Is the computer screen an illuminated manuscript, evanescent, impermanent, but with a memory that is no longer mine or yours? Is love a memory that is never mine, never yours?
Remember I love you.
Paige thought, I give my memory to this machine. I want ecstasy, not evidence. Can a machine’s remembering prove anything about love? If she points to its glowing face, could Paige attest, as one might of a poem written on the finest ivory linen paper: Here, this is evidence of my love.
“For you are so entirely fair, / To love a part, injustice were/… But I love all, and every part, and nothing less can ease my heart.” (Sir Charles Sedley)
Paige glanced at the little marks, letters in regular patterns making words and paragraphs, covering sheets of paper that were spread haphazardly around her on the desk and on the floor, and she gazed at the computer’s face, as comforting and imperturbable as a TV screen.
Love, my enemy, even now I love you.
Romantic love arrived with the singer, the minstrel, who traveled from court to court, from castle to castle, relaying messages of love, concocting notions of love, torrents of poetic emotion, and in the courts men and women listened to these plaints and added more, their own. The singer heard new woes and put them into song, fostering a way to woo, but why did the minstrel sing in the first place, and what did traveling from one place to another do to produce songs of love? And later, did the printing press change love? Did the novel, offspring of Gutenberg’s invention, transform love? Did love become an extended narrative with greater expectations, not a song but an opera?
“When people used to learn about sex and die at thirty-five, they were obviously going to have fewer problems than people today who learn about sex at eight or so, I guess, and live to be eighty. That’s a long time to play around with the same concept. The same boring concept.” (Andy Warhol)
Dearest,
I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before, not exactly. Not like this. Is it possible? I thought about you all day, and then in the night too, and I felt I was going to die, because my heart was beating so fast, as if it were a wild bird caged in my chest, flapping its wings madly, trying to escape. Even if my heart were a wild bird, it would fly to you.
Paige wondered if love disinvented, too, undid her and him. She moved from the computer, which seemed now to glower, into the kitchen and walked to the sink and turned on the cold water. She watched the water flow into the teakettle, and then she put the kettle on the stove.
Dearest,
I love you especially when you’re far away. I can feel you most when I don’t see you. I carry you with me because your words carry, they fly, and yet they stay with me, stay close to me, the way you do even when you’re not beside me. To be honest, love, sometimes words are all I need, words satisfy, your words, your words.
“Does that goddess know the words/ that satisfy burning desire?”
(Puccini, Madama Butterfly)
“I can love the other only in the passion of this aphorism.”
(Jacques Derrida)
Paige thought writing might be an act of love, a kind of love affair, or a way of loving. She hoped it was a possibility, because even more, more horribly and wretchedly, she knew that it was also an incessant demand for love, enfeebling and humiliating. Always wanting, writing exposed its own neediness, like unrequited love, which might be the same thing, she wasn’t sure. Except that when her own worthless desires rebuked her, her writing turned derisory, dissolved into worthlessness, and then became transparent.
“My Love is of a birth as rare / As ’tis, for object, strange and high; / it was begotten by Despair / Upon Impossibility.” (Andrew Marvell)
Dearest,
Maybe I’m always writing love, to you. That’s the only way I can love you. What if love, like writing, was a rite enacted and re-enacted, or a habit, or a disguise to cloak a vacant lot near the streetcar named desire. Sometimes I think it would be better to remain silent, to let emptiness, vacancy, and loss have its full, dead weight, and that it would be better to let love and writing go, but, love, I don’t want to stop writing or loving you.
It was nearly night. Paige visited old haunts without going anywhere, and she wallowed in dead loves and called upon memory, which competed with history, dividing her attention. Paige indulged herself, as if eating rich chocolates filled with her romantic past, and looked at pictures of former lovers stuck between pages in journals and albums. She mused and cut hearts out of paper towels, she held up one, then another, to the light. The hearts were large and ungainly, imperfect shapes meant to represent a romance or two or four. What would she write on a cheap paper heart?
“I wrote you in a cave, the cave had no light, I wrote on pale blue paper, the words had no weight, they drifted and danced away before my eyes. I couldn’t give them substance. I could not make them bear down. I keep failing at this poetry, this game of love.”
“O love is the crooked thing/ There is nobody wise enough/ To find out all that is in it…” (W. B. Yeats)
Dearest,
I know you think I have no perspective, and I know without perspective, everything is flat. Our love exists on available surfaces, beds, floors, on tabletops, on roofs. Tell me to stop. I can’t help it, I want more, I want everything now. I love you, silently and stealthily. I love you as you have never been loved. I love you because I cannot love you.
“True hearts have ears and eyes, no tongues to speak; / They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.” (Sir Edward Dyer)
I love you.
It was just a sentence. Paige was struck by it and, she thought, stuck with it. Three ordinary, extraordinary, diminutive words, I love you, and just eight sweet letters. “O” repeats, oh yes. So little does so much, three little words, three little piggies make a sentence: I love you. The love sentence, arret d’amour.
Dearest,
What if I were sent to love you? What if I were the sentence “I love you”? Do you or I ever think of love as a sentence? I don’t think so, you and I can’t stop to do that, we don’t bother with its syntax, or who is sentenced, and for how long. I think you and I can’t think love at all. I can’t now.
“What voice descends from heaven/to speak to me of love?”
(Verdi, Don Carlos)
“Wild thing, you make my heart sing./ You make everything, groovy./Wild thing, I think I love you./ But I want to know for sure. Come on and hold me tight. I love you.” (The Troggs)
Feeling stupid, Paige tore up one of the hearts. She crumpled the others and looked at the mess. With hardly a second thought, she took each newly crumpled heart and straightened it out, then patted down all of the hearts until they were more or less flat and unwrinkled, and lined them up on the table in front of her like a place mat. Paige smiled at the hearts, paltry emblems of couplings gone. She even liked the hearts better with creases, because she liked her lovers to have lines around their mouths and eyes. So strange to concoct emblems, to want signifiers of old loves, but it was, she thought, stranger not to keep faith with memory and to desire, as obsessively, to forget.
Dearest,