Old Notes on Love

Happiness has never inspired great art for me. Beauty comes from pain. These sentiments have echoed through time, reaffirming ideals of tortured artists and starving play-writes, reveling in their enforced suffering. Sometimes I think these sentiments may hold true. Art has always been a cathartic process for me, allowing me to give my pain a physical shape, smearing it, messy, across a blank page, giving it life, freeing it from where it was trapped within me. I am happy now, happier than I ever have been, and I cannot seem to get my creativity flowing. There is nothing to animate, nothing to give wing so that it may leave my heart and set me free in the process. I guard what lives in my heart now greedily, not wanting to let the glow of love escape it. The beauty exists in the love itself, beauty for beauty’s sake, warm, shimmering, fresh, like the tingle of salty sea spray blown up from the waves across your cheeks. I crave it. A true artist should be able to create beauty out of happiness as well as pain.

Plato said Love was an old, ugly, cruel thing. Love, he argued, wanted Beauty and Truth, Sincerity and Youth, but one cannot want what one already has, and so Love must lack all of these things. Love, for his wanting, is ugly, dishonest, insincere, and foul. Try as I might, I cannot find error in his logic (and who am I to question Plato?), but having known True Love for the first time, the kind of love songs and plays are written about, the kind of love they make movies about, I cannot see anything ugly about it. There is no dishonesty in our love, no insincerity, nothing cold, painful or dark. I find myself disagreeing with Plato on a fundamental level, an emotional, irrational one. I have committed the Cardinal Sin of Philosophy: I scorn logic in favor of an appeal to subjective emotion. How can what exists between us be cruel, petty or childish? Perhaps it has the capability of becoming so, but every relationship has 3 players who guide the course of things, the two lovers and Love itself. In the past I have hesitated to personify Love, but now I find myself drawn to the idea. We don’t choose our Love, Love chooses us.

                                                                                                                                       August 10, 2011

In Place

I felt that text in very delicate places.
Imagining your hands, kneading, flexing,
My heart races as our faces linger, but never touch.
Fingers interlacing, nothing exists outside this headspace,
I retrace my steps, pacing,
My thoughts carved out in boldface as I lean into this embrace.
Deface and erase past harms of old disgrace,
This isn't a footrace, but I'm running to someplace I might find grace or save face.

I am out paced.

Misplaced.

Replaced.

My heart races as our faces linger, but never touch.

I served my country*

One of my classmates is a former Army Infantry officer and he was going on a rant about POGs. I realized that I have this kind of reverse-PTSD, for lack of a better term, about my service. I feel ashamed that, while I served honorably in the Marine Corps for five years, I never deployed. I sat safely at a desk for five years while my brothers and sisters travelled half way around the world and suffered the pain of imminent danger and the deprivation of home and family. I am embarrassed to tell people I served, not because I was admin, but because I have to tell people that I never deployed. I feel like I have to add an asterisk to my service. Yes, I volunteered my life for my country; yes, I would have gone had I been ordered; but I was never given the opportunity. I never deployed. I was a secretary that knew how to use an assault rifle. Yes, my work was important and I helped a lot of people with issues that substantially impacted their lives, but I never went. I never had that experience, and as such I can't quite empathize with those who have; I am set apart from those who have seen combat, even those who sat on the FOB the whole time. I should be proud of my service, in it's entirety, with no caveats or explanations, apologies or sub-clauses.

I am beginning to suspect that this might be part of the reason why I want to come back in to the service as a JAG officer. I seem to be drawn to things that make my life more difficult. It's almost like either I enjoy the misery or I feel like I ought to be punished for something. I tend to give all of myself to others, and leave nothing for myself. Returning to the service would give me another chance to serve my country and my brothers and sisters for real. Not just from behind a desk. I could do something real. I've thought about becoming a police officer to get that same feeling of reality. I've thought about joining a federal service. Everything I want to do involves the kind of work that wreaks havoc on your personal life and relationships. The kind of work that takes you away from all that. I have to ask myself why that is. Is it because I feel like I don't know how to have personal relationships? Is it because I feel like I find a way to destroy the good ones that I find? Maybe. I have had one serious relationship, and, though I know it wasn't completely my fault, I feel that I played a major role in it's ultimate failure. If I throw myself into a job that takes the possibility of deeper relationships out of the picture, then I can't destroy them. What a lonely existence that is. I don't want to be that person.

7 Days

As of today I have seven days left on active duty in the Marine Corps. It's a weird place to be. I spent the last five years of my life in the Corps, arguably five of the most defining years of my life. The Corps is very much a part of the foundation of who I am. I know that part will never truly go away, but the anticipated separation anxiety is a little overwhelming. The worst part is that I want to reach out to my ex, because I know he understands what this is like, but I just can't go there right now.

Joining the Marines is one of the best decisions I have ever made. People make the mistake of thinking that the military changes you, that they take you apart and rebuild you into something barely resembling your old self. But that's just not true. The service changes you, every experience does, but in reality it just reveals who you truly are. I joined the Corps to become a stronger person, mentally, physically, emotionally, but it didn't affect those changes in me, I did. The Corps helped me (or forced me) to grow a thicker skin, and to believe in myself for my own sake. No person has ever done that for me. I owe the Corps a serious debt for doing so.

Now I'm standing on the cusp of yet another major transition. I'm leaving the security of the only thing I've ever really given my life to. I'm wandering into unknown territory alone and I am terrified. I know I will succeed. I know that I will enjoy the same success I did in the Corps, but the truth is I don't want to leave my family, I don't want to leave my brothers. I know the language, and the traditions, the way I'm supposed to be and act. Things are simple. There are rules. It is what it is. Now I'm a stranger in a strange land, trying to learn the foreign customs, a new language and a new way of thinking. I had pride in what I'd accomplished as a Marine. I was good at my job, I earned the respect of my peers, my subordinates, and my superiors. I have no status now. I'm starting again from the bottom, and it's uncomfortable and awkward and frustrating. Sometimes it's hard to have faith in myself, especially when I'm staring down at my map, and the whole thing is dark because I haven't explored anything yet. But I will be ok. In the end, I always am.

Appreciation

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at each other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

 

Love after Love by Derek Walcott

The mentality of a college student.

For those of you who have had the good fortune (or not) of attending an institution of higher learning, you know that in the center of the veritable maelstrom of information and knowledge that is college lies a blackhole, or what I like to call "The College-Warp." This blip in the space-time continuum creates, in many cases, a very strange form of selective amnesia that effects the "real world" centers of the brain, such that most college students forget, or stop caring, that there is "an actual world out there" where we work for a living, pay rent, buy groceries, live in risk and deal with the implications and repercussions of not only our actions, but of the actions of our country and her leaders.

It never ceases to amaze me the social function that is ascribed to the "college experience." Sure, it's a time to learn and hone your skills for the future, but it's also gained a reputation for being that time in ones life when it's OK to fuck up. The time you spend in college is when you get all that partying out of your system, when you get blacked out drunk every weekend, shirk your responsibilities, have lots of sex and generally act like nothing in the world matters but you. Makes you wonder, just what kind of a nation does America expect to be when its future leaders spend some of the most important years of their lives acting like self-absorbed, absolute morons who don't know France from Kabul from Albania from Buenos Aires and don't even give a damn.