Below find my essay,  The Mystery of Human Connection, pt. I: love. I hope you read.

Here is a folk ballad/snack review of Cinnamon Bun Oreos.

Here is a  travelogue of my recent trip to Belgium BRUSSELSGIUM: a croissant a day keeps the joy in play that is appearing on OhioEdit.

THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN CONNECTION, PT I: love

By day, I am a mild-mannered snack reviewer, parsing through what some might say are the dubious marvels of caffeinated almonds, chicken pot pie soup, and Cinnamon Bun Oreos. But, by night, and, OK, possibly by day too, in the non-snack and/or non-reptilian part of my brain I might secretly considering things like …the MYSTERY OF HUMAN CONNECTION, PT I: love.

Let’s not bury the headline: I y’ain’t cracked it yet. I will not be pulling a Hercule Poirot here, gathering you together in an interesting room, laying out the clues, faking you out a few times for dramatic effect, only for the big reveal at the end.

At another point in my life I mightn’t have wanted to bother with such a hopelessly vague? floppy? uncooperative? grandiose? topic like THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN CONNECTION. Trying to nudge thoughts (squeaka squeaka squeaka goes the hamster wheel in the brain) into actual sentences would have felt like it was going to take me farther away rather than closer to any sort of understanding. You know that apple in Eden? You ask me, that darned fruit is the siren lure of making sense out of things for the sake of the human psyche’s cohesion, a psyche clearly not equipped for reality, poor funny old thing. And I can be as tempted as anyone.

Now it seems like procrastination to put it off. Maybe it’s the state of the U!S!A!, edging closer to 50 (this mortality business is just not as hypothetical as it once was…), having a health crisis or two, and one of those unexpected life-altering events…add it up and I suppose I was due in for some pondercation. That, at least, is no mystery. I’m only glad so far these circumstances have manifested in dubious rewards of essay-writing rather than moving to an addlepating ashram in Northern California or Duluth or Monrovia or something. But will I be talking about your life experience, dear reader? Going full-on universal? I’ve no idea. I do know I am reinventing the wheel (haven’t big guns tackled this one—bell hooks? Voltaire?). But. F%*# it. I’ll take my shot.

If we’re going to work with the classical love-hate continuum (why not, my binary bebes), I’m going to start with love. I don’t think love any less fraught or complicated than hate it’s just…the thistly, thorny mess that is hatred might actually bring me to implode under the weight of my number of qualifications. I may lean on examples of romantic love here as they are so wonderfully illustrative, but I do mean the whole kitandcaboodle: friendships, work co-conspiratorships, artistic partnerships, neighborsships. BTW, if anyone wants to turn this into a pop song PLEASE DO SO IMMEDIATELY.

I occasionally like to ask if I think someone might be remotely receptive, “what is the nature of love?” as I, for one, never quite felt like we’re all talking about the same thing. This seems to be a question people generally seem to find alarming, annoying, or touching.

At most points in my life I’d have defined the nature of love in terms of a) how willing you were to take a bullet for someone b) and/or, more specifically, what size: 22? .48? shotgun? Now that strikes me as a not unreasonable but limiting definition (and possibly Christ-i-er than I might self-identify). I’ve also come to think that people who have not nor will ever take a bullet for you and, in fact, might do things like sleep with your wife or sell you out to the Nazis, can actually love you, sometimes a lot. What a mess.

There’s also that semper fi shite, and not a bad litmus test either. And in a funny way, perhaps one of best gifts life has on offer—to be able to help a beloved—when it works. The trick is when the party that one is attempting to drag out of the foxhole (or vice versa, of course) refuses to and/or is unable to cooperate. Addiction is a perfect example, where at some point one may realize attempts at assistance have become acts of self-immolation. That is terrible. And hell on love.

