Patronus: Love and the Eye of the Storm
- N. A. Dawn
- Aug 17, 2020
- 26 min read
To my comrades innumerable, past, present and future
And to Beth, for taking me home and to the river
1
The Big Deal
Well, it’s the talk of the town. Red-lipped, wide-hipped. Bouquets, chocolates. A cis-man on one knee with a polished heirloom twinkling between the lids of a little black box. The bedrock and punch-line of all of Disney; the go-to proxy for character depth cut-and-pasted onto Hollywood protagonists to evoke audience sympathy. That which binds a family when Daddy doesn’t get the deal, or Mommy finally moves out. That which shapes a nation when the deflation rate turns Jews, immigrants and homosexuals into target practice and presidential nominees into inflammatory trust fund bullies. That which sparks a fling when the dance floor disappears, and the strobe reveals, at last, a sublime figure you’ve been waiting to see, somehow, your whole damn life.
It’s that which incites rage, fists heavy when you witness that bastard hit once and run forever. That which heals wounds, the druid touch that whispers: ‘I’m here, I’m here. It’s going to be alright. We’ll face this together.’ That which saturates one’s heart with lifelong grief, as he swears on his mother’s grave that if you ever try to leave him, he’ll break every bone in your body, then kill you, then the children, then himself. Vanity’s marble cradle; the sparkling fount of lust.
If not the primary subject, it persists as an essential ingredient in the matrix of aesthetic experience, vital to near every work of art – from Shakespeare to Bieber, from Friends to Tarantino. Perhaps the most ubiquitous phenomenon in all of culture: the reward for the hero’s sacrifices, the surest expression of one’s life purpose, the magical shield protecting an innocent baby from masked, wand-wielding fascists. Expecto Patronum.
Love. The soul of music, the rose’s dark face. The fulcrum bisecting the scale of justice. Hand-holding, ring-bearing. Darting through a rainstorm, bursting with laughter, an entire congregation mourning the lost. Sunrise on New Year’s Day. The standard psychosocial marvel of every poet. Enshrined in our religions – the gift of the gods, the spectacle of weddings, the promise of a worthwhile mortal existence. Every single commercial:
Do it for love. I love you. The love of the game. Love yourself. Love the skin you’re in. In loving memory. Love will find a way.
The cornerstone of morality; the path to a virtuous life. Something you give – to your rival-come-ally sibling, your devoted spouse, and your barely domesticated pets. To your countrymyn; to your country. To your odious, and (regrettably) necessary (?) job. To your aching, itchy body, and all its lumps, and all its bumps.
It’s something you feel: a kindness in the smile you show a stranger, a protectiveness when you stand up for the down-trodden. A consoling kiss on the forehead in the wake of tragedy. Hope between the interlaced fingers of two wives, one on her vanilla-white gurney, the other already alone and in the void, never quite whole again, but in love nonetheless.
Love is carrying the heavy load, and feeling lighter than you expected. Love is that life-affirming knowledge that you are, on some level, understood, accepted and wanted. Validation, redemption, encouragement. Love is amusement: teeth pearly bright, rimming the portal of sheer joy from which sings the greatest sound you have ever heard, and ever will: honest laughter.
Love is fulfilment, so that every single day, regardless of your boss’s endless diatribes and despite your neighbours’ belligerent new-born bellowing through the walls at who-the-hell-is-awake-except-Nick-working-out o’clock in the morning, it all feels somehow complete. Love is forgiveness for transgressions, when apologies finally matter. Sweetest relief from loneliness, self-castigation and fear. Love is that ever-enticing promise: ‘We are safe here, and always will be.’ Love is not just icing on the cake: it’s the occasion for which we bake.
Love! That giddy, tuneless humming as you bounce through the office door, plonk down at your desk and beam with inexplicable delight at a score of emails which symbolises the life-sapping tedium of wage slavery – to everyone except you. To your eyes, it is the majesty of nurturing your life’s work one errand at a time. No task is too mundane when it constitutes another brick added to your fortress. Or more likely, it is the baffling fact that the soul-eaten foot-dragging of your quotidian experience disappears at this grand revelation: You are in love. And nothing will ever be boring again.
