La Vie, L'Amour

After the Movie
(Marie Howe)
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come
to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what
is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded
night—and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action,
I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to
look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are
doomed to live in purgatory. Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.

I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just
bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck
the stuff from the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You
are a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think
these things of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer
and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.



I think it's Levinas who talks about love as being this possessive grasping, this attempt at consumption of another person--another form of "being's move" to take in all that one does not comprehend of the Other and assimilate it--i.e. the other, unknown, perhaps unknowable person--into the self, as part of the self. Not the prettiest picture.
Is love ultimately selfish? I think most people probably imagine that one's best self exists in the state of loving another person (and experiencing reciprocation)--is this the projection that makes love so appealing?
Surely when we are loved--oh, when another person has chosen us, when we are worthy enough to be fully, unabashedly loved, then will we have somehow reached some new plane of existence? Some enlightenment? Will we then be content? Fulfilled? Happy?
How much should one person depend on another person as a resource of happiness? Is needing someone actually good for a person? Maybe it's a new kind--a different recess--of strength to surrender to the knowledge that we need, that we need to be loved, sometimes to be helped up when we fall, to be told that as we are, we are enough.
But if you cannot go to yourself to call forth this same exclamation to the universe, maybe that means something is missing.
Because it is awfully nonsensical, if you think about it, to think that people can complete one another successively--what with the constant collisions of desire and fracturing identity and (un)willingness to give of oneself.
To what extent can one ever truly give of oneself? (And still maintain one's self as separate from the thing loved?) I supposed we have to individually know whether or not we want to retain separateness in the midst of the absorption of love.