There was a couple I used to see occasionally, and when I did, I was struck by the thought, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen two people so in love.” That might not be empirically accurate. When you’ve read way, way, way too many novels, I think you start stuffing observations into semi-pronouncements like these. They did seem wreathed in golden light, though—that giddy, sensual, carbonated-by-joy love—that can give you a contact high. A year or so later I heard they’d broken up. I didn’t want to be a nosy parker, stabbing around (is there anything worse than being on the receiving end of prurient curiosity besides, maybe, fascism) with questions to attempt to solve my Tristan and Isolde (or in this case an Isolde and Isolde) geometry problem. But, oh, if I coulda, I woulda: where do you think that connection is between you now? What did it feel like? Did it metamorphose into friendship, die in a car crash, live out its life to get buried with full honors, or just dematerialize? Will you be looking for it the rest of your life?

Maybe such questions have to do with a dawning obsession with waste. Love gets as squandered as time, money, or labor. Like money, hindsight is often the only guide. My Depression-era grandma tendencies, where even an empty oatmeal container seems to require consideration before disposing, get riled up at this transitoriness. This disappearance of love…it’s so wasteful…can’t we even recycle it? Sam Mockbee it? I, at least, would like some of mine back. Some of it was the best stuff I got. The GtotheT ecosystem could use it.

I once asked a therapist if he thought having someone fall in love with you is like an act of absolution. After a long moment where I assume he was deciding whether or not to answer (bless all the incalculable helpfulness he had in my life, he was Socratic as hell), as well as considering his answer, he said, carefully, “yes.” But what is getting absolved exactly? Your humanity, your messy/icky/problematic corporeal and spiritual being, I suppose.

When people ask things like “have I loved well?” I assume they mean some version of “did my love land successfully?” As they said in every bleedin’ fiction workshop I attended—did you show—or did you tell? In the show/tell Venn Diagram, there’s showing, telling, showing as telling, and telling as showing. All combinations can make one feel equa-vulnerable when trying to make headway towards expressing the feelings. Sitting at a stoplight many revolutions of our earth ago, I pointed out a windshield and said to a friend something like, “look at that star, if you ever feel alone or scared just know I’m like that star, I’m here for you.” I was weirdly unembarrassed to say it then and even now in the retelling. Go figure. I’ve also told people I was in love with them (sober as a judge! in daylight! face-to-face!), a bold, ridiculous move, something that is seriously embarrassing to think of and I have no desire to relive or recount, but I also find myself mysteriously unable to regret. So that’s an argument for telling and in sense the act of telling was showing. That’s also when I did express things rather than have my feelings kinda squirreled up in the attic eaves of my heart. Regrets (or the lack thereof) can be very instructive.

I have wondered in wheat-from-chaff (killjoy?) manner: what’s the tipping point when what we call love heads over to compulsion or pathology? Say you were having an affair, and your secret inamorata killed off your entire family so you could be together. One might not be confident love was the motivator at work. There are a fair number of acts in life that negate the very thing they are acting upon, so confusing. I’ve noticed in mysteries how de rigeur it is to get knocked off on the strength of the ungovernable power of romantic and/or filial love. And in life, while far less murder-y*, than entertainment, the sensations of murder can metaphorically ring true (see: pain of betrayal). BTW, beware, those of you trying to improve a congenitally jaundiced view of human relationships, Agatha Christie may not help, as the stories are endless cautionary tales around intimacy (it’s always someone you know).

If you have ever been in the grips of a hopeless passion, you might have wondered, as you are experiencing that sensation of throwing yourself down a flight of stairs over and over again, “Wait, hang on, is this love? Or is it ye olde wounded psyche givin’ me a push?” Often times, with that familiar lack of neatness, it’s both.

Vertigo isn’t my favorite Hitchcock but holds, to my cosmological tastes, some essential, necessary truth. We watch Scotty, the main character, wandering around in a trauma-induced stupor seeking a simulacrum of a lost beloved. Once he finds her, he latches on in a triste if creepy tick-like fashion (aside: Kim Novak’s eyebrows!). Everyone does this to varying degrees, with equally varying degrees of what I’ll call healthiness, in the replication of a happy childhood (lost to sands of time) to something difficult to the quite grim (insert numerous examples of tragic loss here). This search, as in Vertigo, can have a strange impersonal quality for all the intensity behind it, for once the love substitute is found it gets tricky. “No, no, no,” indicates the lover to their object d’amour, “shhh, shhh, don’t move, don’t talk too much—you’ll ruin my illusion.” This makes a love that is much more about what the seeker needs than the object might need, want, or be. Then you are starting towards diminishing returns, into something else besides love.