Once, at a wedding I attended, the groom’s father outlined four forms of love. Puppy Love was first: that simple, clown-like enchantment. They’re always on your mind, and your tummy’s always in zero-gravity. A bubbling anticipation, faltering your words, your eyes surveying for any evidence of their presence. Dreaming about them. Day-dreaming about them. Wondering if they’re wondering if…
Then comes True Love: an intense appreciation for everything that makes this person who they are – not just their quirks, their novelties, their appearance. But to contemplate their deeper constitutive elements and find yourself, against everything you’ve ever known about caring for others, weeping with bliss. Their values and aspirations, decisions and struggles. Their wounds. Their talents. Their peculiar entanglements with the world they’ve endured thus far – to relatives and friends, the ghosts of their past, and the petrifying dread of what the future might hold. True Love is not just a fondness for these, not merely an admiration. It’s a coherence with them. An alliance.
Third is that odd and perhaps only hypothetical Unconditional Love. It is the knowledge that nothing that this person could ever do would diminish your fundamental respect for who they are, and your desire for them to flourish. No flaw or ailment, no misstep or misfortune could ever perturb this essentially immutable affection. Radical thoughts like this defy every potentiality; time cannot scare Unconditional Love, because there is no circumstance on any world in which you could not love this person.
What a wondrous, dangerous thought. That no matter what they should do or what should become of them, you will always sincerely wish for them only the best in life. And in some sense, the best of yours.
Finally, the fourth kind of Love: the Sacrificial. You give of yourself, sometimes more than you should. More than is wise, more than is healthy. It is to believe that they matter more than you do. You delay your goals, renege on your deadlines, erase from your life’s vision vast reaches of your existential panorama. This is the ultimate compromise, and I suspect the oldest form of Love there is, after Puppy Love. You can tell by its sheer anti-individualism. It is noble, altruistic and bespeaks the highest commitment to one’s values – a kind of protestant, existential communalism: that you serve them out of love, without exception. This is hard labour, ancient stuff. And at least according to the groom’s father of this one wedding I went to, you’re gonna need if you ever want to get married.
I’m not sure all of these Loves are defensible. Perhaps Puppy Love and True Love square best with our intuitions, our experiences. The latter’s the nectar of life; the former just can’t be helped. (You’re always a kid when you’re in love.) But the final two certainly raise questions. For they seem, at least to me, to encourage a certain susceptibility to abuse. If Love is defined as Unconditional and Sacrificial, what can be said for protecting oneself against a supposedly loving person, who is in fact a toxic, manipulative, possessive, domineering, aggressive, impatient, emotionally inept leech – a thuggish, parasitic liar who threatens your very happiness? Surely there are conditions under which it is both truly unethical and plainly pathological to love someone – a cruel person, a malicious person. And surely there are aspects of our lives which we may feel justified in declaring “unsacrificable”? (I’m looking at the artists in the room.) And furthermore, what kind of “lover” would expect you to sacrifice the most important parts of your life anyway? Surely then, that would not be love at all, but their total disregard for who you are and the happiness you deserve?
At this stage, to a perhaps more enlightened reader, the answers seem obvious. But these are not easy questions. Perhaps a stuntperson or an undercover intelligence operative may be compelled by their partner to seek a new profession after the couple starts a family. “For the sake of the family” isn’t necessarily abusive, I don’t think. It’s counter-intuitive to say the spouse is being unreasonable; it actually seems like the responsible thing to do. But perhaps the couple reaches an agreement, and decides to take their chances. What then might we say about a gambler being asked to change their habits? Or an alcoholic? What about a gangster being asked to leave a gang? Are these requests of spouses the signs of abusive partners? Then again, I’m also not going to get married, so perhaps I don’t need to answer these questions at all.
But I have felt Love, many times. In fact, consistently, in many forms – romantic, platonic, familial. Even a kind of philosophical love, and indeed, most of all, an aesthetic love. An incarnation of personal flourishing: love as a way of thinking, of acting – of being. What of love as learning, as changing, as becoming?
How do we begin to sift through all of these experiences if they ostensibly stem from one feeling? Perhaps, like so many words, we have to separate the semantics from the ontology. That is, can we cleave apart what the word means – or rather, how it is used in different contexts – from what the actual phenomenon truly is in reality. How? Practically speaking, we’d probably have to itemise as many of love’s uses as we can, and consider the qualities of each (which would take a veritable amount of research and debate) to produce a series of descriptive remarks, and from this, arrive at a broad definition, along with a number of etymological subspecies.
Fascinating as that might be, I can’t see myself going quite that far. I just don’t have the right outfit. So instead, here in my underwear, I’m offering something humbler: not a treatise on Love in general, but a consideration of love as I have felt it, its nature, and implications: emotional, social, political and existential. I can’t ontologise Love, but I can talk about why I believe the version of love I’m so excited about is so often underrated, and despite its abundance, underused.
