity before they can even begin. If it is through fiction and story that we dream of other worlds and new possibilities, what new frontiers do these films conjure for us?

*

Some may argue that fighting for a slice of the mainstream is contrary to queerness itself. In The Art of Queer Failure, Jack Halberstam states, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world…For queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin crisp, or a way of life, to site Foucault…. What kinds of rewards can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhood to orderly and predictable adulthood.” Perhaps, in order to create the stories we need, we need to seek the freedom of the fringe.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a perfect film. Marianne is hired to paint the portrait of a young woman, Heloise, for her future husband — if he likes her portrait, she will move to Milan and get married. From the beginning, Céline Sciamma’s film takes the male gaze and flips it on its head. We are in a world where men appear twice, once at the beginning to ferry Marianne to Heloise, and once at the end, to take her away. But on the island, Marianne and Heloise are free to observe one another through the device that will ultimately separate them. The act of painting and art itself enables a greater understanding of their love and of themselves. It is because of this refreshing and liberating gaze that the ending comes with such a devastating force — Marianne is forced to look at her love not through her own eyes, but through the eyes of men and society. After she leaves the island, Marianne sees Heloise twice more: once in a portrait of Heloise and her son and again when she catches a glimpse of her lover at a concert. The film ends through Marianne’s eyes as she sits in a crowd and watches Heloise transform under the emotional power of art. While this film does not have a happy ending, it elevates the discussion of intimacy by examining how art, memory and story shape our relationships with the world. Queer love is structured into the narrative, but despite how simple and easy a story of forbidden sexual desire in the 18th century would be tell, it is not the obstacle that must be overcome. Instead, the film chose to demonstrate what we see and how we choose to remember. Portrait of a Lady on Fire won many international film awards but remained on the outside of the American film scene.

Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film The Watermelon Woman is an iconic queer film that never made it to the mainstream and yet interrogates our need for a queer archive, and specifically a Black queer archive. The film follows Cheryl, played by Dunye, in her quest to make a documentary about a fictional actress, Fae Richards. In The Watermelon Woman Richards was a gay, Black actress working in the 1930’s and was relegated to the role of a “mammy.” As a result, her story was erased. The plot of the movie, in essence, is the desire for both Black women and Black lesbian stories to be seen, heard, recorded and valued. While making the film, Cheryl’s begins dating a white woman who perpetuates the erasure of queer Black stories.

In An archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich states, “The Watermelon Woman points to the vital role of archives within lesbian cultures as well as to their innovative and unusual forms of appearance. They demonstrate the profoundly effective power of a useful archive, especially an archive of sexuality and gay and lesbian life, which must preserve and produce not just knowledge but feeling. Lesbian and gay history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism- all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive.” Dunye captures the hunger for a Black queer archive while simultaneously illustrating that it is almost impossible to manifest within the conventional narrative. Towards the end of the film Fae’s lover tells Dunye, Please, Cheryl, make our history before we’re all dead and gone. But if you’re really in the family, you better understand that our family will always only have each other.

The Watermelon Woman and Portrait of a Lady on Fire are both transcendent queer movies that manage to free themselves from traditional queer film tropes. And yet, one could argue that their ability to challenge and reframe the narrative derives directly from their position on the outside. Perhaps Halberstam is right, being a queer artist on the fringe allows us to fail, and, in turn, define our own vision of success. But, as with every negotiation, we may gain freedom, but at what cost?

*

Yes, it is important and vital to tell each other the stories of our lives. A great many people are still unable to feel empowered in their queer identity due to threats of violence or the potential loss of family and friends. These stories are real, and we should honor them through our cultural narrative. But if mainstream film continues to perpetuate a narrative of loss and alienation, how does humanity grow its idea of what it means to love and be loved?

How do we begin to build new spaces for ourselves if we don’t allow ourselves to dream?

Myths and fairytales evolve and morph over time — there’s a dialogue between what’s being lived and what’s being told. The Grimm Brothers completely reshaped the fairy tale canon through the many editions of their collection. While the brothers were always forthright about their changes, with each new edition Christian ideology and puritanical values were enhanced. Women’s voices were literally removed with each release. In an attempt to create more literary stories, the brothers took years of oral history and reshaped the narrative — one that has defined our culture for two-hundred years and we still reckon with today. The seams of their work can be seen everywhere, from Disney princesses to Jerry McGuire.

