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DELAY * RUSHING CEREMONY * JAN 2012 www.shoutoutloudprints.com

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new video - Jon Washington

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A few weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail from someone I do not know asking me to describe the act of falling in love. After much hesitation, I decided not to write him back. But I did write something. Here it is⎯

First, I would not call ‘falling’ in ‘love’ an act. An act implies that the thing being done is being done with intention, by acting consciously. Falling in love, in all its beautiful triteness, is not intentional, at least not at first. I don’t fall down the stairs on purpose, but I do feel something from it and I may throw myself down the stairs on purpose to re-create the original feeling.

I ‘fall’ in ‘love’ with the idea of you, with the movement of your body, with words you have learned elsewhere and strung together on a clothesline for me. Every moment that has accumulated in you and brought you to this moment where I am seeing you or hearing you or touching you is being effused. Your childhood, everywhere you once were, versions and past-lives, are all amalgamated here, now.

I fall in love with the incompleteness of you, with your unfinalizedness. With the knowledge that we are always becoming something we once were not. I see the route of your growth with a certain fog ahead and I want to go into this fog. I want to run into it with you, and if we lose each other in it, then so be it. I just know I want to be close to you.

Anything that happens after I realize I have ‘fallen’ in ‘love’ with you can be ended by consciousness of the realization of this. Consciousness of this realization may serve to obfuscate moments of their trueness. The falseness of interaction then may be agreed upon should both parties in ‘love’ understand this predicament. But still, moments together may not glow as they once did. A creative, ever-re-envisioning eye is needed, then.

I am thinking of a certain person as I write this. I am drawing from experience. I have come to know all of this only by doing it. Now, although still with much trepidation, we may call ‘falling’ in ‘love’ an act.

The strongest feeling I remember is one of the unexpected.  The unforeseeable. You who appear as if out of nowhere and change me without trying, without intention. We who meet here in a single moment for the first time, and then, again, again, again. I have come to need you in my life, and I know I did not before. I know I may not once more.

— Excerpt from “Where Do We Go From Here?”, Martin Luther King Jr., 1967 (via bookandbolo)

— Lydia Davis, Head, Heart, from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

— Lacan (via thru-these-eyes) (via popnihilism)

— http://www.clairefontaine.ws/pdf/dear_r.pdf (via greathealthiness)

Rainer Maria Rilke

An excerpt from Letter 8 

Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden

August 12, 1904 

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. 

This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called ”apparitions,” the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with. but only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. for if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust inthe difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.