2
You Are How You Love
“Let’s start over, shall we? Like how it used to be. When we were young, remember? Before we went bald and saggy, wrinkled and impatient. Back in the 19–s. Before the kids disappointed us, drained all our savings, and escaped to Australia. Before emails and cellphones and the destruction of the unions. Before we wafted rightward on every topic from fiscal planning to extending the franchise, from vegetarianism to those degenerate fucking communist Nigerians!”
Love is a word for so many conflicting experiences, ideas and desires, that I’ll never be able to say anything about it without making a mess. So here: * hands over a hazmat onesie * Suit up, comrade. Comfy? Alright then. Now: See this puddle of steaming grey ooze over here? Yes, that one. The one with the slow-swelling bubbles and occasional flesh-dripping hand grasping futilely for aid from us onlookers? Right, precisely: that’s my first thesis on love. I know, tragic, mmm. Anyhoo, as I was saying:
Ahem…
Most of what people call ‘love’ I find utterly insufferable. There, I said it. It’s a load of self-diminishing, emotionally abusive sop, commodified by the cosmetics, entertainment and tourism industries, saturating one’s life with inane consumerism, endless melodrama, nauseating patriarchy, exacerbating our insecurities, contracting us into state-legitimating financial chokeholds, all to the detriment of discovering and awakening one’s true capacities to connect, share and flourish as a dynamic and holistically thriving individual–
What? But I don’t understand. What do you mean I’m a soulless monster? That’s simply not true: I reap souls all day long! Hahaha! Oh, I kid. It was just a jo– * gasp! * No, I’m not a virgin, you petulant piece of–!
Wait, I’m sorry. That just slipped out. Oh, come now, of course I didn’t mean that. Wait! No, don’t go! Please wait, I’m trying to make a point! We haven’t even got to the dragons–
* door slams *
* awkward silence *
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Oh, well… * sighs * Liberals.
Fundamentally, primarily, and intrinsically, Love, at the very least, like any true art form, is a mode of freedom. That is: at all times and in every respect, it is entirely consensual and voluntary, mutually enriching and harmonious; supportive and generative, but never possessive, nor appetitive. It is gentle, not aggressive. It is kind, never spiteful. It is a way of sharing and learning, growing and changing, releasing and elating – of abandoning fear before the discovery of one’s grander connection to oneself, to one’s mission, to one’s community, to the universe and to one’s sincerest values.
Or at least, this is the only kind of love I have every cared about. Fraught with kitschy gobbledygook about destiny, as inherited from so many religious traditions, mainstream conceptions of love have always seemed ridiculous to me. ‘Star-struck love’ may describe the feeling, but is at the very least, incomplete. Perhaps your joining was predetermined, sure. But it doesn’t follow that your parting isn’t. This deterministic view of romance strikes me as a sure path to grave disappointments – or worse.
I shudder at the thought of those who rage against their partners for wishing to leave. The partner being ‘left’ – the leavee, as it were – conflates the leaver’s deep need to withdraw from romantic commitments with vices like dishonesty, selfishness and cruelty. Besides violations of trust (like adultery or confessing to enjoying WWE), breakups are usually not betrayals. In fact, they’re perfectly healthy. That’s right, leavees of the world: you’re not being wronged. And, leavers: you’re not in the wrong! A Love that expects eternal bondage can be justified only in the way some defend fascism: a form of lifelong submission to people who claim to hold your best interests (the idealised, homogenous nation), but brutally suppress all your feelings (your sexual differences, your genderfluidity, your ideas and ambitions). If conformity is the order of love, how can love ever nurture your flourishing? A repressive love seems to me no love at all. A partner who demands you stay isn’t interested in the real you, but the imaginary you who exists only to serve them.
People change as they mature. Love of the free kind accepts this. In fact, it cherishes this! If maturing people find themselves migrating in new romantic directions (which they don’t always, but sometimes do), they are (and should be) perfectly free to follow their hearts, without pain of retaliation from their former lovers. One would think this is elementary decency (i.e. people don’t exist to meet your romantic needs), yet many people continue to condemn their parting partners in vitriolic accusations: ‘You lied to me! You promised me forever!’ Of course, in such cases, they likely did. But they needn’t have. And they needn’t apologise for breaking a promise that could – as it did – only result in hurt.
