Since I wrote this piece from a year ago, in May of 2022, I have spent about 5 months (collectively) living in France. While there, I made anecdotal note of the fact that, in dating, everyone seemed a lot less pressed to describe the bounds of their relationships. I marveled at how the French twenty-somethings around me slipped in and out of each other’s beds, arms, rooms, etc. with ease. They would kiss casual lovers hello in the street, they would sleep with friends of friends and all eat buttered toast together in the morning. They were, to me, like pleasure-seeking hedonists with nothing to perform. It had an air of thoughtlessness, as though neither intimacy nor its discontents required explanation or analysis, as though they had never considered that it should. I’m surely over-simplifying my read of this, but it stood in such contrast to the hyper-articulated language of dating I encounter in the US, where questions like what are we usually make for long, winding conversations that rarely articulate the (indescribable?) freedom obliged by love and romance, in particular new love.
That piece from May 2022 explored the linguistic connotations around liking and loving, and the slipperiness of attempting to describe with words, highly subjective yet guised as specific, being in romantic relation with someone. Sartre writes a bit about the (in)utility of language in describing freedom in Being and Doing: Freedom, a section of his seminal Being and Nothingness. “The act is the expression of freedom,” he writes. And in spite of spending hundreds of pages trying to explain and understand this act, he also admits:
The problem indeed is to disengage the meanings implied by an act — by every act — and to proceed from there richer and more profound meanings until we encounter the meaning which does not imply any other meaning and which refers only to itself. (589)
What kind of comprehension becomes possible when we disengage interpretation from action, he asks. The language of romance and the fault line(s) it attempts to describe is/are slippery and unstable. Fascinatingly, the French translation of I like you is the same as I love you: Je t’aime. This linguistic indistinction makes me wonder: what would it mean to erase the semantic differentiation of liking/loving from romantic relationships? To instead be suspended in feeling without attempting to describe it using “specific” yet deeply subjective language? To have the obscurity of feeling codified into the obscurity of words available to describe it? (Also, is this distinction between like/love uniquely english? If anyone knows or has experience with relationships in other languages, please chime in!)
Sartre later asks, while analyzing the work of André Gide, “What difference is there…between a willed feeling an an experienced feeling? ‘To will to love’ and to love are one since to love is to choose oneself as loving by assuming consciousness of loving.” Put another way, the intention to love is a way of (or is, itself) loving, thereby the acts as expressions of love are love as well. (Love is an act, an expression of freedom, according to this reasoning.)
I will pivot now to some lines from Van Morrison’s Sweet Thing, which was the song to which my dear friend and her now-husband shared their first sunlit dance at their wedding a few days after I got back to the US this spring. The lyrics are:
And just to dig it all and not to wonder, that's just fine
And I'll be satisfied not to read in between the lines
These two lines seem to be describing the pleasure of love by virtue of itself, sans representation, sans inspection — the kind of love I encountered among my friends in France, maybe the kind of love-qua-freedom Sartre discusses. Morrison’s repetition of the word “just” along with the ambiguous “it all” mark the impossibility of articulating the love he sings about. This lack of clarity is part of the pleasure, part of what makes it (the love) sufficient, suffice. Morrison’s use of the word “just” functions similarly to adrienne maree brown’s reimagination of the word “enough,” where being/having is correlative with satiation and abundance, as opposed to negatively connoted as a bare minimum.
Morrison’s next line — I’ll be satisfied not to read in between the lines — does a few really interesting things. He is describing a love without questioning, but that’s not to say it is necessarily without questions. When we are in romantic relation with someone, we are given a choice. Someone says, “I like you” or “I’ll miss you” or “Can I cook you dinner?” We can wonder at these phrases, what do they mean, what are their intentions or significations. We can be consumed trying to make meanings of them. Or we can choose, quite simply, to take pleasure in being liked or missed or made dinner. Morrison doesn’t say he doesn’t need to read between the lines; he says he will be satisfied not to. The language of romance, as we’ve seen, is necessarily slippery. But Morrison’s expression of love disengages the meanings from the acts, not a signifying thing but rather a thing in and of and inspite of itself. (Love as an action as an expression of freedom).
While I was in France, I fell in love. But only after I spent weeks trying to read between the lines. A glass of wine on the porch, a long conversation about Agnes Varda, a loaned copy of Leaves of Grass with four song recommendations penned on the inside cover. We went to the beach together, along with a bunch of other people. I thumbed a seashell while we spoke. That night, it appeared on the dinner table. He told me he thought about my question and his favorite Bob Dylan song was Queen Jane, Approximately. He stumbled over the word approximately.
I never really stopped trying to read between the lines, until the day before the day I left, the last day we saw each other. I played Van Morrison’s Heart of Gold on the farm’s new piano, with a book of sheet music that had grown dusty on his shelf. We drove to the beach and listened to the Tupelo Honey album. He insisted on driving me to the train the next morning, and gave me three small gifts. We kissed in the vestibule of the bus until the bus driver said we had to go. His email scribbled on a piece of paper, slipped in my pocket. And then, finally, I think it occurred to that the whole time, while I had been trying to articulate what was going on, he was “dig[ging] it all,” not wondering or interrogating. Having words to describe a feeling can sometimes make the feeling more legible. But it can also create confines, invoke historicities and implications and connotations that take us out of the feeling and put us into describing the feeling.
Sartre continues to problematize his theorizations on love and freedom in the following section of the text, where he considers two alternate readings of love as a parallel to death:
“Nobody can love for me if we mean by that to make vows which are my vows, to experience the emotions (however commonplace they man be) which are my emotions… Thus from this point of view the most commonplace love is, like death, irreplaceable and unique; nobody can love for me.”
“On the other hand, if my acts in the world are considered from the point of view of their function, their efficacy, and their result, it is certain that the Other can always do what I do. If it is a question of making this woman happy, of safeguarding her life or her freedom, of giving her the means of finding her salvation, or simply of realizing a home with her, of “giving her” children, if that is what we call loving, then another will be able to love in my place, he will even be able to love for me… for to love is defined simply as ‘to make happy by the love which is borne to her.’” (Bold my own!) (Both excerpts from page 684)
In the first consideration, love is a deeply personal and irreproducible act, in spite of its also being a fairly universal human experience. It is not love as itself, but instead my love and my emotions — meaning when I die, for example, this will to and ability to and fashion of love(ing) dies with me. In contrast, Sartre considers another definition of love where love is a series of reproducible acts intentioned at making another person happy. If it is simply about the provision of these acts, love becomes transferrable. Perhaps one only has to be in love a minimum of twice to understand the distinct veracity of either consideration.
To be continued. :)