On the other hand, self-sacrifice, or at the very least, a willingness to table self-interest, is a hallmark of many people’s definition of love. Moving to a city one dislikes to be with a lover. A father’s singular devotion to a daughter with cerebral palsy. Coughing up a kidney for a friend in need of a transplant. Then we scooch down a few seats on the bench to altruism, a more diffuse, generalized version. You knew we’d get here sometime, right? A social worker negotiating the soul-grinding logistics of finding assistance for the incarcerated. An advocate for child-prostitutes facing hideous realities. A nun administering to AIDS patients abandoned by their families. Such generosity makes one feel weepy and maybe like one doesn’t revile the human race quite as much as one thought.

So it feels like heresy, and churlish, nit-picky, pedantic heresy at that, to head further down the particular road of questioning I shall heedlessly embark on here. That is: I’ve also observed that altruism can also be a way people are just most comfortable functioning in the world. Which is chalkable-upable to usual cocktail of nature (brain chemistry as relates) and nurture (religion, socialization, gender, etc.). So let’s take inventory. We’ve got: fundamental decency. A desire to alleviate suffering. An urge to help others when one couldn’t help someone at another time (see: semper fi shite). There’s a need to be seen as a good person and/or an attempt to redemption (perfectly reasonable). There’s not wanting to examine too closely one’s own life by way of throwing oneself into other’s (again, perfectly reasonable). Or that darned find-meaning business. My thinking in examining this (in both myself and others, although I should say I’m less altruistically inclined than many I know) is less to gleefully expose some “bogusness” of good intentions, than a desire to correctly diagnose when people are moved into service of humanity by a higher percentage of altruistic love than personality or, for a lack of a better word, ulterior motivations. I seriously cannot tell. You might need to know someone really well to be able to discern that one. Or one of those world-weary sorts who has been working in a non-profit for a very, very long time and develop a sense for these things.

But to my mind altruistic love can also go a little like this: the pang you get hearing the wife of the guy who sells you your scratch ticket has been sick. A hope your mail carrier that has developed a bad hunch gets a back massage now and then. Or, after a trip to Bangalore (or Palermo or Asmara or Tallinn), where people were so generous feeding and housing you, and patient and understanding with your cultural gaffes and poor language skills, that you feel warmly towards any person from Bangalore (etc.), even if one of those someones was sort of a dick making a pass at your cousin at her husband’s funeral, and you stoutly defend the inhabitants of this land against the wild generalizations your relations are making. I’d also like to include the universality of love I have for all the somber toddlers staring out in a lordly fashion from their strollers with their binkies.

I’m beginning to think this might be the best stuff on offer, this mild benignity, maybe even what could be called a manifestation of the social contract. Love has more star qualities, but this impersonal form of…appreciation(?), maybe is preferable and leads to better things, as long as it doesn’t become self-deluded…you know, bad-boundary 60’s tyrannical anything-but-peace-love-speak-is-unenlighted crap. Oof, that was harsh. And not entirely fair. Not entirely unfair, either. Another conversation, another day. P.S. love for humanity seems as much unrequited as anything else. It huwts!

Have you ever had the sensation of trying to echolocate affection or love or even, heckfire, feeling for a person like a college roommate, a co-worker who made long hours of commute bearable, the distant cousins you stayed with in L.A. for that glorious summer? And come up with nothing? “Good gravy, maybe I am a sociopath,” you might think. Well, maybe you are. I don’t think I am, at least. It’s not like I would stand coldly by while they drowned or something, but, geez, where is that warmth? This is especially puzzling when you’ve retained an abiding fondness for some other minor character in your life. How much of it is situational, a moment in time? Why can’t I stop ending paragraphs with questions?