Love, of the free kind I so adore, also does not confuse itself with infatuation, although its infatuations (passing attractions) are no less free. (Puppy Love and True Love, remember?) Nor does it preclude the shadowy sensations of love per se: it simply recognises them in the broader context of a consensual, reciprocal flow of generosity. A love that is free is not a mortgage on someone else’s existence. It doesn’t substitute one’s own wellbeing with a false dependency on someone else’s validation and affection. Like, surely, if love were this total obliteration of one’s agency, and the accompanying expectation that your partner should have no agency, then wouldn’t it be the worst thing ever? It’d be like a plague: ‘Oh, Christ! I’ve fallen in love! Help!’ No wonder people speak of being “love-struck”, as if by a bolt of disease from the fingertips of Hades. Likewise descriptions of love as a drug: it’s a psychedelic trip, addictive, but ultimately toxic to your flourishing. Primary symptoms include utopian hallucinations, while your life slowly crumbles, leaving you a desperate husk with no sense of self whatsoever. Any bets on surviving the withdrawals?
Of course, it’s true: Love can sometimes overwhelm us for the worse. We may feel disappointed to think our journey with a partner has come to an end when we were looking so forward to more strolls, cuddles and long nights revelling in our communion. This is not to say that those haunted by longing for a lover who’s passed away are ‘feeling incorrectly’. Nor are those blinded by love when mistaking someone’s toxic qualities for being less dangerous than they truly are. Love can distract us from our own inner needs, or our true callings, when we’re absorbed in the wellbeing of others. Love can take us to forks in the road and render us immobile, not wanting to hurt our dearest allies by making the decision to walk one path and not another.
But love of the free kind acknowledges that a parting partner is simply pursuing their fullest wellbeing. How could we oppose that? The disappointment we feel is a perfectly understandable pain, but love frees us from obsessing about holding onto the version of this person who exists only in our imagination (i.e. the one who is still our partner). Love helps us admire them for who they are in reality: an individual on a journey to fulfil their needs and realise their dreams, making choices that are healthy for themselves. Love reminds us that to admire someone, to appreciate them and feel inspired by them, we needn’t wedge them into our lives in a particular slot (e.g. as the Friend or the Boyfriend). Love can be something like an inner applause celebrating the sheer existence of this treasured someone. We don’t need to date them to love them; we never did.
Likewise for loss: missing is a normal, predictable agony. But love frees us to savour and rejoice in all that we shared with this wonderful, departed companion. We may wish they were here to share more, but we love them all the same, even when they’re gone, knowing that we keep with us all those memories, all those lessons. Love isn’t mere nostalgia, but a forward-moving nostalgia that heals more than it steals.
Love needn’t ignore or euphemise the cruel acts of others. On the contrary, it can reveal and clarify them, like Justice Goggles; empower us to confront or escape them, like a cybernetic suit with built-in jetpack and plasma rifles. Love, when free, illuminates in us the capacity to choose and to let others choose. Loving someone doesn’t mean pleasing them despite your own needs. Loving someone means first loving yourself enough to know how to love another. And that precludes abuse, entirely and categorically. Love means finding a mutualistic reciprocity that edifies and enlightens, not subjugates. Love has nothing to do with being suffocated, infantilised, unappreciated, insulted, terrorised or controlled – nor forcing upon others those same injustices. Love is free: to give and to receive. Love is free: between people who, too, are free.
Thus, this kind of love – this form I so enjoy, this non-possessive, consensual, mutual, reciprocal force of connection between and among people – manifests across a range of spheres in our lives. This free love is, in part, a personality: the kind which aspires to generate value and not monopolise it, the kind which appreciates and shares, rather than consuming and destroying. It’s a personality which tends both towards self-sufficiency and altruism; which requires relatively minor validation from others in order to feel whole.
Likewise, free love is both socialisation and deviation: you’re taught to share your toys and serve your community, but you also draw your own boundaries. Hands off. Hence, free love is extremely political: to celebrate the agency of each person, to smile at their right to flourish in their own way, is to oppose any baseless constraints upon that. Love then is the pingback felt when we admire justice, as it is the alarm bell screaming inside when we witness oppression.
