All we need is love Indrani Raimedhi Sigh. People of a certain age should be exempted from having to write about love. They have travelled much too far from the giddy-headed salad days when lightning struck from a perfectly clear blue sky. For every young man or woman looking for love, I would offer these simple words of advice. Go stand on the tallest cliff you can find. Just jump of it and hope you grow wings on the way down. That was Kurt Vonnegut’s take on writing. But it could well be about love. You have to be open to risks, to dare all, and hope you land on your feet, like a cat. Just as in the case of a writer, a lover, too, finds the most important things the hardest to say. You are ashamed to speak, for words diminish those things. And thus the secret treasure of the heart remains buried and only glossy, gold embossed cards with printed words are exchanged. Writing, they say, is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. Lovers, too, hear voices in their heads and live in an alternate reality. They, too, fear the world is conspiring against them. If fiction is the truth inside the lie, true lovers must also uncover layers and layers of hype, hypocrisy, trite sentimentality to reach the white hot core of shared experience. When you have arrived at that zone, there is no need for sugared candy and heart-shaped balloons, satin-ribboned gifts and chocolate nougats, for where you will be as natural as a grassy knoll, under shady trees and the silence of a summer afternoon. My favourite writer Anais Nin was spot on when she wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Love should be like that. You need to immerse in its magic, be drenched in it, as under a waterfall, coming up for air and then you need to view it in retrospect. For those who have failed in love, this experience is bitter-sweet, because it brings with it the sense of what was, and never will be. Unrequited love makes poets of us all, and the suffering ennobles us in a way few experiences can. For the creative person, the worst enemy is self doubt, which blunts the imagination and imposes limits where there should be none. Self-doubt and love are partners who won’t travel far together. He must give off the sense that there is no one like him. She must believe she is the queen of the ball. In writing, you must breathe, laugh, cry, rage and swear. Living fully through every word makes your work more real, more alive to the reader. Love, too, must not be a well-ordered, sanitized affair. It must have the grandeur of passion in it for it to be full-blooded and memorable. Show me a couple who does not have quarrels, who only coos like turtledoves and you will discover a relationship that is flat, monotonous, almost anaemic. Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Love is a leap of faith and everyday, you invest your time, your emotion, your love. The future is a winding road whose end you cannot see. And still, you go on giving generously of yourself, for not to do so is to betray the very idea of love. The great American dramatist Tennesse Williams once said, “When I stop working, the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.” It is so with lovers, too. They feel awakened and alive when they are together. Imagine them at a modest restaurant. The décor is cheesy, the chairs uncomfortable. Tomato sauce congeals on the rim of the bottle. She toys with the salt and pepper shakers. The waiter is slow, the food terrible. But they are like two flames swaying drunkenly towards each other. Everything in the room is beautiful, exotic – including the garish plastic flowers on the pots. And when they part, it is as if they have returned to a grey, nondescript world. The traffic is noisy, the fumes nauseous. All colour and music and beauty seem to be elsewhere. If I have any wisdom to transmit it is that – you can go anywhere you want to go, buy anything that catches your fancy, meet all the people you can and learn all the things you wish to learn, but if you have not been madly in love, yours is an apology of a life. You have never been a whole person. You may have never known the full awakening. The chances of finding out what is really going on in the universe is so remote – why dinosaurs became extinct and we did not. Why stars die and jelly fish live… that we might as well keep ourselves occupied with the beloved we know and understand. The assurance of love and fidelity blots out the vastness and strangeness of an unknowable world. Milan Kundera has it that the worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend yourself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people. The first time this happens is when we are in love. We are amazed to be existing in the other person. It is like being given another dimension. One’s self is enlarged, it radiates outward, assumes a great significance. One may go beyond loving a person to embrace a cause, and love all humanity, but the first sense of expansion, of radiating, comes from love. Kundera has also said that happiness is the longing for repetition. How true it seems – don’t you dream of meeting her again and again in that little restaurant with the coagulated ketchup on the rim of the bottle? Don’t you wish to see how she smiles at you sideways, and moves the salt shaker here and there? Don’t you ache to tell her the same profundities and watch her sip coffee just like other times? Love is life’s yearning for eternity. ` We are in a world where there is famine and hunger. People are dodging bullets and being thrown into dungeons. Lovers are the only ones holding up the flag of hope, peace and sanity in this mad, mad world. For that alone, they must be feted. (indrani.raimedhi@gmail)
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 05:57:00 +0000
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