(Photograph of a Viewing of Sophie Calle & Greg Shepard's Double-Blind (No Sex Last Night) 1992, 2008)…Maybe even literature, though I have read some sad and lovely stories of love from Leonard Cohen, some of which I relate to from my own history, and some of which I have no experience of but fall deeply in love with the words.
I’m not really sure where I stand, mostly confused, maybe even scared. The truth is I don’t really know and it is this uncertainty that separates me from anyone else, and separates the emotions I have to give. I don’t think I have ever met someone I loved and that loved me back, and so can be said for those who have loved me that I never loved. I can’t help it, neither could they. There is no ownership to love because it can never be transferred or traded away, you’re just stuck with it. We tend to label ownership to things of value. Love doesn’t have a value when you’re the only one feeling that, it’s a beautiful burden. It’s hard to live with a heavy thing, and we regret, hate, having to bare with it, but life in the cold, where we live on the dark side of the moon without the light of love, we regret not having love. And it is where I find myself mostly, sucking up the last of it, those fruits of burden, or at this point, the distasteful wine from decomposition. At times I feel like Dr. Frankenstein, taking parts of dead moments and reassembling them together to form something that is very much the opposite of its materials, something alive. And though it may be a beast, it is love, not from the process of bringing something alive again, but by putting life into something. And that’s where I’m at, this conception of love; you take a dying or dead plant and you transplant it to a new pot, with new soil, you water it, and you keep watering it even if it shows no signs of life, then your devotion is rewarded when his back straightens up, he begins to stand on its own, starts blooming, maybe it is a she, and then she grows and grows and you just look from a few feet away and admire what you have done. It isn’t what you have done but what should have happened. That nature should rebuild itself, that we should not have to aid it, but having such illusions of this act, like the feeling we created Dr. Frankenstein’s love, when we didn’t, we just think we did, like traveling to a destination. We will go somewhere with thoughts of getting somewhere, but inside we just wanted to experience traveling, that it was the journey that we were looking for, a journey that is generated by chance. And then when we arrive what do we discover, we’re living exactly how we were before we left, in a static state where we have a home again; a place for our shoes to rest, a place for our skin to bathe, and a place for our things to stay while we grow old and tired and then retire to our beds. I think of Hollywood, how we are just like it, full of ideas and conceptions of what love is. It is what we build, what we create, and what we willed together, with all of our strength and all of our heart. The plant, whether he or she, will still grow without us. The dead flesh will decompose and become life again. And everything will end, happy or not, without rolling credits, and without us. But I want to believe, that I can control something by being a part of it, and will I be controlled? It is better this way…because some things don’t change, and so she or he will grow, stronger and stronger, while I grow weaker and weaker, more and more, and less and less, in love, and without, and again, and again.
(Title name inspired by an interview from Charlie Kaufman talking about Hollywood, paraphrased.)
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