Free love also has profound ramifications for aesthetics. We are inclined to view all forms of beauty and sublimity as sources of love, when they are the creations of artists (i.e. acts of freedom undertaken by free people), but also when they are the inherent qualities of the world around us: waterfalls, sunsets, full moons. Free love accepts a plurality of aesthetic and recreational tastes. It cannot and does not prescribe, since it is inextricably entwined with a reverence and enthusiasm for freedom. This is to say: perceiving art is itself a unique and free experience, and to take this from someone else is a kind of abuse.
Free love then – this personal, social, political, aesthetic force – implies a particular value system: that living is about flourishing, individually and collectively, drawing on the unique and diverse capacities of all people, without exploiting or otherwise harming those who could come to suffer – nonhumyn animals, the people of subsequent generations, etc. In short, free love is the soul of socialism. Love is anarchy.
3
Hunger and Taste
On some level – or ‘lovel’, if you’re silly that way – it is a kind of sense. And much like the taste of sugar, we have only words like “sweet”. But “sweetness” is also honey, and fruit. I cannot express the taste in words; I can only approximate it. Index it. Instantiate a particular opinion of it in the mind of a reader (or listener or signer). And if I do that successfully, this approximated indexical notion will resound in the reader. The reader may feel they understand somewhat more clearly a flavour they may or may not have ever actually tasted. But language isn’t just a series of adjectives; I can weave stories whose themes (I hope) arouse powerful feelings in a reader which may simulate an encounter with sugar, so that even if they don’t ‘experience’ the sweetness necessarily, they still ‘experience’ the sugar in their imaginations. But the word is not the thing. Love, thus, can never be fully expressed in language, because its nature, as with all things, transcends words.
Why does love – this anarchic force – present so much less frequently than other forms underpinned by consumption, possession, gratification and co-dependency? Heck, if I know. But I’d guess for the same reasons that other anarchist opinions are drowned out in public life: they’re squashed by powerful interests. Businesses need us to view humyn existence and interactions in consumerist terms so we see our impulses to purchase products as natural and normal, instead of obscene and superfluous. To believe that humyns and nonhumyn animals are intrinsically deserving of love is the end of labour exploitation, animal agriculture, wealth inequality, etc. So, yeah: if love means everyone deserves to flourish, and we should all commit to building relationships and social systems which prioritise as much, then state-capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, speciesism and racism, ableism and ageism, and religious intolerance will necessarily collapse, since those all predicate on hierarchies, which love necessarily opposes. But besides all that, I think we confuse love with obsession.
Let’s distinguish between love and obsession. They are not wholly separate, and they share a great deal: they are both powerful desires, they fulfil us on a profound level, they drive us to do extraordinary things, and I suspect they occur in tandem.
Love differs significantly from obsession: Love is offering, where obsession is demanding; generative (i.e. it creates), where obsession is appetitive (i.e. it consumes). Love shares and receives, but never steals; is invincible in its vulnerability, not fragile in its delusions of untouchability; it is serene, not temperamental; adoring, not fretting; respectful, not invasive; grateful, not disappointed; celebratory, not jealous; cooperative, not competitive; trusting, and not fearful; unattached, and not possessive; centred, and not dependent; free, and not trapped; listening, and not babbling; letting go, not holding on.
Loving then, distinguishes itself from obsession, in one fundamental respect. The structure of the latter is a kind of hunger – it has to be sated, it has to be filled. It is a need. It is a want. The former is a kind of creativity. So while it is true that humyns crave social bonds in general, it is also true that within this general category of immutable hypersociality, free anarchic love is the kind of bonding which best harmonises with the pursuit of a valuable life.
Love on some level is this indistinct positive social energy: something to do with solidarity, cooperation, mutual wellbeing. It’s about being on the same side, which is to say, striving for the same thing. Which is to say, seeking our own and each other’s flourishing.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. In practical terms, love puts obsessions into perspective, noticing them and guiding them. Love is thus integral to moral action, as it helps us manage these other desires, and order them in accordance with our values. Love is the mechanism by which we become better people.
It’s not you. But, like… okay, so it’s a leeeettle bit you. But it’s mostly me. Anyway, here’s a portal to a post-scarcity utopia. You’re welcome. Kay, bye!
I have on several occasions enjoyed the pleasure of what I consider to be perfect breakups. I mean, don’t get me wrong: the pain of adjusting from prolonged closeness isn’t to be scoffed at. It hurts. But they were loving, and hence mutual, compassionate and, in their own ways, joyous. Should you ever need, here are some tips I’ve found work well:
Forgive them. Forgive yourself.
