I wish you would anyway

 

If you send someone a love poem

They will think it’s about them

And chances are that it is

For example

Neruda says that white clouds

Wave like handkerchiefs in the wind

The early fall sun angles light

That makes you feel sick to your stomach

With desire and loss

Neruda says somewhere else

Something about spreading ashes across your chest

I heard a woman sing on the radio

About not being “a problem you can solve”

And I misunderstood her because

I thought she meant that we are

What we are and not what we’re not

But she meant she is too complicated

Maybe she is

Who can understand anyone anyway

But the taste of someone’s mouth

And the texture of their hair

And the smell they leave behind

Is not a problem

At least not at first

Pressed Up

In the final stages of El amor en los tiempos del cólera Florentino Ariza nears the consummation of the love he maintained his entire life for Fermina Daza. The first time they are near intimacy he realizes that his stomach cannot handle the emotion, and he manages to drop her off before he soils himself in his carriage. The second time they are in the cabin of one of the ships owned by his company on a river cruise. They board this cruise in order leave behind the prying eyes of the people around them, in particular the judgments of her family who cannot understand, let alone approve, of the romance between the two elderly lovers.  Finally in bed together, a lifetime of frustrated desire and affection seems to be about fulfilled, but Florentino Ariza, a man who waited patiently for his love finally to be free by bedding countless women, is unable to get an erection. But after waiting and waiting, they finally have sex. They are old. There is no illusion that the sex is more than two old people expressing a deep and hard-earned affection. There is no mention of passion and fireworks. The fantasy of this novel lies elsewhere.

When I read this novel the first time long ago as a young man, I was caught up in the romance of it. Florentino Ariza pines for Fermina Daza his whole life, even as she finds love, family, and a happy and fulfilling marriage with someone else. Florentino Ariza accepts that life will not give him what he wants. He is poor and full of poetic illusions. He knows he must change. He spends the rest of his years making a life that will make it possible for Fermina Daza to want him when her handsome, rich, and attentive husband dies. And so it goes. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the husband, dies and Florentino Ariza arrives at the funeral to take care of the arrangements and to tell Fermina Daza that he is still in love with her. And with time she comes to love him. Who wouldn’t want that: to love, to suffer, and finally to find happiness?

The vision that the novel lets you have, if you want it, is the romance, long-lasting and impervious to time and circumstance. But the novel also shows us that alongside that romance is the social situation. Fermina Daza doesn’t know why she first rejects Florentino Ariza. She knows that his poetic sensibilities cloud his understanding of reality. But it’s more than that. She also can’t really explain why she chooses Dr. Juvenal Urbino but she seems to intuit that it’s because of his beauty, his taste, his status, his money. She is a tropical Elizabeth Bennet seeing Pemberly for the first time and realizing that what society wants for her might be exactly what she wants for herself.  Had Florentino Ariza not become rich and important, it is not altogether clear if she would have come around to loving him. That is why at the end of the novel they must remain on the ship. They cannot land because only on the ship can the demands, judgements, and prejudices of society be forestalled.

But who wants to think of that when all you want is love and desire? Who wants to be reminded of the crude demands of life when all you want is to touch someone and feel your breathing go shallow with terror and expectation? Olivia Rodrigo references this when she sings about being “all pressed up in the bathroom line.” Sometimes there is a breeze and in it you feel all the loneliness of the world, and you have to keep walking as if nothing happened. And sometimes you touch someone and you feel connection, desire, fantasy, and you also have to keep moving as if nothing happened. But either way nonetheless something happened.

Right at Home

 I have lived alone for many years and there are things I have forgotten. But then something reminds you. The intimacy of seeing a woman in messy hair as she gets ready for bed. You lay in bed and hear her turn off the faucet. She steps out of the bathroom in a shirt and underwear. You watch her walk across the carpet to bed. She sits next to you for a second, pulls the covers aside, and gets in bed. Sometimes you touch her leg as she sits on the bed. Some nights it’s cold and she climbs into bed quickly. You feel her cold skin next to yours. Sometimes she touches the back of your head or kisses your neck. You smell the toothpaste and soap and lotion. She presses next to you, and you feel her get warm. She turns over and goes to sleep. You listen to her breathing. Your breathing lines up with hers for a second. You move a little to be closer but try to not wake her. Some nights it’s hot and you try to stay far away from her in bed.

There are times you wake up in the middle of the night. You reach for her and either she is too close or too far away. You get up to get water. You come back to bed, and you have to move her arm over if it’s in your way. Maybe she has turned into the indentation you left behind, and you have to find a way to nudge her over. In the morning when there is time you lay next to her waiting for her to wake up. You watch the sunlight climb the walls. You get impatient. You fall back asleep even though you wanted to get up.

She wakes up. You kiss each other without opening your lips to spare each other the embarrassment of your breaths. She goes the bathroom, comes out and puts on something to go out into the living room. Then you sit with coffee and chat. You talk about nothing. You look at each other distractedly. You eat something. You make plans.

Eventually she takes a shower, performs her ablutions, puts on her day clothes, and fixes her hair. You walk out into the world and that private, vulnerable version of her is gone. Her hair looks nice.

All of this is the opposite of what Harry Styles describes at the beginning of “American Girls.” He sings “Right at home/ With perfect timing/ A face that knows/ Her perfect lighting.” This is not that. And maybe those women are just like that for part of the day. Or maybe they are like that because they need to be or are expected to be. Who knows. But I am referring to something else altogether different. I am thinking about the quiet face that you look at in the shadows of the bedroom just before you start to dream.

