Posts tagged: love
“The Love Competition” by Brent Hoff
“Love is like a feeling you have for someone you have feelings about.”
7 contestants each have 5 minutes in an fMRI machine to love someone as hard as they can. Brain regions involved in producing the neurochemical experience of love are measured. The contestant who generates the most activity in those areas of the brain wins.
The science of love at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging. Watch this. I hope it makes you feel as happy as I did.
(Source: vimeo.com)
“In 1950, a young man from Central Point, Virginia, went seven miles down the road to hear some music. Seven brothers named the Jeters were on that night, playing bluegrass in a farmhouse. The young man had come for the music, but couldn’t help noticing a young woman in the audience. The man, Richard Loving, was white; the woman, Mildred Jeter, was black and Cherokee. Seventeen years later, as a result of their meeting, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, along with anti-miscegenation laws in fifteen other states, ending the legal prohibitions against interracial marriage.” (The New Yorker)
I love this so much. It is important stuff, beautiful stuff, and a subject that is very close to my heart, being the product of “miscegenation” myself (we chaps are the wonderfullest and most beautifullest, tru facts you guys, sorry, I’m not sorry, deal with it). Grey Villet photographed the couple and their children in 1965 and there’s an exhibition of some of the photographs at the International Centre of Photography in NYC. I would kill to see it. This is just wonderful, in so many ways.
Love. It’s all there is.
In 1937, as photographer Ansel Adams recovered from a nervous breakdown, he wrote this beautiful letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright:
“Dear Cedric,
A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.
For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.
Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.
Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.
I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.
Ansel”
(Source: lettersofnote.com)
Soon the swallows will be gone.
September is the month they up and leave for African shores. Calling to each other high and far from soft, red throats they gather in the skies and leave this island. A few stragglers will stay until early October, but most will have left by then. They go journeying far away but always come home, are persistent and beautiful and brave and so I love them, as one must love a thing that is beautiful and brave and does not give up. And that is the why of my swallow tattoo.
Do you know Oscar Wilde’s heartbreaking story The Happy Prince? About a swallow and a statue and how they help the suffering people of their city. It is a tale that is beautiful and tragic and deeply moral (God appears at the end but don’t let that put you off if, like me, you are a non-Goddish kind of a person). It is about sacrifice and love, that is all. I will never forget the time my mum read it to me in bed when I was eight. She had just left my dad and his psychosis and taken us, her three young kids, with her to live in a tiny flat. Sitting in the dim light on the edge of my bed she read the story quietly to me. Her voice got fainter and fainter until, about two-thirds of the way through, she burst into tears and closed the book. She caught herself quickly and sat silent for a moment with her hand over her mouth and her long blonde hair over her face, then kissed my forehead and left. I lay in the dark and wiped my wet brow, listened to her crying in the living room. I wanted to go to her and put my arms around her and tell her, Mama, don’t cry, I love you, it will be alright. But I didn’t. So many years have passed and I still feel bad about that.
I may have told you that story before.
Mum was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer two weeks ago. She broke the news to me, in her usual matter of fact way, over the phone. Both she and I have had cancer, and have both beaten it right back to hell too, but when she told me I felt sick, as tiny and helpless as a baby bird. Next week she is having a mastectomy and I will be taking time off work to look after her if she is allowed out of hospital. If she stays in I will stay at her house, wander the little rooms, unearth old childhood stuff, do some pottering around London, write. Wherever she is I will read to her. I will write something for her, on paper. I will make her laugh. I will cook for her. She eats hardly anything at the moment but she loves to see me eat and I love to cook, so I will cook lots and eat lots. I will bake us a Tarte Tatin and dammit if I don’t get her to have a whole slice (if you’ve never tried it, you really should).
These little things of love, a home-cooked meal, a few handwritten words, a gentle touch, can make a difference, I think, sometimes. I hope.
“Justine, I’m perfectly capable. It’ll be fine. Don’t fuss so”, she tells me. I half expect her to go all Monty Python’s Black Knight on me: “Tis but a scratch!” She is a stout-hearted Eastern European socialist who built roads in her native Yugoslavia as a child and prefers to deal with things herself: slaughtering pigs, beating cancer, overthrowing capitalism, that sort of thing. I try not to pester her too much with my concern, for it seems to upset her more than the illness does. But this time I will not let her do it all on her own. This time I will go to her. Though I feel scared and oh so small, I am strong and this time I will go to her and put my arms around her and make sure she is OK.