When we transition to platonic from romantic, or even to something more distant (a clean break, as they say), we often feel guilt for the mistakes we made. In such cases, I advocate a four step process: 1) accept the guilt and take your share of the responsibility, 2) apologise by directly addressing your wrongdoing with your former partner and committing never to repeat that again, 3) attempt to make amends in whichever ways you can, and 4) forgive yourself, because no one is perfect, we all make mistakes, and this is simply how we learn. Forgive them as well, not to forget their transgressions or inattention to your needs, but to release the frustration from the atmosphere of the mind, so that at long last you can move the heck on.
Behold the wonder of everything that is still to come.
Your life after your transition/breakup will only be more wonderful than the one that came before. Think of the places you’ll go, the people you’ll see, the skills and knowledge you’ll gain. You have books and films and travels ahead of you, and so much love. It’s not over. Far from it.
Embrace the pain of loss. Remember and appreciate everything you’ve built together.
It’s still going to hurt: you’ll miss the closeness, the activities you used to share, their energy and their presence. You’ll miss what they brought to your life. And it’s healthy to feel that pain – to notice that you’ve lost something. But it helps to remember how much you’ve gained: all those memories, all those lessons. Those have fortified you, enriched your life with joy and wisdom. And you keep all that. Savour it, because it’s yours – both of yours.
Start (or continue) the habit of dating yourself.
Get intimate with yourself. All your own interests and passions continue – or perhaps you’re just discovering them. Maybe in the absence of your partner, you can finally prioritise your own capacities and attractions, and follow your own fulfilment. Now’s your chance to deepen your self-love and pursue the roads you never thought you’d walk.
Cease physical affection. Gradually reduce contact and shared spaces.
If you’re still on good terms with your former partner – say, you’re still close friends – it helps to minimise physical contact. The body stores many powerful yearnings, and a hug or a held hand can make it difficult to revive in yourself an understanding that you can live a wonderful life without their romantic involvement. I’d also recommend giving each other a wide berth, since it means you can fill your head with other experiences, rather than navigating their company, or relapsing into the belief that you’re doomed without them. You never were, and you’ll never be, and having that space reinforces as much.
Allow yourself to become interested in other people. Encourage them to become interested in other people.
That’s right: love will happen again. For you and for them. It won’t be the same; maybe it’ll be better, maybe worse. But you’ll only find out if your heart’s open. Rejoice! To think that love never dies. Perhaps it can’t sustain one romance, but it might energise another. And besides: a thing isn’t good because it lasts. Change is healthy, even when it’s difficult. We keep learning, we keep growing, and, since it’s all that counts, we keep loving.
4
Arcs and Archaeology
Love, like wizards, talking trees and stubbing your toe while walking in the house with the lights off, teaches life’s profoundest lessons. Through love I have discovered my tastes in the arts, healthy habits, politics (theoretically and strategically), my social patterns, intellectual curiosities and professional ambitions, as well as my guiding values. It’s provided a lens through which to clarify my life, and the energy to brighten within when the world around me seemed too dark to bear. Love – real, anarchist love – puts life into perspective. The resolution of its lens is as precise as it gets, and it shoots only photographs.
Platonic love, like the relief of rainfall eclipsing a long summer, is one of my life’s greatest pleasures. While it doesn’t pang as often as the need to write, when it does, it’s just as strong. Comrades, confidants, companions, co-conspirators. They’re the ideal articulation of free love; certainly more voluntary than family, the love of whom I’m not sure I’ve ever really felt at all. Which is not to say I don’t love a few of my family members; I do a great deal. Infinitely. But those people I consider my best friends, to whom I just happen to be related. (Hi, Mom. Hey, sis.) The rest’s just small talk.
I blame this disaffection on being a born introvert and a grown radical; as a rule (of nature, not a principle), you just can’t stand most people. Oh, and my parents’ divorce too. You lose faith after that: in parents, adults in general, and certainly in the concept of family. Kids of divorced parents know the truth: we’re all just people. The love is there or it’s not. But friends are great.
Perhaps equally potent has been my love for places, ideas and lifestyles, books and songs. Certain harmonies, particular writing styles. The wind caressing the trees in particular forests. Sunrise workouts. Spec fic, prog-rock, jazz fusion, vegan home cooking. Anarchist theory and praxis. The quest to expand my capacities, to deepen my self-knowledge, to heal and empower my community. Such loves endure as a constant expression of self, and in wobblier moments, buttress the balancing ballerinx.
