I've been flummoxed, gobsmacked and twitterpated by the recent experience I've had of falling madly, head over heels and incendiarily (red squiggle? I reserve the right to adverb any word he said, verbly weirding language) in great big goof(il)y sacred love with someone entirely via text messages and emails. Never mind the also-astonishing rapidity with which it happened or the utter impracticality of the situation and the careful observance of Ye Olde Wiccan law of laws: DO WHAT THOU WILT AND HARM NONE. (It's a good law. I have a whole screed ready as to why I disagree with that old devil Crowley's hubristic truncation to merely "do what thou wilt," including the fact that I lived that way for many a year and just fucked shit up constantly, causing harm on all sides and then having a burning culm dump of wreckage to clean up).
The ordinary mortal in me or in my friends objects, sometimes strenuously, to the notion that such an event as falling in love in any meaningful way via only the written word is even possible in reality. That words themselves are *only* words, or that, even if more than only, they are still something less than direct experience. Of course there's some wisdom to this. It has been true on a few occasions that I've met people I only knew via mediated communication and whatever spark and fascination was there on the page (digital or otherwise) just was not there in the flesh. This gets wickedly complex and into persona in writing versus personality in person and the deep disjunction that is of course possible (or even highly likely) between the two. So it presents itself as objection number one: through an exchange of words, two people only get to know their writing personae, not who they are in reality.
But here's the thing, old quotidian objection number one. My language persona is largely who I am in reality. I have a strong sense (and a shred of prior direct experience from 16 years ago) this is true for this other person as well. We're both writers. You know how writers are. There's a reason writers of a certain ilk tend to embody themselves in the written word. The main reason: because we can. It's a power that, once experimented with (probably starting very young), becomes thoroughly seductive, exhilarating and truly magical. We've always known that the written word is powerful magic. Those of us who play with the tools are transformed by them in turn.
It's dialectic goes something like this: I am having an experience. I feel the wild urge to share that experience in common with someone else and decide to write about it. If that someone else is one of my good readers all the better. Or, best of all, someone who inspires me to the core, which of course means a muse. As my fingers move on the keyboard or as the pen scritches along on pulp, there it is. Almost, almost exactly. Embodied like a hermeneutically translated homunculus, magically made truly manifest and as solid as anything else if not even more solid in some ways. Time and space are irrelevant. The far away is brought so close as to be right here. The minutes that pass in the writing are obliterated by the reader. It's no matter whether "real" or "rational." It is what it is.
A fight that continues even to this day
And here's the other thing, old mundane dull as dishwater objection number one: with the right audience, the right reader, what magic in exchange can occur! Because I am also a reader. And she's a reader. And we don't miss a goddamned trick, not one-- going either way. When you get two writers together who are also readers, just about anything is possible. Especially, as is the case here, when the exchanged language is also playfully layered with echoes, resonances, puns, sensual metaphors, inside jokes, single phrases that reference entire works of literature, blazing images as motivic symbols for entire paragraphs, etc.
Play in language, I had forgotten, is of the utmost importance to me. Some beloveds knew how to compete, and how to write very well, but not how to play. There was admirable earnestness in them and a sincerity that was intense, but no gamboling, cheeky, risk-taking multifaceted and flashing wit. I love that in all the people I truly love the most-- friends and lovers. I hadn't realized how much I missed it until I started playing this time.
I also love people who just get IT. It's a mystery, this ability. You either get it or you don't. If it has to be explained, well, that's like making out while reading a manual on how to make out at the same time. I love and admire many people who often just don't get it, and that's okay. But I've been reminded by this encounter that my most intimates have to get it or I feel unseen in a very fundamental way.
I think there is a lot more to understand about the epistolary impulse in love. It seems the main strand of a lot of the thinking about love letters, for example, is that they are somehow functionally declarative. I guess there is a whole subgenre of the merely declarative love letter or love poem, intended only to communicate to the beloved in some convincing, persuasive or seductive way the reality of the lover's love (and then a sub-subgenre of the "I am unlike all those other lovers in these ways and their love is stupid and mine is brilliant." cf When You Are Old by Yeats for a fine example). But that is a depauperate form, in most of its manifestations, in my opinion. Perhaps periodically important to remind lover and beloved of the dimensions, or, even more dangerously, the "reasons" for the love, but it gets old. We know we love we. Enough. Time to get into it.
Therefore the highest form of love letter in my opinion is essentially erotic. This kind of writing doesn't just declare love-- it makes love to the reader. Even, dear reader (and those of you with delicate constitutions may want to avert your eyes)-- it fucks the reader. Plenty of people can fuck pretty well without being able to write about it, but the lover who can do both has a nearly infinite cache of value in my book. In any strictly procedural sense, embodying love making (let alone sex) in a written scene is one of the hardest things to do well, without unintentionally including some kind of honking clam or grotesque nonsequitur. If you have ever tried to do it, you know of what I speak. (For hilarious and painful examples, check this out. Consider with trepidation that many of these examples are from quite accomplished writers).
Even at its best, the high wire act requires an avidly forgiving and disbelief-suspending attitude on the part of the beloved, which, thankfully is usually there, given the circumstances. Fortunately, however, two things: thing the first: if you do things right and pay attention along the way (which, being in love, of course you will naturally do), almost all of your missives become soaked in or on fire with eros, on some dimension or other. If the ground is properly prepared, you might be able to write something like "I'm imagining kissing your mouth" to the beloved and know that that simple, straightforward and vulnerable admission probably summons an entire scene that doesn't even have to be written or could be unnecessarily diminished by being written. Thing the second: at least it's fun to practice.
On the other hand, I've also learned or been reminded through this encounter that, in addition to my beloved "getting it," I also cherish lovers who can *simultaneously* be flat out pornographically raunchy while at the same time holding the sensual in a space of reverent or even sacred devotion. The high and low have to come together. So to speak. Because this is how sex-in-love (a word we need) works for me. It is both and neither. There is no difference between the most explicit description and the most tender and idealistic, in such a context. The sensual in this way gives breath to the poetic ideal and the co-existing authentic admiration for the personhood of the beloved provides a temenos for the sensual. They play together seamlessly. They co-create each other in myriad ways. One discovers whether or not another person shares this value especially powerfully through the written word, because the most explicit erotica has that thread of devotion that runs through it, helping hold all of the beaded words on a chain of respect and admiration. Or the respect and admiration is held on a beaded chain of fucking hot bluntness. Either way.
I have not met many women in my life who are able to do this in addition to getting it (and in addition to several other characteristics which I'll leave for another time), and these encounters, as a result, floor me. And there are yet a great many other reasons why this most recent encounter has floored me, with this particular woman, which, again, I'll not write about here. This concatenation of mysterious wildness changed everything for me, suddenly, even in the face of having not too long ago been leveled by love.
Don't you just love the Awkward Yeti?
For me, when something powerful that "describes" an encounter is well written and well read, I'll tell you something that some of you might think is delusional: it might as well be real. It *is* real. It's not simile but metaphor, just like all conscious experience. (unpack that sentence! I dare you!). If an embodied experience is written well, the words bring the body of the experience to me as immediately as being physically present does. I know that this way of experiencing written language as transcendent magic is what has made me a reader and writer all my life. So of course falling in love via the written word "is possible" for me, given the right woman who loves to read and write herself, whether in Platonic play, coloring well within the lines, or blazing with the most unfettered and attentive frankness.
Untitled, Joan Mitchell, 1961
