The world's excuse for being ugly, a dog from hell, a disease: Friday, Feb 17

Today's miscellany is about love ❤️

Dear Gentle Reader,

that day of commercialized displays of conventional love may have passed—I hope that whatever you were doing, whatever it means to you, whatever your situation in life, that your heart was held gently. As fellow readers, we’ll hold each other’s hearts tenderly here. Fortunately, the love of fiction burns brightly every day of the year.

At Clay and Paper Theatre’s annual late October neighbourhood festival, Night of Dread, in central-west Toronto, we collectively burn all the fears we can think of—everything from spiders to nuclear war—on a bonfire. Pictured here, the fiery destruction of not only Stage Fright but also of the Fear of Sudden Unexplained Endings, the Fear of Dependence on the System, and the common but tragic Fear of Love (perhaps allied, come to think of it, with one or all of those other fears!).

A quick recap as we’re adding new Gentle Readers every day (in fact, we’ve doubled from this time last week. Perhaps readers reproduce by binary—or library—fission): On Friday mornings, friends, I send you this miscellany of literary, artsy, and wonder-of-nature goodies to stimulate imaginative thinking (majority voted to keep it to Friday; we’ll revisit this in time as it’s a lot of weekend reading I still think could be better spaced-out). On Sundays, I hope you can stay in bed or at worst just crawl out pathetically in your pyjamas to make some coffee, then settle in for a good read focused on fiction and living more lives. But please read just what you have time & inclination for: this is about pleasure, not homework.

By GPA666 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63961552

On communication: you can get in touch with me directly at carly_z@hotmail.com or via Twitter DM (@CarlynZwaren), especially if you have suggestions or wishes for how I might help you LIVE MORE LIVES through fiction. There is also a comments section at the bottom of each post. But but but… Substack has just unveiled a new chat function that allows for more interactive discussion, which can take place casually between newsletters. For this to work, you will have to download the Substack App onto your phone or tablet. So…

I’ll take this into consideration and set this up if enough people are interested. Now, a miscellany on certain good, bad, and maddening aspects of love:

• In honour of Valentine’s Day, a definition from the brilliant neologist John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows¹:

  gnossienne

  n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

  And here lies the trouble and the glory of human relationships (such a motor of novels and real life alike). The most successful practitioners of love—as a verb, an action, a conscious choice—seem to be those who find the existence of this private and mysterious inner life wonderful and magnetic rather than maddening and upsetting, those who are not alienated by their personal gnossienne. In theory I’m one of them, in practice… unfortunately not.

• I promised to tell you about the Valentine’s Fairy. Here, exhibited for the first time, is carefully conserved archival material, around forty years old, attesting to the existence of this supernatural being, who continues to quietly spread non-romantic love to new beloveds to this very day (actually to that very day, meaning this past Tuesday).

• There’s a fine line between icky, pre-digested sentiment and the genuinely sweet, of course. I hate Hallmark romance but ❤️❤️❤️ all that is romantic and especially (and occasionally overlapping with it), all that is Romantic². One way to practice true romance might be to avoid the official day, and the suggested form of expression— factory roses (described in this excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses)—and the object of affection—the cishet lover. Instead, we might lavish sweet, small, thoughtful, non-commercial expressions of love and of care on any beloved person or persons on a day of your choice, or of personal significance. Most important is that it be done quietly, never appearing (as these did not, until this fateful day) on social media. Love that absolutely dares to speak its name, but that doesn’t need a third party, an admiring corporation, friend group or network, to approve it.

• A highly Live More Lives-approved way of showing love is to cheerfully quote unforgettable and usually silly poetry at the unfortunate object of your affections (works best with your children but give anyone a try) until it is tattooed on their brains despite their best attempts not to learn it by heart. Such as,

Moses supposes his toeses are roses
but Moses supposes erroneously
for nobody’s toeses are posies of roses
as Moses supposes his toeses to be.

(Ta-da! My first, slightly faltering attempt to add audio to what I hope will keep stirring your senses in as many ways as I can. This is the version of this poemlet I was taught as a wee nipper and which I have inflicted on the next generation; a variation appeared in Singing in the Rain). You need more examples, maybe?

Illustration by Henry Raleigh to a short story by Mary Rinehart Roberts. Original caption: Caption: They were covered with scratches from the rose thorns of the night before, and one toe had been badly cut by glass. By Henry Raleigh - https://archive.org/details/sim_colliers-the-national-weekly_1912-03-09_48_25, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128005331

Trudging through icy sludge to the daycare:

“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail.
“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail³.

Discussing anything where one party says “do you think I should risk it?”:

There was a young man from Bengal
Who went to a fancy dress ball
He decided to risk it and went as a biscuit
And the dog ate him up in the hall.⁴

For no apparent reason:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table⁵.

If there are any ice floes left by then, I guess my retirement plan involves being shipped off to one by my adoring children.

Undying love. Photo by Carlyn Zwarenstein.

But when we’re talking about love, a practice strong enough to transcend time, distance and death, irreverence keeps things real. In fact, too reverent a relationship to one’s object of affection—whether parent, lover or beloved child—and you actually objectify them, their autonomy forgotten as they are made to serve as a widget in your personal life story factory.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres —Raphael and the Fornarina [from the Winthrop Collection of the Fogg Art Museum]. https://en.600dpi.net/jean-auguste-dominique-ingres-0003923/

• Love is a disease (Ivan Turgenev), love is the world’s excuse for being ugly (Leonard Cohen), love is a dog from Hell (Charles Bukowski). You may notice that these three lovers are all men. Mother Teresa thought that love was a fruit, FWIW. Ah here we go—Canadian poet Lorna Crozier compares falling in love to a horse bite:

  Once the pain starts
  you know it has to
  get worse before
  it stops.

  Definitely seek out Crozier’s work if you haven’t encountered it before.

• And on that note, I wish you a very happy belated Valentine’s Day. Spread a little silly love around, since no one’s expecting it by now.

  Till Sunday, friends,
  

  Carlyn

Good advice from a wall of messages written by clients and staff of an Overdose Prevention Site (supervised drug use site) in Toronto. Photo and linked article by Carlyn Zwarenstein

1. Although I very much intend to get hold of Koenig’s book as soon as I possibly can, this coinage is grabbed from the associated website.

2. My first book, though ostensibly about opioid painkillers and pain, is actually largely about Romantic-era literature and about the Romantic spirit, because that’s what I really wanted to write about. That book is out of print but luckily the entire slim text constitutes part I of my 2021 monster, On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance, which you’ll find at the library, or in other places, if you can use a little capital arrrgh Romance.

3. From Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Mock Turtle’s Song’.

4. Origin unknown. There are many versions of this limerick.

5. T.S. Eliot, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.