What do Disobedience, Ammonite, The World to Come, Tell it to Bees, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, have in common? Like my queer experience at camp — these films demonstrate the fleeting nature of the safety and acceptance found in queer love — it’s a space you’re lucky to enter, but a place you must inevitably leave. The lesbian canon is filled with films depicting the impossibility of love between women — whether the impossibility of the time period (Carol), culture (Rafiki, Saving Face) or circumstance.

Our stories and our lives inform each other. I could write a whole essay about how my idea of romantic love was completely informed by the 90’s rom-com and how my girlfriend and our therapist are still trying to undo the damage. I’m not asking for a lesbian Pretty Woman. I don’t want a scene where one queer rides the top of a limo to the base of another’s apartment blasting Verdi with roses in their mouth. But I do hunger for new depictions of queer intimacy. I’m tired of watching someone struggle for 120 minutes to accept the fact that being queer is okay — I want to watch a movie where that is self-evident. In The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl said, And most importantly, what I understand is that I’m going to be the one who says, “I am a Black lesbian filmmaker who’s just beginning. But I’m gonna say a lot more.”

Like the Grimm Brothers, we, too, can define the future in which we will live through the stories we tell. By reclaiming our own narrative and our right to see our stories represented on the big screen, we can create a world in which a young girl sits on a blue corduroy couch with her family and watches two queers struggle to come to a deep understanding of themselves and each other, not in spite of their queerness, but regardless of their orientation. I don’t want a new dawn of lesbian rom-coms like The Happiest Season where hetero-relationship tropes abound (one partner is an abuser and the other, generally the woman, struggles to accept the abuse and ultimately decides that love can conquer all). I don’t want more queer movies designed to make the statement see, we’re just like you! Being queer is a different experience and a singular way of being in the world. I don’t want to strip us of our stories. Erasure in order to “belong” is not the goal.

I’m not interested in happy endings, either (although they’re always nice). What I do want is for lesbian films that depict the love between women to reflect the varied and unique experiences of falling in love. Right now, the defining characteristic of queer films is that gay love is impossible. What if we rejected the queer category completely? Suddenly all we’d have are stories of love — the messy, disturbing and beautiful task of reconciling differences in order to understand. The solution is not more queer stories, but simply more stories.

Together, we have a responsibility to build a world in which it does not take decades for young queers to see themselves reflected in the romantic love portrayed on screen — but instead are presented with a vision of their love from the beginning and are allowed to interrogate that vision as art and as story and form their own conclusions.

We dream the world in which we will live.

It’s winter. I’ve been sick and tired and unable to write and avoiding all my friendships (sorry friends). So, because I’m being lazy—baby’s first video essay on Substack! In this essay I talk about the three reasons I can’t quit Instagram. I reference Erich Fromm, Simone de Beauvoir, Subjects vs. Objects, The Social Dilemma, and this incredible book called Four Thousand Weeks.

But before we dive in to Instagram I want to take a moment to address that the world is at war and Ukrainians are standing strong—I encourage us all to support them in whichever way we can. Also, a Black, masc lesbian is being detained in Russia for possessing a vape pen and we should all be nervous. And finally, the latest climate change report came out and it’s bad. Very, very, very bad. Like humanity ending in our lifetime bad.

While I’m at a loss as to how to help Ukraine or Brittney Griner—I do know how to fight climate change.

The top 10% of the world seems to not care or even acknowledge that we’ve already reached a tipping point and we’re on our way to reaching a point of no return. Human life doesn’t seem to really matter. But you know what does matter to the uber rich? Money. And do you know what we have more than the uber rich? People. So what do we the people need to get the uber rich to understand? That it’s financially beneficial of them to care about climate change because investing in fossil fuels is a bad idea for us and for the world. Getting the rich to care about their money has proven effective when it comes to fighting climate change. (Also, something to note—if you make more than 38,000 a year, you too are considered the uber rich in terms of the world).

So what can you do today? You can go to this site and learn about how to talk to your asset managers (your 401k people) about creating more sustainable investment opportunities. Don’t move your money! Just talk about your money! Show up for the people by demanding a more sustainable future. I just had this conversation with Vanguard and let me tell you, it felt good.

BONUS: If you are on the fence about climate change—i.e. don’t believe in it, don’t think it’s that big of a deal, don’t think it will end humanity for our children, then I will BUY you this book. FOR FREE. Just send me your address and it will be delivered to your door. No shame! This is a shame free space. I will send it with love and light and without blame or shame or judgement.