On the other hand, romantic love, as I’ve said before, eludes me. I recall the first stirrings that boys and girls were different: opposed, antithetical to each other’s proclivities (colours, bathrooms, interests, clothes, who could be smacked where and for what), and yet destined to collide in that distant, repulsive future, in which we worked jobs, owned property and created children with the power of what biology picture books called ‘ga-meats’. Fortunately, before all that, we would evolve into cool, carefree and witty-beyond-our-years slobs, rebellious teenagers enriched by golden mounds of pocket money (or what the Americans on TV called “allowance”).
I remember playing tag (we called it ‘on-on’) with some girls who accused me of hitting them whenever I tagged them. I genuinely didn’t mean to. When you’re running at full speed, tagging someone must feel like hitting. I remember playing soccer with boys, and never receiving the ball for longer than about one and a half seconds. I couldn’t tackle, so I only ever picked it up by intercepting, or when I was passed to. I also couldn’t shoot (or pass), so when someone passed to me, all I could do was panic, lose the ball and hate myself, mostly in that order, but not always. What really freaked me out was kiss-catch. I didn’t want to kiss someone who was running away from me. What the fuck? And I sure as hell didn’t want to be kissed by any of those people; I didn’t even know them!
When those latent, cloudy intuitions about romance and sexuality began, I remember being surprisingly young – way back when the only tricks my penis could pull off successfully were peeing and not peeing. It wasn’t much of an awareness, but a tacit sense that certain boys and certain girls were ‘better’: a harmony between their clothes, voices and facial features. They were always thin, their hair was always neat, and their smiles somehow meant more than the rest of ours. You mainly picked it up from other kids: girls liked some boys more than others, and vice versa. They were Cool, or they looked Cool. Or maybe that’s all ‘Cool’ meant: looking Cool.
The boys were usually tall (but not too tall), sporty and, barring repeatedly injuring themselves by jumping off high places, well-behaved. They were funny, by which I mean they had whatever passes for humour when you’re five years old. You couldn’t be one of the goofballs though; there’s a meaningful distinction between being funny and being laughed at. On the other hand, the girls were always blond (or at worst, golden brown), skinny as splinters, into dancing, Barbie and the scariest game on the planet, ‘house-house’.
Dear Lord, spare the children from ‘house-house’: whoever pretended to be the husband and wife were collectively, mercifully and without exception, referred to as ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’, so no one had to do the math about where the ‘kids’ came from or why we all were the same age. I was always (by which I mean, both times) ‘Uncle’ or ‘Grandpa’. I don’t really remember, except for this vague image of Jack the American kid howling his head off, pointing at me and jeering, ‘Hahaha! You’re an old man!’ And everyone laughed with him, and I got upset, and walked away to cry somewhere private, and sing to myself an improvised song about escaping into an imaginary world with the help of caring aliens who liked me for who I was and believed we could save the humyns from diseases, car accidents and Jack the American kid. More to the point: I wasn’t an old man; I was six. And besides, I’d explicitly asked to be a cousin. (Secretly: because it meant I had a plausible excuse not to play ‘house-house’ when I didn’t want to. Cousins are extended family; no one expects them at dinner.)
But I always scowled at those who were relegated to ‘Dog’, not because nonhumyn animals are less fun to play or less important in family life, but because somehow, whenever someone was Dog, someone else ended up riding on top of them. How wrong, I thought. People can’t ride dogs! I especially didn’t like it because I always fancied the image of a big friendly monster who could protect other little kids and take them around the playground. I wanted to be that monster. Someone else getting to be Dog felt like me missing out on the closest thing I’d ever get to my dream. I could protest, but that’d lose me my invitation to play ‘house-house’ in the first place. But if I didn’t protest, I wouldn’t get to be Dog. Hmmm. I eventually resolved my dilemma when I decided I’d just draw pictures of big friendly monsters instead, which for me had the added perk of not obliging me to interact with all my annoying playmates and their unconvincing quarter-life alter egos.
Kids are cruel, and adults are just big kids. In primary school, I remember things getting markedly worse before they got any better. Firstly, most students were coloured, which meant, among other things, that blond girls stuck out way more. Each had to endure that much more unwanted male attention. Secondly, it meant that boys who weren’t particularly obsessed with blond girls – or any girls for that matter, whether for having another sexual orientation, or (being no more than thirteen years old) simply not giving a fuck – became the targets of serious abuse. Boys who weren’t boyish somehow magnetised the real ire of the truly capital-B Boyish Boys, who, like Republican oligarchs fretting over their wealth, protected their fragile Boyishness by bullying the rest of us. Eventually, with all boys protecting their Boyishness, the deluge of bullying flowed so constantly as to be essentially unnavigable: it wasn’t a single bully doing all the bullying anymore, but a network of gossip and threats, rumours and glares, expectations and insinuations, alliances and rivalries. A game that didn’t make sense, even if you happened to be winning – and the odds were, you weren’t.