Springtime

One spring in the late 80s, I would walk across Highland Park to see this girl. She lived near the freeway, and it took me a while to get to her place. She would be waiting for me on the porch. I never went inside her house or met her mom or even made it past the gate. When she saw me, she would come to the gate and we would head off. Sometimes we stopped at Thrifty for ice cream or a drink or candy. But whatever route we took we wound up in the park as night began to fall. It was warm but cooled quickly. We would sit close to each other on a picnic table and talk. Then we would kiss. She was amazingly beautiful. She had brown skin, soft hair, and caramel eyes. She had been on tv and was a celebrity at our high school and was voted prom queen. She was a year older than me and knew I had a girlfriend. She would make a big deal about my girlfriend, who she knew well, until we started kissing. We would kiss in the park for a long time, groping at each other like teenagers do. Then I would walk her back home, holding her hand, drunk with the lightness of spring and the smell of this beautiful girl. I felt bad about the other girl but not that much. After prom they both dumped me.

In the spring about ten years later, I would walk into this bar in Eugene and see a girl I knew from class. She was always sitting with her friends in a part of the bar that looked like a slightly raised stage. We would pretend to not see each other for a while, then one of us would make eye contact. Eventually she would walk over to where I was sitting. I seldom walked over to where she was. I figured that her friends didn’t like me or wouldn’t like me and that’s probably true. We would talk for a long time. I would buy her a beer or two. She was short and pretty, with high cheekbones and dark tilting eyes that gave her a catlike appearance. She was a punk and had short hair and wore tight jeans and torn shirts. She carried herself with the air of someone who knew she looked attractive in things that would be unflattering on most people. I would walk her home from the bar in the perfumy nighttime air of spring. Sometimes she would invite me in and sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes we would make out and sometimes we wouldn’t. It felt electric to be near her, and I was okay with whatever happened. She knew I had a girlfriend and sometimes she brought that up. Yet she still came to find me every time I was at the bar. I would feel miserable walking back home to the girl who loved me and who I treated so badly, but I kept going to the bar to let that other girl come find me.

And there are more things I could say about spring and illicit desire and my moral failings. Spring so often made something break inside of me. No matter how happy I might have felt before, the lightness of spring, the smell of flowers, the warming sun would set off that thing in me that couldn’t accept happiness and so instead wanted affection no matter how much it cost me or the people around me. Juanes says “mi corazón entero entregarte” and now many years later looking back I know I have never been capable of that. I was never able to change that about myself and so instead I stopped having romantic relationships. But like an addict who stops using but never stops wanting to use, I still want to go out into this spring night and feel the warmth of someone I’m not supposed to be with.

Borges, Benjamin, and Taylor Swift

“She wears shorts skirts/ I wear t-shirts/ She’s cheer captain/ And I’m on the bleachers,” Taylor Swift sings once again (Taylor’s Version). The instrumentation is different and so is her voice but that’s not really what makes the song different.

In the short story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges mocks several conceits at the same time: a positivism that believes that the present knows more than the past, a critical perspective that thinks itself superior to the work of art, and an over emphasis on authorial intention in literary analysis. In the story, a fervent admirer of the clearly limited symbolist poet Pierre Menard recounts how Menard set out to write Cervantes’ Don Quixote. That is, Menard meant to write, not copy, the Quixote word for word, relying on his own imagination and compositional power.

The anonymous author believes that although no copy survives, Menard was able to write a couple of the chapters of the Quixote and perhaps parts of other chapters. The author believes Menard’s version of the Quixote to be far superior to the original for he contends it was much easier for Cervantes to write the first version since he was an early modern man of letters and a former soldier, so Cervantes drew from materials he knew. Menard on the other hand had to invent the language, the events, and the ideas from his own imagination and could not rely on the crutch of first-hand experience.

It's a pretty funny gag. When recounting the famous philosophical debate in the novel on the relative merits of arms versus letters, the author maintains that of course Cervantes ultimately sided with arms because, after all, Cervantes was an old soldier. When Menard, a contemporary poet, takes the side of arms (don’t forget, the two texts are identical), this proves how much richer Menard’s Quixote is, full of ambiguity and irony, drawing not on experience but from the philosophical works of Bertrand Russell and Nietzsche. Menard’s work is thus “much more subtle” than the original.

Ironically, there is something similar in the two versions of “You Belong with Me.” They were written and performed by the same author and the lyrics are the same. But the latter version does not create the same illusion. When young Swift sings about being on the bleachers, one can imagine her as an awkward teen who has spent so much time performing and has so much ambition that she has very little in common with her peers. The song convinces us that even though Swift is tall, pretty, and talented she nonetheless struggled to make romantic connections and that period of loneliness is in the recent past. Who knows if any of that is true, but the song tells that story effectively. But when the older, much more famous and successful Swift sings those words the story falls apart and the whole thing comes across as a lie. I could maybe believe that young Taylor sat in the bleachers but when older Taylor says it, it makes me not believe either one of them.

Older Swift singing the words of younger Swift destroys the illusion. Here one recalls Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” where he argues that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” By this Benjamin means that mechanically reproducing a work of art, like say turning a painting into a poster and making lots of copies of the poster, democratizes art, removing it from ritualistic display in a museum, where pilgrims visit and stand before it in reverential awe. Mass producing art negates the almost religious power of authenticity. Warhol was barking up the same tree when he made paintings with a bunch of Mona Lisas on them. Maybe something similar happens when Swift reproduces her own work: we no longer see the character she wants to portray and instead see the artifice of someone trying to sell us something. The cult of Taylor Swift dissolves and is replaced by the business of Taylor Swift.