And—if you a)love the movie Robinhood: Prince of Thieves as a kid and watched it obsessively (me) and b) want a laugh, like a full belly, wild laugh—read this.

Okay,

live long and prosper,

Sammie

I'm in love! I'm not in love! I'm crazy! I'm not crazy!

-Anacreon

Hi Lovely Humans!

In honor of February and the dreaded holiday, Valentines Day, I’ve made a playlist of ‘torch songs.’ What is a torch song you might ask? Well, according to my friend Wikipedia:

“A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, either where one party is oblivious to the existence of the other, where one party has moved on, or where a romantic affair has affected the relationship. The term comes from the saying, "to carry a torch for someone", or to keep aflame the light of an unrequited love.”

So here’s my contribution to the genre. Full disclosure I am a cheeseball and this playlist may or may not include Cher, Phil Collins, and Heart. Listen at your own peril :)

Torch Songs

Also— I have some poetry forthcoming in Issue II of The Thalweg. Pre-order if you’re so inclined. All profits are split evenly among artists <3

Pre-Order The Thalweg

Okay, and now to the History of Love :)

To Reach is to Love

*the podcast is the abridged version of what follows: a deep dive into four writers and thinkers. If you don’t have time, just listen to the recap.

When I was seventeen I started my freshman year of college. That same year the city of Chicago was making a bid for the Summer Olympics and every museum was free. So, instead of spending my spare time on campus where I felt lonely and disoriented, I rode the Metro North line into the city any chance I could. I'd sit in the stairwell in the modern art wing of the Art Institute of Chicago and stare at Georgia O'Keeffe’s Sky Above clouds for over an hour, hoping, I too, would dissolve into blue.

When I took the L train around the loop I stared through the glass at window after lighted window—each a block of yellow cut against the night. I could make out the shapes of humans. Beings without gender or form. I remember watching those bodies in the windows and being filled with a palpable existential terror. I pulled my knees to my chest and let the panic flood me. The fact that there could be so many brains, so many bodies that I would never know, never meet but who, nevertheless would wake the next day in rooms I would never see, speak with voices I would never hear, was an understanding beyond my imagination. How could I be surrounded, overwhelmed by the bodies of others and yet never, not once, expand beyond my own? The knowledge of how much was out there for me to know was instantly met with the impossibility of such knowledge. The only mind, the only skin I'd ever live within, was my own. Panic soon gave way to hunger. The impossibility of true understanding made me ravenous for it.

Some of you have been wondering, why romantic love? And this is the answer: when I fell in love for the first time—I mean real, generous love, not love for utility or pleasure, but love for the sake of other person—this existential horror returned in force. How could it be possible to love someone and never know them?!?!?! But when I spoke to friends and acquaintances about this fear I mostly received confused stares and therapist recommendations. So, I did what I always do when I feel most alone: make like Hermione (also a Virgo) and head to the library. I wanted to know if there was even one single person in the history of the earth who felt that the more they loved the more they understood how completely and utterly alone they were.

It turns out, I am not alone in my aloneness.

So, I lied to you. I’m not going to give you all the History of Love Part 2. I’m just another dude with an agenda—muahahahahhahaha!

If I wanted to provide a true History of Love Part 2 I’d have to talk about Shakespeare (who I love, yes, but there’s so much out there about Shakespeare already) and Freud (who I don’t love and don’t care to spend any time discussing) among many, many others.

Instead of the History of Love Part 2, I’m going to address the question that brought me to the study of romantic love in the first place: why do we engage in romantic partnerships?

This is my answer:

We seek romantic partnerships out of an inherent existential separateness.

Love is essential to human life.

By engaging in the act of love we can come as close as possible to the oneness we seek.

In order to make this argument I’m going to show how the Greeks first articulated this existential separateness. Then I’m going to speak about the Romantic period and how Mary Shelley and John Keats show that despite our inherent separateness human connection is essential to human life. Then, I’m going to demonstrate how philosopher Erich Fromm believes we can engage in the action of love and achieve union.

Greeks and The Origin of Loss:

tl:dr

Man is plagued by the feeling that they’re missing an essential piece of themselves. They spend their lives trying to fill the void.

Once upon a time man was a single orb: spherical and perfect. And yet man’s perfect oneness and perfect happiness was too pure, too strong. So palpable was man’s joy that his power threatened Olympus. Zeus commanded Apollo to split each man in two. Suddenly, man was rendered separate from his perfect oneness—he’d lost the essential part of himself that made him whole. And so, man was doomed to wander the earth searching for his missing half.

