The strange commerce of love

"As she got older, she was discovering the strange commerce of love: Whatever she gave to others (affection, understanding, kindness) she got to keep for herself too. And whatever she withheld (all of the previous things plus peace of mind and communication), she actually ended up losing instead of keeping.

She wondered if love was the only transaction where such an inversion of the fundamentals was possible."

Philip John, 'Labyrinths'

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn/photos/a.1456617284574306/2039936179575744/?type=3&theater

If you wanted to be yourself all the time, get an aquarium full of fish

The Virtue of Discomfort

In the beginning of a relationship, she said, both people were happy to be a little uncomfortable. It was a voluntary suffering. She said the Latin root for the word passion was ‘passio’ which meant ‘to suffer’. It made sense, she said. You were so passionate about someone you were willing to make sacrifices. You watched a high brow film and ate salad afterward not because you liked it so much but because your partner liked it a lot and you wanted to see the world through their eyes and you knew they would do the same for you. So at this stage of your love, passion triumphed over authenticity and you didn’t mind it at all. The discomfort made you feel alive.

Then time passed and the desire to be uncomfortable for the other diminished. It was time for frankness, for complete ‘authenticity’. Society made you believe this was the ‘real’ stage of the relationship. Now it was a win-win, you could ‘settle down’ and build an honest, comfortable life together. But, she said, this is where her heart always sank. She hated comfort. And marriage, to her, was really a way of legitimizing comfort and indifference with the carrot of stability, of security.

So here’s the thing, she said. Once you had a relationship that was not so comfortable but very passionate. And now you had a relationship that was very comfortable but devoid of passion and curiosity. Which was better?

After a pause, she said she would choose passion, even if it meant a little discomfort. In other words, she wanted to suffer for her partner and she wanted her partner to want to suffer for her.

She wanted them both to give up a little of their ‘authenticity’ to change for the other. Otherwise what was the point of love?

If you wanted to be yourself all the time, get an aquarium full of fish, she said. Why be with a human being?

Being your true self all the time, being ‘authentic’ was for her not a virtue in relationships but a kind of selfishness.

Philip John, Labyrinths

 

Caring, an Act of Rebellion

We are Mad You are Sane

Do you know what I
Love most about you?
That you care.

That you care fanatically
About those things the rest of us
Have forgotten or sold our souls on.

In a world deadened
By cynicism, by laziness,
By emotional detachment
That passes off as wisdom,
Your kind of obsessive caring
Is an act of rebellion.

Don’t ever think
Or let anyone tell you
That you’re oversensitive.

I sometimes think you may be
The only sane one among us.;
Guarding your heart from
An epidemic of elasticity;
Elastic explanations.
Elastic ambitions.
Elastic morals.

So this is what I want to tell
You this morning:
We are easy-spirited
Because we have lost our way.

You are heavy-hearted
Because you are holding your ground.
We are mad.
You are sane.

Never change.

Philip John

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn/photos/a.1456617284574306.1073741827.1452843378285030/1810841775818520/?type=3&theater

I want madness and poetry

How easily you asked me

How easily
You asked me
If we could still be friends
After we broke up,
How easily.

That is when I knew
I was never your passion.
Passion finds it hard to
Descend into friendship.

You might read this and say,
What is wrong with friendship?
It is the purest kind of love.

I say I don’t want this kind of love,
I want another kind,
One where I can express myself
With other words
And sometimes, without them too.

I want madness and poetry,
Hunger and sin,
I want to be haunted
By you always,
Want my brain
To be the unsuspecting soil
To your freely
Invading roots.

Is this kind of friendship
Acceptable to you?
No. I figured.
Because how easily, how easily
You asked if we could stay friends.

Philip John

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn/photos/a.1456617284574306.1073741827.1452843378285030/1850889825147048/?type=3&theater

Conveyor Belt

Confession of a Feminist

I am a feminist, he said.
I believe in equality
Except when it comes
To falling in love.

In passion there can be no equality;
We fall in love not with equals
Who eat and drink and yawn like us

But with people bigger than us,
With angels and demons
Who yank us out
Of our endless conveyor belts.

Philip John

From here.

Goodbye

​One of those things no one warns you about

On my bookshelf I spot a book
That I was supposed to give you,
Many months ago.

Then we broke up before
I could give you the book.

Now the book is a spirit in limbo.
Keeping it on my shelf
Would be sentimental.
But giving it away would be
Another goodbye.

This is one of those things
No one warns you about
The end of love.
One says goodbye not once
But several times.

