I spent a lot of my life opting for love at its worst over the prospect of loveless life. My masochistic tendencies I suppose. Berman gave voice to this approach toward life—thinking of the SJ quote with which you end the essay—alongside a few other Gen X singer-songwriters: Smith, Molina.
Interpersonal dynamics are usually brought to light in discussion with pop-psychology terms, and on the level of large-gesture deeds or rhetorical actions. But I think the little hesitancies or vague sensorial reactions are where you actually find the real pain and/or the magic. These things are difficult to even describe let alone analyze. But I think music and poetry does a great job of letting us see these things and we need to tell their stories, we need to realize these things in order to direct our lives, especially in matters as illogically driven as relationship. What I like about the Conrad passages because he sort of points towards the experiential-knowing by making note of it ineffability. He makes his "vain attempts". Actually "darkness never hides is an idea borrowed and reworded from a Molina song.
I mean ya they definitely honor love's teeth and I think I was here trying to come to grips with love's teeth or 'vengeful aspect', while also juxtaposing it against its evergreen warmth?
It is all often pathologized now. After my last breakup, I was reading about borderline personality disorder and started to think the evergreen warmth was idealization, mirroring, followed by the teeth of devaluation.
But…no. I noticed the culture at large—especially the dating culture—has translated all love into pathology—“toxic codependency”—in the service of a more poisonous social pathology: individualism.
Pain and loss is inextricable from the ecstasy of love insofar as love illuminates our being in the world (as Heidegger and others contend), that being is also shot through with finitude. It is the antithesis of pathological delusion.
Something about that cohort of musicians…I have always wanted to write about them and their moment.
I spent a lot of my life opting for love at its worst over the prospect of loveless life. My masochistic tendencies I suppose. Berman gave voice to this approach toward life—thinking of the SJ quote with which you end the essay—alongside a few other Gen X singer-songwriters: Smith, Molina.
I mean, people need love.
Interpersonal dynamics are usually brought to light in discussion with pop-psychology terms, and on the level of large-gesture deeds or rhetorical actions. But I think the little hesitancies or vague sensorial reactions are where you actually find the real pain and/or the magic. These things are difficult to even describe let alone analyze. But I think music and poetry does a great job of letting us see these things and we need to tell their stories, we need to realize these things in order to direct our lives, especially in matters as illogically driven as relationship. What I like about the Conrad passages because he sort of points towards the experiential-knowing by making note of it ineffability. He makes his "vain attempts". Actually "darkness never hides is an idea borrowed and reworded from a Molina song.
I mean ya they definitely honor love's teeth and I think I was here trying to come to grips with love's teeth or 'vengeful aspect', while also juxtaposing it against its evergreen warmth?
It is all often pathologized now. After my last breakup, I was reading about borderline personality disorder and started to think the evergreen warmth was idealization, mirroring, followed by the teeth of devaluation.
But…no. I noticed the culture at large—especially the dating culture—has translated all love into pathology—“toxic codependency”—in the service of a more poisonous social pathology: individualism.
Pain and loss is inextricable from the ecstasy of love insofar as love illuminates our being in the world (as Heidegger and others contend), that being is also shot through with finitude. It is the antithesis of pathological delusion.
Something about that cohort of musicians…I have always wanted to write about them and their moment.