This is the story that Aristophanes tells his friends at Socrates’s table. In this myth Aristophanes is saying: we are separate from that which we once had. We are missing. There is a void within, an emptiness we seek to fill.

One could argue that this is where the origin of humankind’s belief in their existential separateness began: in Plato’s Symposium and around Socrates’s table. It was here that a few key ideas were first articulated:

1. Humankind feels as if there is a void, a missing piece within them

2. You cannot desire what you already have

3. Once you have what you desire, you will no longer desire it

4. Therefore, desire is lack

5. Or, more accurately, desire is the space between what you want and what you have

This could sound negative but it’s not. What the ancient Greeks are trying to establish through their dialogues is that love is knowledge. We always want to know more and there is always more to know (if you are confused about this, refer to the History of Love, Part 1).

Everything cannot be made clear to a single person—there is always the reach for more.

Anne Carson delves deeply into this concept in her essay, Eros: The Bittersweet.

The word Eros, Carson explains, is in and of itself a paradox. Both bitter and sweet in one. “In Greek the word Eros denotes ‘want’, ‘lack’, ‘desire for that which is missing’. The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.”

The crux of Carson’s argument is her belief that the Greeks demonstrate that it is through love and the act of loving that we come to understand our own edge—the place where our self ends and the world begins. Without encountering another body to love and cherish we would never truly understand the limitations of this form.

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counter glance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive… The main inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”

The Romantics, Human Connection and Negative Capability

tl:dr

Romantic love is, at its heart, human connection. And human connection is essential to human life.

We call romantic love “Romantic” love because of the Romantic period. The Romantic period was an artistic movement that originated in Europe at the end of the 1700’s and lasted until approximately 1850. What makes the Romantic era unique was its study of emotion and the individual. For the purposes of this newsletter, I am going to talk about two Romantics: Mary Shelley and John Keats.

Mary Shelley:

tl:dr

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein which is a testament to the innate human need for connection. Through her allegory she declares that when we’re alone and rejected from our community we make monsters of ourselves and if we subject another creature to a loveless existence, we too, become monsters. Love is essential to being alive.

She was an incredible and unique woman. When I think about all my fears and my desire to conform I just have to think about this brilliant person who wrote one of the greatest books of all time at age seventeen and remember to be the pioneer of my own fucking life—if Mary Shelley could break free of convention in 1818, what am I waiting for?!?!!

Brief bio:

She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft a prominent feminist and proponent of free love. Wollstonecraft had several lovers and only married Mary’s father when Mary Shelley was conceived. Mary Shelley met her future husband, the poet Percy Shelley, when she was sixteen. He was already married at the time but Mary and Percy eloped! There was a great meeting of the minds. Percy wanted their relationship to be open, as we would call it now, and they tried it out. For a while Mary was involved with both Lord Byron and Percy Shelley but that wasn’t really her style.  Percy was definitely what I would call a rake and women fell in love with him and/or he seduced them. Both Mary’s younger sister and Percy’s first wife committed suicide out of desire/pain/longing for him.  

Frankenstein is, perhaps, an investigation into this loss and the responsibility that Mary felt she and Percy had for the deaths of her sister and his first wife. Ultimately, Frankenstein is about the fundamental need for human connection and the belief that without connection we make monsters of ourselves. The monster in Frankenstein is not the nameless creation, but the master, Frankenstein himself. It’s a truly chilling examination of what happens when we strip our fellow humans of their ability to connect, of their ability to love, and the cruel transformation of a person forced to live without love.

I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.

-Frankenstein’s creature

John Keats:

tl:dr

Coined the term “negative capability” which roughly means that through the annihilation of self and the search for many truths we can hope to enter the eternal mystery but can never hope to define it.

Brief Bio:

Talk about a traumatic childhood. When Keats was eight his father died in an accident. His mom remarried and left only to return when Keats was fourteen. Keats cared for her while she died of tuberculosis. Later his younger brother also caught tuberculosis and Keats cared for him as he died. Woof.

His friend, poet Charles Brown said of Keats: “From his earliest boyhood he had an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his feelings?”

Keats is not only famous for his poetry but also for his love of Fanny Brawne—a relationship that’s been preserved by his letters to her. Keats was poor and financially dependent on others when he fell in love with Brawne and so they were unable marry.  Despite the limitations of their courtship, the affair lasted three years until Keats died at twenty-five. While it was by all accounts unconsummated (which honestly feels tragic to me, I don’t know why that hits me so hard, but so sad! To love someone so much and so fully and never be able to feel their touch—devastating), it was clearly a passionate and deeply feeling relationship that inspired his great odes.