Philip John, https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn/?fref=ts

Vision

No Promised Destination

She asked him if he was a man of vision,
And he said no, not in the traditional sense.
He didn’t have visions of changing the world.

Instead, his visions were far smaller:

He liked to get up in the morning and look
At his lover sleeping beside him,
Her face in perfect repose,
Her hair scattered like sea weed.

He liked to watch tea powder swirling
In boiling milk; it evoked distant galaxies.

He liked to work through the day
At something he liked, in the knowledge
He had a book waiting for him back home.

He dreamed of quiet contemplation,
And of quiet, hungry love.

These are my visions, he said.
I used to wonder if I needed
To think bigger but lately
I have come to love ordinary life.

No promised destination seems necessary
For the person who finds the infinite
In a cup of tea,
In the breast of a lover,
In a passage in a book.

Philip John

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn/?fref=nf

Peace

From here: https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn

Rush

Wordless Love Note

Once when you two were leaving a party, you stood behind her as you both waited for the elevator. You were still only getting to know each other. Suddenly her hand came around behind her back. You wondered what she was up to. Then you realized she was trying to locate your hand. Her forefinger found your thumb and pulled.

And it felt like blood from every corner of your body had rushed to your thumb to receive her magnet finger.

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn

For Myra, whenever I find her

In the room above the cafe on 53rd street, in the spring of '72, was the first time I felt the tug of what I call the thread of you. We shook hands after our meeting and your thread entered my finger tip. Now your thread runs through my jog in Central Park. It gets entangled in my fork when I have dinner. And it is stitched into the dream that pulls me out of sleep at 4 a.m.

I have spent hours reconstructing your personality, like a coroner who tries to determine the time and cause of a fatality. For instance, I know that you prefer to listen rather than to express yourself. You've probably been that way ever since you discovered the complex and sensitive streets in your mind, streets that you are still reluctant to open out to others. I know that you are at home with abstract truths, the way some women are at home with watering the plants or making pancakes.

I know that when you speak to people, you see their emotions like how one can see bio-luminescent fish through water. But you are also easily hurt and that is why you prefer to silently withdraw, rather than to make demands. I know that you like plans and lists, any semblance of order to calm the hopes and fears that run through you like water under the Brooklyn Bridge.

I also know that if I told you all this, you’d invoke the unwavering core of your reason and tell me that there is no basis for these indiscriminate emotions, no space for them in our lives; we both have ties that bind us. I will not disagree with your reasoning; I am a man of reason myself. That is why I find it hard to work my reason when I see your face in a cup of tea, in the dew that forms on the top of my car at 6 a.m. and in the mirrors of the Waldorf Astoria that I pass every morning on my way to work.

You have entered my mind. But your own mind is miles away; all I have to enter it, is language. And the hope that this language will tunnel into your unconscious where it will lie dormant, like forgotten but vital memories.

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn

The Nothing Man

In 2014, Mr. Samuel is overcome by a strong desire to read Lolita. But Mr. Samuel is accustomed to these strange and sudden whims. And so he decides to wait it out. A few days later, as he predicted, his need to read Lolita is not as strong as it was and Mr. Samuel finds it easier to move on. He pats himself on the back for his ability to triumph over a ‘temporary mindset.’

Then in 2015, Mr. Samuel feels a strong urge to own an SUV. It is quite possibly the finest car a man can drive! But again, Mr. Samuel reins in his ‘unnecessary indulgence’ and by the end of the month, gets over his desire. He congratulates himself and he realizes that he may be on the path to nirvana, the state of wanting nothing, and this idea appeals to him very strongly. Why, of course, it is the logical end to everything! The panacea for the worlds of disquiet within him!

And so, Mr. Samuel starts to train his mind to detach itself from all desire, to achieve a state of contented ‘nothing’. He relinquishes sex, meat, alcohol, gambling, gadgets and even masturbation. Initially, Mr. Samuel experiences mind-numbing withdrawal symptoms, like a drug addict whose secret stash has been hidden from him.

But over time, Mr. Samuel’s resolve strengthens and by 2022 he manages to rid himself of all desire. Mr. Samuel becomes famous in his neighborhood as the man who renounced materials in exchange for peaceful contemplation. People come to pay homage to this powerful bastion of anti-materialism who sits sanguinely in his rundown sofa in his rundown home.

But something has started to bother Mr. Samuel. In trying to achieve a state of nothing, is he trying to achieve something again after all?

Philip John

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn