The Jackette

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• on October 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  A call to arms and the absent other 

  It begins with a call to arms. I dress in my grandfather’s military uniform and address the camera I am being transmitted. I call for a revolution, but language fails me. I speak gibberish. I am calling for the other. I am calling to be touched.

  In 1940, my grandfather, Sidney James Conlon was called to arms. An engineer for the New Zealand army, he had enlisted himself before the war began because serving the state was one of the few sources of employment. But in 1940 he was called to fight for his ‘mother country’, Great Britain, in the very distant and foreign continent of Africa.

  He had never left the shores of New Zealand.

  All he understood of this war and the world it consumed was seen through the flickers of the cinema screen. The world news briefing where everyone in the audience stood up and sung “God Save the Queen” before the screening started.

  The world was transmitted to my grandfather by the machinery of the cinema. He was called to arms via the screen.

  The cinema screen. A large white space. The focus of the funnel of the theatre. An empty space. It is in essence Heidegger’s void. It ceases to exist as some thing  until shadows and light begin to dance on the screen, projected from behind people’s backs. For a moment the void is filled, but only for a moment. The frame, the captured image, hovers in space for a split second before it fades. For my grandfather the war and world appeared briefly in front of him before slipping from his grasp and retracting into the ether. He followed it. He left his lover and followed the call to arms.

  Sixty years later his grandson sits in front of a television awkwardly grasping for the hand of a girl who wants to hear the words ‘I love you’.  Her face basks in the glow of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

  The flicker of the cinema screen or the glimmer of the television. Both fulfill Heidegger’s prophecy of abolishing ‘every possibility of remoteness’ without making anything near. This is the intimacy of the remote. This is the love I uncovered in the love letters. A love borne of absence, or of emptiness, a space without the other.

  Now,  absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I – I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless. At hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense.

  Roland Barthes writes that there are two desires, or two words for two desires,  drawn from two greek gods, the sons of Aphrodite. Pothos, a desire for the absent
  being, and  Himeros, the more burning desire for the present being. I would argue that the two desires cannot be distinguished  simply by proximity. The two desires are to be distinguished by the methods assumed in connecting to the other. I tell the other I love her. I use language to connect. I touch her. I use my body to connect. Pothos; I speak to you. Himeros; I touch you. I reach for her hand. She waits for a word.

  Both Pothos and Himeros are forms of sexual love, this is  the love I am discussing, not familial love or religious love (Singer). This love itself can exist only as Pothos. ‘I love you’. It is language.  Whispered into the others ear, written in a letter, or typed in a text message. It is a call to arms, a call to be touched. The other is always absent when I speak to her. I use language to call her nearer. That is the nature of love.

  Hume writes that all sexual love contains a yearning for continued oneness with the beloved. Plato says that love is a striving for perpetual possession. Neither are feasible. I will strive for you, I will desire you. But you are always the other. We do not join to become one. We connect as two, yet the yearning for oneness persists. We create the abstract to shape the void with language.

  “I love you.”

  I. It is I. And you, the other. In-between, is that void, shaped by language, the word love. Here, outside of ourselves and outside the other do we fulfill that myth of oneness. Here is the intimacy of the remote. I am absent from you. You are absent from I. Yet we are intimate. We both project ourselves onto that word love, like light and shadows projected onto the cinema screen. Here does love become some thing.

  
  Tags: barthes, cinema, heidegger (6), language (3), love (5), love letter, singer, television   

  Like a Virgin by Emily Maguire | The Jackette is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

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• on August 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  To not write a line or speak a word 

  Rummaging through my mother’s antique dresser, looking for scotch, or some other stoic spirit that could bide me well through a teenage evening of debauchery I discovered hundreds and hundreds of old love letters bundled in twine in an old biscuit tin. Cautiously I untie the knot of one bundle. They weren’t signed from my mother but from my grandmother Thora;

  “All I want to do tonight is not write a line or speak a word but snuggle down in your arms, my head on your shoulder and my soul in communion with yours in the perfect unity of our love. And that is what I’m going to do now. Goodnight my darling, I love you so,

  Thora”

  Eyeing off a bottle of port I returned the letters to their cave. They served some interest. I was sixteen and currently engaged in a heated debate with a girl at school over the meaning of love. She had asked if I loved her. I asked her to explain what love meant. She couldn’t. I tried.

  It was my first crisis of meaning. I should have just told her I loved her rather than tussle over semantics. The meaning would have followed the proclamation. As Irving Singer writes:

  “What looks like a seizure from without – the innocent and hapless individual suddenly being struck by an arrow from cupid’s bow – may therefore be taken as a manifestation of meaning being created in accordance with whatever needs or desires the lover accepts as paramount at the moment.”

  The only issue with cupid’s arrow was that my paramount need and desire, was a need and desire for meaning. The arrow would not strike until I could manifest meaning.

  I sought the letters. I believed the meaning of love could be uncovered in their bittersweet correspondence. I only had to read that line again to know it was not. She did not want to write or speak a word, only to snuggle down in his arms.

  “All I want to do tonight is not write a line or speak a word but snuggle down in your arms, my head on your shoulder and my soul in communion with yours in the perfect unity of our love.”

  He was stationed in Egypt and the world was at war. She was home on a cliffs edge in New Zealand. They would not see each other for years. They would not snuggle in each others arms. She wrote that the communion of their souls was the perfect unity of love but would they not reach this communion without performing the ritual of the embrace. She did not want to write a word but she did. She wrote the word soul. She wrote the word love.

  If the word love was never written would she have loved?

  Love lies in that little squiggle that hangs from that sentence. The question mark. Love lies in every mark. I scoured the pages of the letters seeking to define every other word written if I could not define the word love. Soon I saw there were only a sparse collection of markings, of symbols, of words that I could concretely define. Symbols of things that I could see, things that I could taste, things that I could smell, things that I could hear and things that I could touch. Love was not one of these things, but love was some thing. As Heidegger writes:

  “When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.”

  Love is not shaped by clay. It is shaped by language. It is shaped by symbols. Love does not mean anything, but love is the opportunity for meaning. As Singer writes;

  “Love, like life itself, is a plastic process. It varies in conformity with temporal vicissitude. It rarely stays the same for very long.”

  Love in its plasticity cannot exist in a stable state but in these letters it is written and it exists in a physical form. It exists in this world as a few scratches of line. It is shaped by language.

  
  Tags: love (5), love letter, writing