Accurate Yet?

A Dialectics of Dialects

“I have love to give, and you’ve qualified.”

This apparently was not the answer that she had hoped, nor that which would have made her, or incidentally me, immediately the happiest. But accuracy is a noble pursuit, one which I have always prioritized over the cheap, short-term returns of dialogic approximations.

It all started a few months before, while sitting on the pot. I, like Copernicus, find my best ideas during that suspended, meditative time of waiting for matters, previously held in our private orbit, to rejoin earthly gravity. At least, those which I consider the best, judging mostly by the excitement that they provide their author whilst echoing the works and writings of past thinkers, poets, and artists whose meanings I deem related to my own; and thus at a rather ample remove from practical purposes, communal validation, or even legal consequence. I have narrated elsewhere how my first major toilet idea landed me, besides a variety of aerial destinations, for one year in prison—this is not the place for repetition, but for a milder, less dramatic, considerably more subtle anecdote.

That day, a rainy, sushi-morrow, fairly constipated kind of day, it occurred to me, while squeezing my sphincters in methodic, reiterated succession, that contrary to my persistently painful feeling since my ex-wife had left me, five years before, with as much notice as a Belgian general in a Blitzkrieg (or Bewegungskrieg, for the purists), it was not her, herself, which I had loved and, upon losing, believed myself incapable or unwilling to live without, and, later, a resigned survivor, irremediably scarred by (syntax OK so far?); or yet it was her, in formal terms of object and identity, but she was not the cause of love, not even its defining factor: springing as natural and spontaneous as a young hare, or a baby robin taking flight, said love was mine, in all its breadth and complexity mine, it came from me and was defined by me; and in my ex I had merely procured an individual whom I could reasonably, or irrationally but within culturally established romantic tropes, believe to fit its hopes and demands, and who would consent also, probably in exchange of a comparable acceptance on my side, to submit thus her person to my dream, such as I brought it to bear all but entirely predetermined, and to the various rituals which I intended jointly to observe in its honor, mostly involving foods, fluids, and periods of sleep.

How did I reach this conclusion in and on the toilet, one might ask? Easy: I found myself able that day, conjuring out of protracted idleness a number of readings as well as yearslong Buddhist practices, of loving, with all my soul and sincerity, the first available object in my vicinity (or the most attractive to me, perhaps): the toilet door (as, alas, twasn’t a cellar). Which, by way of an example, seemed to me base enough, simple and limpid enough to confidently consider that I could, henceforth, love pretty much anything, or anyone (This is obviously all completely true, who would make such shit up, and I would prove it with a picture but, the next time I visited that apartment, under another tenancy, the door had been replaced. With a more modern, sliding one, which I firmly trust I could love almost as much—if not entirely, due solely to the fact that it had been my first time, on that recorded day, with a door—yet would mean nothing to you, doubtful reader, if hereby presented in a photograph: because, although it could have been, and you convinced to so believe, it was not that one.), and to evaluate anew my past infatuations, whose objects I had deemed, at the time, proportionally exceptional to the intensity of my desire, but was now drawn to reassessing as not necessarily much superior to the current, framed, wood panel of my heart.

For the edification of mankind, a brief summary: if you love someone, the love is in you. Being with that person helps you feel it, but the love comes from you. You are the one experiencing it. This cannot be taken from you. Similarly, if you feel anger at someone, this person may seem to you to be defined by what makes you angry (they are… x or y, which you hate), but really the anger is within you, aroused by your limited perception of them, and you are the one experiencing it. Please consider whether that is beneficial to you. Similarly, if you feel like calling an attractive woman a skank, please consider that it comes from you, the feeling that you are trying to express: what is skanky is your attitude, the way you feel upon seeing her—nothing to do with who or what she is. Similarly, if you were to be told about “metta” meditation, or loving-kindness toward all creation, don’t think of it as an altruistic approach, nor one which needs to be grounded in an experimental validation of creation’s qualities: it is plainly a way to make oneself feel good, all the time, by feeling love for everything, including toilet doors, as despite not truly taking its content and characteristics from its object, love is set up (as are the main functions and processes which define human beings, language in particular) to work toward something or someone other than oneself. Which doesn’t mean, cunning as we are, that we must needs be selective: somewhat in the same way that I write this story without knowing if anyone will find it interesting, or even read it, but still with an inner notion of “a reader” who will, if not benefit, at least enjoy along with me what I am hereby putting to paper and how, if you can feel love all the time by loving everything, I’d say go for it.

And so, all told, I’m sure she would have understood, the new lady now lying at my side (new to me, goes without saying: if this tale were by her proffered or from her point of view, most paradigms of space and time currently being relied on would be significantly altered, past relationships to both humans and doors would differ, and the structure of this story, I imagine, would likely highlight the aftermath of this moment which I have picked to focus on, subsequently provide background as to who her interlocutor was and where she could possibly have been so unlucky to find him, followed, at least in the register of everyday conversation, with commentary on the contemporary practice of dating people met through “apps”, and the unpleasant surprises that it often procures), and asking, if only I had been able to convey, if not in the words themselves which I reproduced at the onset of the present writing, presumably in their tone or, were we in one of these visual modes of representing story which technology has propelled to the forefront of humanity’s attention, in the content of my pupils which, optionally gyrating, the camera would penetrate with appropriately suggestive musical support (the latter) and reveal (the former) through a flashback of indeterminate length, I’m sure she would have understood, and probably appreciated to a further extent than actual events have thus far indicated, that it was a matter of philosophical accuracy—without which obviously one could not hope to be true, whether to oneself, to their lover, or to love itself—and not in any way of lesser consideration or interest on my part, for her specifically, if I had answered, after an otherwise delightful evening, recently concluded in her bed by all the athletics of Western affection, in the aforementioned way, her breathily murmured question:

“Do you love me?”