Because I'm in email contact with a couple of friends struggling with lost love or loneliness I thought I'd return to the thread and continue my discussion of romance.
Last night I watched Jennifer Byrne presents Love along with Panellists: Andrew Goldsmith, Posie Graeme Evan, Mark Colvin and Toby Scmitz who agreed that book lovers will tell you that love on the page can feel as powerful as the real thing. If this is so then romance has as much to do with imagination than anything else. As far as I can determine romance is not necessarily about sex, as one might assume but actually about unrequited love, distance, simultaneous pleasure and pain, longing, deferring the sexual act or even not about sex at all. It was even suggested at one stage that perhaps we desire the pain, the intensity of feeling that romance arouses. Lovers are invariably absent when you desire their presence and it's this yearning that fuels desire.
I wrote to one of my friends last week that longing, which I call romance, seems to me to be something that cannot really be defined, but is bound up in some magical moment. Maybe we desire the desire, or the feeling of longing more than the actual event, since the event in itself cannot really satisfy the human desire to want? In other words if IT can 't be satiated then we probably get more satisfaction with the intensity of the feelings, which are prolonged, rather than in the sexual act, which is often fleeting. This idea appears to be supported by what the panellists said last night. My conclusion thus far is that desire and romance is borne out of the fact that we want to experience heightened feelings, depths of loneliness, exquisite pain - any emotion that takes us away from ordinary life, which may be flat in comparison to the myriad of complex feelings associated with romance and love. Reading a book about love is one way of 'experiencing' romance without actually having to engage with another - many of us have been through love affairs and been scarred by the experience; our mind riddled with a blunted affect that in turn produces a decrease in feelings and enjoyment for everyday life.
Since romance is not easy to find (but sex generally is) many turn to the safe space of a book in order to be carried away into the realm of romance. I must admit to having never done this and can't imagine romance on the page could be anything like real life. However, having said that, I do admit to becoming thoroughly involved in an ongoing exchange of email messages during 2009, but that was because I knew the source of the romantic texts was a flesh and blood person.
One of the female panelists said that there was nothing more intimate than being alone by yourself reading a book. I call that intimacy with oneself and romance feeds that intimacy. It appears that romance is less about the other and more about self feeling and self interest. No, I can hear you saying, it's about the other. Sure, the love interest is the source of the romance, the magician who appears to have conjured up these feelings from the depth of your soul and when that romance (often combined with sexual activity) continues, even with it's rising waves and eventual crashes there's an easiness that is not encountered when the closeness is disrupted. Long after the relationship is over people hold onto the thought of the love interest, because they were the catalyst to romance. But I imagine the person who has lost love is playing out all kinds of scenarios in their mind to resurrect the intensity of feeling they achieved with their lover and there's some rarefied emotions and delightful pain involved that becomes as addictive and desired as the real romance.
I'm a true believer in the notion that we need to be seduced and we wish to be seducers. Seduction and romance should not be perceived as negative, there need be no-one spirited away that does not want to give themselves over to the act of seduction. Maybe romance or the feeling of romance, with its twists and turns is a way of surrendering to seduction of self and other?
A friend sent me this link this morning:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=32
I've just finished reading it, It's beautifully written, with much pathos for the female child (her client) who has discovered way too early the disintegration of self in death, since she considers herself refuse (disposable, unwanted) after being deserted by her parents. Her strategy, to eat of garbage and spit it out, to know what it is like to be devoured and then spewed out like vomit is the tragedy of wanting to be, but knowing she is not loved. I'd like to hear other readers interpretation of this piece of writing. I can hear the female analysand's projection of her own insecurities as female, as object, as other.