choose love?
as if you have a choice...
It’s been two hours we’ve been sat together,
and for two of those hours,
All she has spoken about
Is her dog.
That’s the thing with addicts.
They all act the same.
When I started looking into love as a lever on identity I ended up finding people who used it to benefit themselves.
Maybe that’s what I was looking for.
But I’ll never forget Steve.
Steve taught me that sometimes what we fall in love with is something that fixes something in ourselves. Some side of ourselves we can’t access without it.
A perspective.
A feeling.
Steve was a heroin addict.
I always felt like he and I were closer than he realised.
Maybe that’s why we were friends.
I met him in London Fields.
Every day I’d go to the park in my ski suit and draw the trees.
I don’t like drawing people,
for me it’s too intimate.
Buildings and trees I like.
Especially in that park.
There’s a tree there I really like.
I loved going out everyday and drawing it.
Steve would come every few days.
He had same game every day,
same routine.
Different clothes.
I remember seeing him walk through the park with one shoe on.
He ran over to say hi then ran off.
normally I’d walk with him to the shop and buy him a can of Nurishment,
he liked banana.
I agree, it’s the best flavour.
There’s only two types of people I see drinking those things
(Three if you include me)
bodybuilders and heroin users,
both addicts in they’re own way.
I still remember the metallic taste.
As tough as his world was, he managed to have some fun.
Always on some interesting hustle.
Something found, something pilfered.
All in the name of the game.
Steve had the added benefit that he was lovable.
Charismatic,
Funny.
Like all relationships, you don’t really know anything about them, until one day you suddenly do. I remember that day with Steve.
“You know Russ”
“The kid needs feeding”
”and the girl, she’s always nagging at me”
“She needs me to do things”
“They all need me to do something”
”and I don’t know how to do them”
“I can feel I have this thing inside me”
“And I want to let it go”
“But I don’t know how”
“I didn’t learn that growing up”
”I didn’t learn any of that stuff”
“I know I need to, I just can’t”
He was talking about crying.
He didn’t know how to cry.
I always regret that moment.
I thought he needed stuff from the store.
Not a way to get something out.
And in that little moment of time
I didn’t figure out how to show him.
That was the last time I saw Steve.
A few days later one of his friends found me in the park. He’d been killed. Beaten up and left for dead.
Everyone knew what had happened.
The police knew, but nothing was going to be done.
Steve had a lot of love in him.
But as much as everyone loved Steve,
Steve loved heroin.
It gave him something nothing else could.
And took whatever it wanted in return.
Who started it?
I don’t know much about love and I don’t trust anyone that says they do. But what I do know is that it’s addictive, and it changes who I am when I’m in it.
I’ve loved a lot of things. And every time I’ve realised I’m in love, I know that what I’m about to see is some part of me change. And I won’t know what that is until it ends.
But why do I love the things I do? Why have I loved the things I’ve loved? What was it I wanted from them, and how did I learn to get it?
Humans love to prize novelty. But we’re mimetic by design. Derivative to our core. We think we’re branching off into something new, something unique, our own interpretation of the ones who came before us. But we’re not. We’re just finding the middle ground in the spaces they left behind.
René Girard coined the term mimetic desire in the 60’s. We want what we want because we saw someone else want it first. A chain of desire, running back and back, all the way up to the present day. Imagine the child and the toy. Largely uninterested, until another child holds it in their hand. The wanting isn’t in the toy, it’s in the other child’s hand.
I’m fortunate to have some very ambitious people around me. Sometimes, I wish I had their ambition. Their desire to ‘get’ somewhere. I can see it, these nice places. I have it sometimes. But I’ve realised they’re only ever things I’ve seen someone else have or do. And isn’t that just me saying I wish I was more like them, than I am me? Some deep admission that I am not enough? Maybe that’s at the root of desire. The agreement that we’re all sort of incomplete.
Slavoj Žižek extends the idea toward the media environment we’re brought up in. In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema he presents the idea that films aren’t made to tell stories or ask questions. They’re built to teach us how to want. They teach us what longing looks like, what desire should be, how a person in love should behave.
Just like the printing press let a layer of the world be guided through a given lens, film does it with the extra juice of industrialisation. They educate us on how to experience and interpret, connecting neural pathways through sound and vision in a way that real life cannot. When you look at the roots of cinema and film, I feel comfortable agreeing. But how much of the world I’m experiencing is guided by the films I’ve watched? How much of my world has been tinted by film in a way I’ll never be able to interpret? Am I just trying to live out a life inspired by some falsehood? And how deep does that go? I know I feel what I feel. But even that appears to be malleable. And if the feelings are not me, then where do I begin?
Control
I think we all forget that when we close our eyes and feel the feelings we have, even that isn’t really us. The world, and what it’s taught us, has taught us to be a certain way and to love a certain way. And the reality is we don’t have much choice over that. That is until we stop doing it. Until we take control of what it is we love.
But how much power do we have to control what we love? How much power did Steve have, to take control of his world at that point?
Whenever I spoke to him, I realised he didn’t want to be in the situation he was in. But what was also clear is that it’s a hard battle, and not many people make it out. When I think about Steve, all I think is that he didn’t get the tools he needed. He knew that. It was clear from our conversations. With all the desire in the world, he couldn’t get out of it. And by the time he’d learned the tool he needed to not go backwards, in this case heroin, it began to own him. What he reached out to and fell in love with became his downfall.
And that’s the risk we take with love.
That’s the risk we take with all of our decisions.
Gluey
When we love something, we don’t stay separate. We become it. We’re as much the thing we love as we are ourselves. And that continues until our identities are one and the same. You can see when someone’s in love because they define themselves by it. A mother with her kids. A heroin addict with the needle. You know when someone’s in love because they wear it like skin.
You don’t get to choose what or who you fall in love with. We’re just lumps of sentient meat bouncing around the planet until something connects to us in a way that shows us some side of ourselves that has been buried in the dark.
Whenever we’re in it, we want to devour it. Consume it. Be so enmeshed with the thing we love that to separate ourselves from it would tear us into the ground. I’m willing to mould myself into whatever it takes to have more of it. To stay in that tension just so it doesn’t let me go. Because this is the feeling we want. And we never wanted to change.
“My love wants to incorporate her totally, to eat her. My love is selfish.”
- Susan Sontag
Maybe it’s that. All of it is just us wanting to be something we’ve seen before. Some other state of being we don’t believe we’re capable of alone. Something that isn’t us. And maybe it isn’t real, and we’ve been taught it. But I don’t believe that’s all it is. And that doesn’t mean I’m right. I might be wrong, but that’s my choice. And just like every addict, I’ll be happily wrong. Because these are the tools I’ve got, And I’ll keep using them until one of us stops working.
Because I still don’t know what love is. But I do know that it’s powerful. And from what I can tell, there isn’t a better tool in the world for doing what I love.
love you loads
r x