The swallows will be back next year. And you know what? I am hopeful that my mother will still be here to see them return and that maybe I will be in Africa to wave them goodbye as they leave on their return journey to the UK in the Spring. I’ll stop and watch them and say to my small herd of goats (for I will have some goats by then, oh yes, and maybe a kitten, I would like a kitten), “Look! There they go!” The goats will shake their heads and wonder what I’m on about. They’ve seen it every year, it ain’t nothing special to a goat. I will call to the birds and ask them to say hello to my mother when they arrive. “Tell her I love her. Tell her I will be home soon. Don’t forget!”, and the swallows will rise into the African sky and start their long, perilous journey back to this land.
Bon voyage, little birds. Be safe. Come home to me soon.
Someone has taken my usual morning place - front seat, right-hand side - on the top deck of the number 25 bus.
That is my favourite spot because it has the biggest view and is closest to the sea. I like to have a big view. I like to be close to the sea.
They’re not there every morning, but mostly they are. A couple. A girl and a boy, both dark and pretty. She sits next to the window. She has long hair and wears a green hat. Her fingers are pale. She wears many silver rings. He sits next to her. His hair is close-cropped, velvety, the kind of hair I’d love to run my fingers over. She is usually quiet and so is he. They don’t put their feet up on the front sill of the bus like I would. Sometimes he leans down towards her ear and speaks to her. Sometimes she looks up at him and smiles. Sometimes she rests her head against his arm. Sometimes they kiss, softly, careful not to bump noses too hard as the bus jostles and lurches over potholes and around corners.
They sit there, at the front of the bus, side by side, quietly. Shoulders pressed together, heads inclined slightly one towards the other. They watch the streets and the sky and the gulls and the sea.
Somewhere between the bus stop at the bottom of North Street and the bus stop at the front of Brighton Pavillion he puts his arm around her shoulder. She looks at him and they kiss again. They are infinitely tender with each other, smile into each other’s eyes. They don’t say anything but as he stands, stooped under the low bus roof, their hands linger, fingers still entwined as he starts to walk towards the stairs.
This morning they were there. I took a seat a few rows behind them. He had his arm around her and they whispered to each other and smiled at each other and kissed as they do, Valentine’s Day or no Valentine’s Day. He got off at the Pavillion as usual and I watched him cross the six lanes of traffic to the other side of the Steine. He walked slowly, turning every now and then to look up at the girl and wave. Five times he did that. The road was clear but I imagined the sudden shriek of a car horns, vehicles swerving to avoid him, irate drivers hanging out of car windows effing and blinding and giving him the finger. Hurry up!, I thought, get across the bloody road or your girl will have no one to cuddle on the bus in the morning. But I was worried for no reason. He carried on to the other said and once safely on the pavement he stopped and turned once more, smiled, blew his girl a kiss and walked on.
I don’t begrudge them the seat on the right-hand side next to the sea. Why should I? It is good to see two people in love, no? It is a good thing. People sneer sometimes, hide within cynicism and bitterness because they’ve been hurt and are afraid. I understand that and I’ve been guilty of it myself, but life is short and brutal and lonely enough so why not try to be brave and open-hearted, though it is difficult, though it hurts, though you may do it wrong and badly and fall over and bruise yourself, why not show love whether or not you are loved in return and risk crossing that fine line between courage and stupidity? Maybe, just maybe, something rare and beautiful will come of it.
I don’t know. I’m rambling. I have a cold again (I must stop getting ill, we all know what kind of stuff I write when I’m feverish, and yes yes I wrote that for you yes) and my head isn’t making much sense. But my heart is. And so I am happy for that boy and that girl who have found each other and I smile as I see their dark heads pressed together in the front seat on the right-hand side of the number 25 bus.
Every day I play you a love song. This day is no different, but today I will play it for them as well and hope they make it, those two, whetever happens.
I hope they make it, together.
—————————————————————————————————-
“Because yes, life is finite. Time spools out of our hands when we’re not looking and, inevitably, runs out. But to know that you’ve been loved, truly loved. To know that you’ll be fondly and honestly remembered - surely that’s a consolation.”
Cloudya speaks simple truths on the death of her uncle.
Go read the rest. It’s not long, and she writes beautifully.
(I wanted to reblog the whole thing, or just the above paragraph but can’t figure out how to do it. Forgive me cloudya, for I am tired.)
(via cleversimon)
“I made a new friend today.”
Guys. Hey, guys. What’s more than a gazillion bajillion?
That many. That many hearts for this.