Paddling around in these labor-intensive descriptions, a.k.a. clues, about THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN CONNECTION has generated my own conclusions, if nothing resembling a solution: our hopes and expectations are way too high. Look at us. Die is cast, rolled, bowled, boiled, and cooked. One sees the good, the OK, and a nice heapin’ helpin’ of the please-god-I-don’t-want-to-believe-we’re-capable-of. Love? Jesus. Forget love. Let’s start with not murdering each other either in body, mind, or spirit as much as we can possibly manage. Everything after that is gravy.

I have at times taken some deranged comfort in how we seem to have to dehumanize groups of people to be able to live with what we do to them. The logic behind this cryogenic-cold comfort is why else would we have to dehumanize each other if we didn’t have a baseline understanding that those we murder, enslave, incarcerate, torture, and/or bomb to bits are human. And, a recognition that besides not wanting to live in a continuous state of crushing terror and loss, those others would like to function, learn, find love, get good at something, pursue hobbies, and have regular access to their favorite sandwich. I go back and forth on which is actually worse: that we can pull off such denial at all or what happens as a result. Inhumanity vs. Inhumanity on the docket, again.

However, before I get too lost in the weeds, I should say as a micro rather than macro gal I’m really more interested in connection in an immediate sense how relationships are forged (or not) with the people that one bumps into in life. There’s plenty of ways of describing this, with your whattayacallit metaphors, analogies and allegories, from forests to cooking to sex to long distance running to interior decoration. I find them instructive. I like them. I want them. I need them. I will amend, (this point I first heard from Joseph Campbell), when metaphors are taken as facts (such as literal interpretations of Bible), I get ancy (or depressed), but when the metaphor gets mined for facts, I get wary (and grumpy).

Which means I will not start rummaging around looking for apropos quotes from astronomers, as writers sometimes do in conclusive paragraphs about human emotions. While I wholeheartedly say yes, please, have at it, explore space, time, see what’s out there, I also say don’t try to dodge this bullet with space talk. You know, those uncanny parallels of uber-infinities, quantum atoms, and planets who just can’t seem to get their shit together to our struggles. These quotes often have some nice mystical-sounding (or OK, occasionally an actual) parallel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I kinda hate that—I get surly about the stupidest things, I swear—but some part of me wants to say, hey, suck it up. You’re stuck on earth, buddy. The problems of mass emotional illiteracy start at home. Deal with it. Tough love. Ah, what a mass of prejudices I am.

If I could be totally unreasonable for a moment, may I say more illustrative to me would be the following: that on your deathbed you could be slipped an envelope with the names of people in the course of your life who dug you—I mean really dug you—not when you were trying to be hawt or interesting, but in an essential way. Wouldn’t that be fascinating? Does it sound like a rom-com premise? Or egoism holding depressingly fast even as death looms? It doesn’t feel like it when I say it. It’s more of a window to answering some fundamental questions about your life. Just what the hell was going on, anyway? What mattered? Where was I? What happened? Who noticed I was here?

But of course there’s no envelope. There’s what people have expressed to you, sure, and some gut instincts and some guesses, and that’s about it. We know this: love grows and dies. Love works insidiously. Or clobbers. It can abide. Love is a misery, a treasure, a triumph, a way out, the only reason to go on, and the biggest pain in the ass conceivable.

And a mystery. Some mysteries you may privately hope remain so (“whatever did happen to Ambrose Bierce?” you might enjoy speculating in a rhetorical fashion), but this, my friends, for me, isn’t one of them. Whatever experience, wisdom, and insight, I may or may not bring (eh I’d say I’m about average) to the question, I’m out of my league. Everyone is. That’s something to remember. Everyone everywhere has something to contribute to the conversation. I cannot emphasize that enough. But nobody knows. If they say they do, you might want to check your wallet.

Plunging into such messes as THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN CONNECTION could have turned into a total drag pretty quickly, but to my surprise I’m not trying to find excuses to dump it. As maddening and difficult as I’ve found trying to discuss this with anything approaching clarity, and as occasionally pointless the exercise has felt (who asked me anyway?), it hasn’t been a waste of time. That’s pretty much the greatest praise I have now. And that’s something.

Thank you for reading.

Love,

Gilmore

* if you are lucky enough to live somewhere without regular gun violence, etc.