Be a good lover
Dispatch #40: "There is no love worth its name that isn't plural, porous."
Hi friends,
For Angel’s 36th birthday this past December I made her a scavenger hunt that went all over Manhattan & Brooklyn. Her favorite homemade brownies were tracked down (thank you Emma!), she was sat down for a surprise matinee of a very homosexual movie amidst a very homosexual crowd, we roamed Alvin Ailey’s exhibition at the Whitney for hours, friends surprised her for dinner & tarot, & more, & more. When she was finally in bed the scavenger hunt was capped off by a little link - What is this? / Go on, press it – to a song I’d been secretly recording with my brother for weeks just for her. Well, go on! Press it!
Today’s missive is about love. But this is not just romantic love we’re talking about here, folks. It’s love as redefined by James Baldwin: "I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."
This is an invitation to explore love not as a rom-com central plot line but as a “state of grace.” To actively inquire about its presence in your life, to feel its many textures, colors, shapes, faces, & mysteries. Accompanying you is my private catalogue of images & quotes about love. Throughout our time together I’ll also drop some prompts for pondering, journaling, or poeming.
PROMPT 1: What is your first memory of love?
PROMPT 2: What does it feel like when you’ve been able to access love for yourself? Where in your body have you felt it? Imagine your love for yourself is a color. A weather phenomenon. An animal. What sound might this self-love creature make? Try & sound it out right now.
PROMPT 3: Let’s imagine that the phrase “good lover” has nothing to do with sex (or at least is not limited to it, you perfect freaks!) & instead refers to someone who is significantly adept at being love. Perhaps it is through their openheartedness, warmth, compassion, clarity. Or it’s simpler than that. It’s in the way they water their plants or make you tea or listen. Who has been a role model for you in terms of being a “good lover?” Is it someone from your distant past or someone you see daily? Is your role model a human, animal, natural wonder, something else altogether?
PROMPT 4: Anne Sexton wrote “To love another is something like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.” Can you name a time in your life when love destroyed something that needed destroying? How does love behave at its most radical?
PROMPT 5: Come up with as many alternate names for love as you can. Use nouns, verbs, & adjectives, oh my! For example: Raspberry. Snowplow. Door. Scalp. Butternut squash. Tenderize. Hold. Blur. Explore. Blue. Spectacular. Free. Cloudy. Write a love letter to love addressing it by one of your alternate names.
PROMPT 6: When you want to experience love where do you go? Who do you turn to? What activity do you reach for? What song do you put on? What book do you open? Who do you reach for? Who do you touch?
While we’re on the topic of where we go to experience love: I founded In Surreal Life explicitly as a space of love. Unlike writing programs that heavily focus on product, in ISL we honor the process of our humanness AKA how we arrive to the page (whether clumsy, messy, burdened, overstimulated, etc). We consider how we show up for the work & for each other as just as important as “becoming a writer.” The Visiting Artists for our April session (registration is open now!) are creators that exemplify wholeness & multifaceted-ness in how they show up in the world. From Hala Alyan’s vivid articulation on the genocide in Palestine to Nate Marshall’s inventive yet down-to-earth poetics to Diana Khoi Nguyen’s multi-genre prowess & seemingly bottomless creative ingenuity, our upcoming April session is bound to be an ode to grace itself, a technicolor invitation to love as Baldwin named it: “the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."
Okay, good lovers, shall we close with a prayer?
PROMPT 7: The “Love is better” prayer. To be applied softly & without too much fuss. When you’re in a going-nowhere fight, when you’re tense, when someone cuts you in line or cuts you off mid-sentence, when you look in the mirror & feel deflated say these three little powerful words: Love is better.
With the full knowledge that you can’t know another human being as completely as you want (heck, that you can’t completely fathom yourself!) say these three magic little words over & over: Love is better. Love is better. Love is better.
Each time you say it imagine you are shooting roots into the earth. Shoot them deeper & deeper so they drink nourishing underground water.
Take stock of what this prayer does to your body, what it does to the air, the earth, the sky.
With ample maple syrup,
I have just seen this - thank you for including me! Really lovely and interesting letter.
Love as a state of grace. Gorgeous!