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02 April 2008
41. The Point of Impractical Love
Retrospect always condemns impractical love, yet always preserves, pristine, the memory of practical love. I’ve noticed this, and come to the conclusion that it’s a real bummer.
I think about the nature of love a lot these days. You do that when you are in love and it’s unrequited, with no discernible relationship to lean your love upon. The feeling of love, I’ve found, needs something physical to lean on – it can’t rest on the idea of itself particularly well, it can’t just steady itself within its own emotion. Without physical support, love is apt to flop or fall over. So love leans forward and out a lot, due its need for a surface to come up against, for some kind of hard practicality to prop it up. Love, you could say, has weak legs – that’s why it always looks for someone else to carry it about. In a way, women look at men and think: oh, he’s got quite strong legs, he can lug my love about for a bit!
Yes, for some women it’s about legs. But, for most, what constitutes a leaning post is a lot more complicated: who would think you could lean on the slope of a forehead; or the astute, knowing lines of fingers; or the tiny winking rivulets that appear at the side of each eye during conversation; or the wax and wane of pupils; or the bubbles that can rise up, lighter than air, from the sound of laughter; or, curious of all, the moment of quiet emptiness in a face, that can be the hardest and toughest stanchion of all.
I don’t know this man James at all, but I’m leaning forward anyway, longing for his practical surface for my love to rest on. Funny, in time to come retrospect will damn things as they are in me right now! Something in me will call me stupid and I'll be my own worst enemy for a while. Factions inside will war; there will be shouting and general clamour. Yet does all this stop me? Well, has it ever stopped any woman?
I climb the Clansman a lot these days, when my lungs are up to it. The weather’s been improving. Spring arrived the other day, although you might not know it by the still jagged nip in the air. All the way to the top I go these days too. From there I can see if I’m alone on the hill, as I can see where any hill-walkers would park their cars. When I’m at the very top, and I can see that it's just me and 'Man Mountain', I perform a kind of ritual. At first I dance around, arms open wide, letting the feeling course through me and out of me, up into the air, up to the clouds and across the sky. I spin around and I look up, watching the world turn like I’m inside a whirlpool of blue water and white froth. I smile, I giggle, I sigh, I yearn. I leap across rocks and I shout out. I skip and I canter and I groan aloud, like there's a little dog of joy scampering around inside some luxurious hurt.
This love is creative. This love is expressive. The great thing about humans is that we can make love with our brains as well as our hearts. It’s a making thing, comprised of ideas and instincts, practicalities and impracticalities, but also that calls out for effort and certainty and inspiration. At some point though, you have to realise that a work of art just isn’t going to happen. And you have to decide how much work you’re going to put into it before you tell yourself that it's all horribly flawed; that the proportions are all wrong, that the balance is off, that the engine requires a bit of machinery that they just don't make anymore, that he’ll never actually love you the way you want. That’s when you realise that there’s actually very little space between hope and hopelessness.
At this point I stop my expression of love and delight, and I scream instead. I scream with such effort, such depth. I let it all out of me – the anger, the frustration, the unwell hope, and, oddly, something of the love itself within all that charged noise. I never hear it echo though. I just feel it get gathered by the wind and discharged to somewhere else. I can’t say where. But it’s out, and it leaves me exhausted. Empty. I’m like a bell, without a tongue, that will never be rung again.
With James I haven’t yet reached the point of thinking that this is an impractical love that cannot be converted. No, not yet. I just hope that I will recognise that point when it arrives and know then to step away. Yet as every day passes and no sight or sign of him, it’s becoming clearer that this is an impractical, hopeless love. Yep, another one of those!
Yes, love that is both beautiful and purposeful, where we see a future, or we see the benefits to ourselves within it, always stays long in the memory and the memory continues to adore it. I know, in time, my heart will condemn this love for James, and ridicule and rebuke me for feeling it. But it’s this impractical love that comes back time and time again. Headless love, like a ghost on horseback riding darkly and terrifyingly through my soul. What is it though? What is its point?
Once I’ve stopped screaming I lie down on the ground. I draw my legs up and I hold them, then I lie there and I let the pain course through me like it’s the first day of my period. I bleed the love out of me but with small tears on my face; the merest visible leakage from the great downpour inside.
I guess that’s what it is: women attempt to find a practical love by testing it from the inside. We can’t put its credentials under a microscope and analyse them – instead we have to inject ourselves with the chemical and see the reaction. Women are a bit blind that way – we can’t see the potential of love from the outside. When it comes to other people’s souls, we have the equivalent of night-vision goggles – and, as everyone knows, night-vision goggles are shit useless when it’s daylight.
So I realise the point of impractical love, and it is quite simply that love looks at all the many, many faces in the world, it sees one, and it points. That’s all, it just points. Gently. Sweetly. And with the tiniest, tiniest air pocket of hope in its ever so small finger, that can only be tried and tested by ingesting it and breathing it in and out.
Kidman doesn’t have much to say about my feelings for James. She just shrugs her shoulders and says: “Well, at least it lets you know that you’re still alive.”
And sometimes that’s as good a reason as any, I guess, for a woman to be totally, utterly impractical.
Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.
08:00 Posted in Part Two: Getting Some Answers | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
Comments
hey. evryone make's mistaks, stephanie foy!
Posted by: Ferdinand Jay | 10 April 2008
Yeah, thanks for that. Your mother and your teachers certainly did!
Back to the school drawing-board, balloon!
Steph Fey
Posted by: Steph Fey | 10 April 2008
Oh-oh. Steph's in one of those moods! Better watch out! Anyway, guess what, Steph! Ive been practicing my apostrophe's. Soon be perfect at them so I will, you see if Im not!
Tither Smith
Posted by: Tither Smith | 10 April 2008
Oh, boy!
Posted by: Steph Fey | 10 April 2008