“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Most would agree that true love requires work, a stretching beyond our resources. But is it the end to which all meaningful things are headed? The quote by Rilke suggests so, and I would agree. Unless my work is for the ultimate end of love, there’s no point setting out to labour in the first place.
There are many different ways to look at love, so I want to outline what I mean by it here. The love that underpins all my work aims to be persevering, self sacrificial, other-centred. It's durable, yet flexible - not stoic, but bendable.
“Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
- Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie (via Zora Neale Hurston) teaches me the bendability of love, the fact that it’s malleable in the presence of whoever it seeks to connect with. Love holds in tension an objective and subjective quality to it. On the one hand, it’s as deeply fixed and rooted as a mature oak tree, on the other hand, it’s as tender and perceptibly wholesome as a baby’s yawn.
This isn’t to say that every time people who engage with my work will feel loved. The feeling is likely to come much more tangentially. For example, I hope that people will feel seen in my work. The ‘eyes’ in eyesandoath refers directly to that. I observe the world around me and peer into my own soul in order to connect with others. My hope is that people listen to my work and ‘yes, that’s my experience of the world too’. This leads to love because it forms connection and combats isolation. The objective necessity of common human experience and the subjective necessity of fleshing out that experience is satisfied.
The flexible side of love is inherently creative and this is where the magic happens. In order to connect with someone, I reshape myself into their world. Counterintuitively, this requires a subduing of parts of myself which compete with or jar against the uniqueness in others.
For example in my poem Mother, I speak from the perspective of a middle aged man in a corporate world. Now, I have nothing against middle aged men (I promise! more on what inspired this poem another time…), but we would all agree that a middle aged man working in the corporate world is likely to have aspects to his personality which don’t entirely fit with mine. But in writing Mother, I looked to my own difficult experiences and honoured them through metaphor. At the same time, I subdued aspects of myself in order to connect with someone totally different to me, but who could identify with me in this experience.
This is an attempt for me to love and connect with others:
“mother is muffled tears behind closed doors over drowned years of suffocating pain,
mother is perseverance and collapse,
I, a grown man, run around this world with an umbilical cord tied to her lap,
chair board meetings with her eyes in the shadows,
see glints of her wild smile in my daughter’s folly.”
I think this is how empathy functionally works. Real empathy requires putting a pause button on our own demands and preferences in order to step into the world of others, and empathy is a prerequisite for love.