In her book, Keat’s Odes, Anahid Nersessian says “The best poets, Keats says are ‘camelion’: they change to match their surroundings, sometimes entering fully into the psychic and sensational orbit of other beings. Keats gave this talent a name: it was negative capability and he had it to spare. ‘When I am in a room with people, the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a very little time annihilated…’”

Keats believes that in order to truly love and in order to create art there must be an annihilation of self.

The boundary between one and the other needs to blur. You need to take in that which surrounds you and make it part of you.

It is not a single answer that art and love seek but many—an entire world of feeling and emotion is required for someone to begin to truly understand.

Keats wrote in a letter to Fanny Brawne, “You have absorbed me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.”

Anne Carson speaks about this in her essay, Eros the Bittersweet. “In Greek the act of love is a mingling. Desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded…Sophocles compares the experience of eros to a lump of ice melting in warm hands.”

So—Keats is with the Greeks—in order to love we need to melt, dissolve, lose our form and join with the other and the world. Even though there is an essential, impregnable boundary between self and other we must reach across the void. Not because we seek truth or certainty but in order to find Beauty.

The Romantics remind us that even during the dawn of the individual, human connection was seen as essential for existence.

Erich Fromm and Art of Love

tl:dr

Love is an action performed daily and it can bring us into the sense of oneness we crave. Without such oneness we literally go insane.

Brief Bio:

Born in 1900, Fromm fled the Nazi’s and settled in the United States. He’s described as a social psychologist but he is also a philosopher.

Fromm’s basic philosophy of love can be summed up as follows:

1. We are driven to love because we inherently understand that we are separate from the world and if we don’t love, we will go insane.

“Any theory of love must begin with the theory of man, of human existence… When man is born… he is thrown out of a situation which is definite… into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open... Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself… This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.  He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.”

“The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness and leave the prison of his aloneness.”

2. There are many ways humans try to overcome their intense feelings of separateness:

Orgiastic union

• Since the beginning of time humans have engaged in orgiastic rites to overcome the feeling of separateness—but the sexual orgasm is transitory. It can’t really overcome separateness because it fades. But humans seek orgasms or similar pleasures w/ alcohol and drugs in order to have that momentary escape from feeling so alone.

“One way of achieving this aim lies in all kinds of orgiastic states. These may have the form of an auto-induced trance, sometimes with the help of drugs… In a transitory state of exaltation the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it.”

“It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.”

Conformity

• As civilization has gone on humans seek to become one by conforming. If we are like everyone else, then we will be less alone! If we pursue the same goals: marriage, pursuit of material things etc… then we will forget we are separate. But that isn’t enough.

Mature Love (the only true way to overcome separateness according to Fromm)

• In order to engage in true love you have to maintain your individuality and integrity

“In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an act of power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”

• True love is not exclusive—while you might only share in erotic love with one person, you cannot truly love one person if you do not also share love for all of humanity

• True love is an action

• True love is the only way to achieve union

• True love is essentially an act of generosity

• The ultimate “act” of generosity is that of sharing yourself. If you are not generous with your true self you cannot really be said to love

• Because love is an act, it can never be “arrived at” instead it is a constant process, a practice, like the artist’s practice, that must be engaged with every day

“Love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of a compulsion… In the most general way the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.”

“The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that giving is ‘giving up’ something, being deprived of, sacrificing… Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power… What does one person give to another? He gives himself, of the most precious he has, he gives up his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other— but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness… In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness.”

“Love… is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together… two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than fleeing from themselves.”

3. There is a lack of love in the western world because of capitalism

• Because we’re constantly pursuing material goods we aren’t engaged in any pursuits that feed the generous act of love.

“Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at shop windows, and then buying all that he can afford to buy… He looks at people in a similar way… Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market considering the limitations of their own exchange values.”

“People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions; love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present day western society.”

In Conclusion

Human beings are fucking alone. We are isolated by our very minds and bodies. But just because I can never truly know another doesn’t mean I shouldn’t reach for them.

Like Aristotle says— “all men by their very nature reach out to know.”

Just because we’ll never read all the books, watch all the films, learn the history of the earth, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand all we can.

So it is with Love.

Love lives in the space between me and you as we reach through.