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Thursday, February 12, 2009
THE GRIP OF LOVE
Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine
Elektra : 1979
[Buy It]
Why are people so quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports teams but so slow to love other people? Sages have been debating this issue for centuries, and continue to the present day. Bill Sage, a kid I went to high school with, used to talk about the girl he was dating, how she was a hot girl who was smart or maybe a smart girl who was hot. "Maybe she's the overlap," he said. "I love the idea of the overlap." But he never loved her, and she found that out a few years later in college, and promptly slept with someone else. It wasn't me, but I knew the guy, and after she got rid of him, too, we became friends. Now she's living in a western state, where she works for a company that helps other companies manage inventory. I spoke to her not so long ago, and she said that her personal life was frustrating, not exactly loveless but not exactly love-filled. Work, on the other hand, was rewarding. "You wouldn't think it," she said, "but I like the purely logistical issues. For example, in most companies, sending things out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse." She went on to explain that since no system is perfect, especially when so many moving parts are involved, a certain amount of management is management of inevitable errors in counting, logging, and ordering. "You have to be precise about imprecision," she said.
I digress. Or rather, she digresses. Or does she, and do I? Bob Sage, Bill's brother, used to say that it was easy to love people so long as you didn't have to look at them, and we would laugh at him, because he was always making these kinds of jokes, but it's entirely possible that he wasn't joking at all. People are quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports because those things don't love back--or rather, can't love back. There is no expectation of reciprocation and consequently never any disappointment when reciprocation falls short. Each and every time you listen to "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell," say, it produces the same experience for you. If the experience is different, you will quickly understand that the shift has occurred within you rather than within the work. And it's rare that love is withdrawn from a song or a book: you can come to see its flaws, or come to be embarrassed by your earlier ardor, but that might just make you drive your love deeper inside. It won't, for the most part, make you bring your love to a full stop.
Loving people, on the other hand, is a dangerous business, because love isn't just about what you feel. It's an economy in which what you feel must be matched with something of equivalent value, as well as one in which your expectations for ongoing supply can quickly reach self-annihilating levels. Not to mention the fact that you may feel you are not equipped to handle what you are receiving: expectations from another person that are as interdependent and volatile as yours. Love, or whatever you want to call it (pick a less romantic word if you'd prefer, like "relationship" or "commitment") is a frightening prospect. When you accept it, you are assuming risk at a level that often overloads the human organism. Two people acting with single purpose but retaining their separateness? That's an overlap, and nobody likes--let alone loves--the idea of the overlap. Giving love refines the spirit; worrying about getting it clouds and clots that same spirit. Or, to reinvest the digression, sending out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse.
This may be obvious, but it's Valentine's Day, the commemoration of the obvious. The friend in the western state who manages warehouse inventory recently went through a breakup. I think maybe she was trying to hold on until Valentine's Day, but that became untenable for several reasons, some of which I have listed above. The person she was seeing was not a movie or a book or a painting, and so, in trying to love him, she quickly found herself concerned with trying to accept his love, which led to expectations he could not satisfy. These were not unreasonable expectations, not as far as I was concerned -- and, sometimes, not as far as she was concerned. They mostly involved him offering to drive her to work some mornings, or offering to pick her up some afternoons, or leaving little notes in her jacket pockets, or calling in the afternoon and assuming a funny accent to ask if she knew where he might find the "best little wharehouse in the state." Whatever. The specifics aren't important, not to me. The point is that all the things she admired about him statically, all the things that would have worked to his advantage if he was a TV show or a sculpture, dissipated when he couldn't -- or wouldn't -- understand the issues of inventory management. She was able to give him love, for a time, but witnessed repeatedly how pained he was to give in return, and that returned her to a point where giving seemed more like someone else's taking.
After the breakup, she said, she thought often about whether she had give him enough chances. "He made mistakes but so did I," she said. "Why should that be unacceptable?" This was a fair question with a fairly obvious answer. In love, or commitments, or relationships, you don't have to avoid error. In fact, you should embrace error. But you should embrace the proper type of error. This is another way in which static artworks are easier to love than people. As we have said, artworks don't change, really, so they can't disappoint you. But they also can't try to accommodate you and, in doing so, show you that they are utterly insensible about how to find your heart. My friend told me one story that stuck out like a stalactite. After their breakup, the guy came by her office. He took her to lunch. He ate a meal that he would never eat -- a big burger, she said, when he was mostly no-red-meat -- and asked questions he would never ask. "I know he was trying to be a different him so that I would feel differently," she said, "but it only made me feel more the same. The root him and the root me didn't intertwine." It is easy to believe unverifiable things about a song or a book, but harder to do so about a person. We left aside one broader issue, which is the question of why people date people they know are wrong for them -- I have a theory about Controlled Failure which dovetails nicely with the terrors of confronting someone you might actually love, and thus cannot control -- because it was a social call, not a session. We talked about music and politics.
So for this unholy coming holiday, and for my friend, and for the guy, even -- who I never met and probably wouldn't have liked, at least from the description, but who has the right to be happy elsewhere, eventually -- here's Tom Verlaine's "The Grip of Love," which not only contains some of the finest electric rock guitar of the last century (try it, you'll love it), but has a comprehensively elliptical lyric that says most of what I've been trying to say: You do the moon
You do the snake
Everywhere you go
You make the right mistake
You take a picture
And lay it on my tray
Some kind of window
Just like the Milky Way The song doesn't end well -- the girl tells him to get lost, and he says, desperately but slyly, "well, don't that buckle my belt?" -- but it starts beautifully, and that's something. Inventory is managed, at least for a little while, and it's managed exactly as he says it is, exactly as my friend said it is: "everywhere you go you make the right mistake." So find that person, get in the grip, do the moon, do the snake. Happy Valentine's Day.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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