Then in fourth grade, at last, it happened. Her name was Faye. We both liked to write stories and poetry, draw pictures and, basically, be kind and quiet and cheerful. She had freckles, a breezy voice and ginger hair. We got on well enough, I think. I mean it was fourth grade; nothing was going to happen, save what did: we mired in our unspoken fondness for one another, near asphyxiated with awkwardness (we both knew, and everyone else knew, and we knew that everyone else knew that we knew), until she returned to Manchester, and I was too cool to say goodbye in any other way than assuring her, quite publicly, that I wouldn’t cry. So she did, for both of us, and finally, for that one moment in my life, I became a true Boyish Boy (see: self-spiting jerk).
Over the next few years, on and off, various girls caught my eye. Artsy people, usually. Quiet and bright, always with lovely laughs. Nothing ever materialised – again, we’re talking pre-pubescent sensationalist Mxit declarations of ‘we’re boyfriend and girlfriend’ (but with worse spelling). These flings included little more than being considered Cool and feeling marginally less awkward on Valentine’s Day. Then in grade seven, much to my surprise, I found myself the “boyfriend” of the most popular girl in school. She was coloured, which was a big break for me. At my school, being white was not good for your reputation (except for blond girls, who somehow still held the monopoly on social capital).
Hayley was, and remains, a mystery to me. She never had anything to say, and seemed to possess no particular interests or talents. She could never answer my questions about her family, where she grew up, what films or books she liked, what music she liked. ‘Oh, you know, I like whatever’ was about the deepest thing she ever said to me, and all I could really attribute to her personality. I found her nebulous, inarticulate and unreadable, but I pitied her, and she was pretty. So we sat together at break, bored, me trying to talk to her, and she trying not to talk back. ‘I’m doing this for you, you know?’ I wanted to say. ‘This is all your fault!’
Meanwhile, my popularity exploded. I’d already developed a reputation as a compelling public speaker, a talented illustrator, and most recently a drummer. Once people found out about my mom, I became something of a white tiger in a zoo. Half-coloured, half-white? Feast your eyes! Suddenly it didn’t matter that I sucked at sports, and won awards for things like Academic Excellence, Social Sciences, Creative Writing and Drama. Drumming basically makes you a god, when all the Boyish Boys are inheriting cellphone upgrades from their corporate daddies and kapping tolle (literally just doing tricks with spinning tops). And now, all of a sudden – * gasp! * – I was “dating” Hayley, the coloured girl with the perfect hair! Woe is me.
So while Boyish Boys quizzed me in the change rooms on whether I’d reached second base yet, little did they know that I was secretly stalling on having to submit to first. They also didn’t know – besides anything meaningful about me – that Hayley was having her other popular friends deliver to me typed letters (in literal envelopes!) on her behalf. Each nightmarish rendition would profess her love for me, and beg me to hold her more. When I tried to talk to her about them – sceptical whether these were legit, or just a prank sent by her friends (surely the more likely explanation) – she’d frantically swat down the discussion. ‘Oh no, don’t worry about that. It’s nothing. Forget it, seriously. It’s really fine, yeah. Don’t worry.’
I was so confused. Why was this making me so popular to people I abhorred? Who was this bizarre person? And why was I involved with her? The answers were simple: I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. So I broke up with her. I phoned her and we spoke about it. Or rather, I told her, and she absently agreed. She seemed to understand, but only in the way of a bobble head toy nodding away. Then at school she acted like nothing happened; like we were still together. It’s especially surprising since we never really were at all. In any case, when I realised I needed to restate my position (I know; none of this makes any sense), she blanked me, and shortly after, started dating a Boyish Boy I once pinned to the ground in a punch-up after he bullied me for six months.
But like all bad experiences in life, I learned a lot: that love is not pity; that love is not a duty; that love is not popularity; that love is not possible between people who aren’t friends. All of which is simply a way of saying: in life, trust your inner voice. It’ll make you a braver artist, a better friend, a happier person, and be there to remind you that your heart often knows what your head does not.
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