..that thing is love

"I'm not frightened, not of anything. The more I suffer the more I love. Danger would only increase my love, sharpen it, give it spice.

I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than when you entered it."

- The Reader

I've been thinking about love in a relationship, and desire. It struck me these are quite different things. A long term relationship, by definition, has to be practical and maintainable. It's like finding a joint venture partner. It's about the practicalities of how you want to live and where you want to end up. But desire is a totally different beast.

Desire ignores appropriateness because it worships different laws.

It is that door at the end of that corridor one flight up and at the back of your house.

It answers the siren call of black holes that were never filled.
Things lost and paths not taken.

Why would any of these things coincide with practicality?

They say in this sex obsessed society, that you can have one night stands, but it won't make up for a real relationship. What about the things real relationships can't possibly cover? It's far more than sex.

The French knew the lost art of the 'Affair' - and the difference between an affair and a one night stand is like the difference between a French Arthouse film and a porn film.

A haunting book I read once about love was titled simply, "Open the Door!"

Metropolis I

Big metropolises are a special world unto themselves, especially Asian metropolises where the forces of development, inequality and globalization come together. What does this do to the individual? I wanted to write a series of vignettes to explore this issue, but then days of self loathing got in the way. Inspiration comes and goes, and self doubt steps in to fill the remaining minutes and hours and days. Anyway I finished the first one of the series, based loosely on a conversation I had on the top floor of the Jinmao Tower. Comments welcome.

So many aspects to look at...

XXX

Clinking between cocktail glass and gold clad table, 85 stories above the city. We were laughing absurdly, carefree at the top of the world. For once the blur of speeding highways that took me from party to party, bar to bar wasn't an echo of bleeding loneliness. A wide-eyed companion was by my side and we moved at the speed of light, with the beat of the metropolis, hearts pulsating neon.

He looked out of 360 degree windows at the man made world glittering madly outside. The skyscrapers were alien giants winking lewdly back at us. "This view is amazing," he said. He was leaving in two days. "It's my favourite place here, and I wanted to show you." He turned to me with dark eyes holding something as other-worldly as the night outside.

I turned away. My absurdly expensive rings clinked against my absurdly expensive cocktail. "It's progress, and potential," I said turning the conversation to the abstract, "but pursuing potential is not the same as happiness."

His eyes refused to let go, "potential for what?" he asked.

And that's when I knew he really was an innocent who believed there was a difference. Potential for good, potential for evil.

***

In the spring of years ago I arrived - it was bitterly cold but bright. I was one of a great movement from countryside to city. The girls used to giggle, "maybe a rich city boy will fall in love with us." Our fertile, human hearts couldn't help receiving the seeds of spring.

But in the great seas and seas of human lives I soon realised I was just another dot. And in the crowded dormitories shared with ten other girls, snoring loudly after days of backbreaking work, I stared at the dark patches where paint had peeled and rust had come through on the bed posts.

I thought of my days in the countryside - escaping from school to steal oranges and dropping out at 16 with dreams of the city. My grandparents who lived with their illnesses because it was a choice between medical fees and eating. And I thought of the sister after me given away because she was a girl and there were already too many girls in the world.

And I knew I had nothing to offer.

But this machine of concrete limbs and fleshy heart pumped on, its metal mouth gaping open and hungry.

***

He was from a wealthy family, but he never talked about it as if he never cared. His mind was on other things and he threw away his birthright like handfuls of gold dust. I clutched my low cut designer dress - always successful - and the white gold necklace a gift from another man. All of it suddenly felt cheap. Like I had taken my
mother's heirloom to a pawnshop and got back two dirty notes.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

In all our previous 24 hours together he had asked questions, one after the other. Breathlessly curious it was all new to him, as if his imagination could devour all the night stars blazing. He thought he could uncover the truth about this convulsing human mass with just his open, searching heart. But it was he who brought humanity within him to our gaudily lit farce.

I tried to think of a plausible story. But what came out was the most impossible yarn, yearning to tell the truth.

"My family and I were moving to a better place, and we packed everything we owned on a boat," I fabricated, talking through layers and layers of years wasted and steps taken from that first spring.

"On the sea the boat sank, taking everything and all their lives. Except me. I survived on a tiny boat, just me between endless sky and endless sea."

The metropolis was waiting for me, always waking, arms and legs open. Every weekend a one night stand that I called paradise.

"When you have lost everything important, and still survived," I heard myself say through the giddyness of the height and the alcohol and the glittering madness, "you realise you never needed it in the first place."

He listened. He had no answers.

So eager was he to pose questions he never listened to the replies. That was the ephemeral nature of his being, his questions, and his passing through.

But he paused then.

And the heart of the machine missed a beat.

My muse

I found my muse.. a fact I can't talk about in real life so it's spilling onto my virtual world. A guy so deliciously unsuitable, and yet so poetic. A person I met in the depths of the Chinese winter, and who melted my heart. But by spring who knows if I'll need him anymore as the whole world thaws. That's the tragedy of muses.

He's a migrant worker, the lowest of all classes in this class concious society. But his spirit is unbroken, unlike these pampered, white collar kids who have grown up as emperors in their families. He has a wild streak, and yet no opportunities. He's smart but vulnerable and he remembers every single thing I said. I find the differences between us endlessly fascinating. I want to go with him to his native Henan province, see what it's like to grow up close to nature and the community.

We met at Christmas time, and when I came back to my real life to go to the parties, sip the drinks, and pretend to laugh with the people in my world all I could thinkk about was, "life has got to be more than this." I was just bored, bored, bored without the struggle and the injustice that opened a window into what really mattered, and who I could be.

But I don't have the courage to go forward with this. I'm a coward and a hypocrite and a liar. There's a reason why middle class Chinese people treat these workers like they're not human. There's too many people and too few resources in this country. Wasted lives and wasted potential is just par the course.

There's a danger to treating everyone like a human being. You can be polite and generous to the lowly waitress, or the scruffy builder but it's only at the very basic end of treating someone like a human being. At the other end is falling in love.

I don't want to fall for someone that can't even afford a coffee. Sounds bad but how can it possibly work? And it's worse because I know I'm capable of falling this way, ever since I decided to follow my heart.

It couldn't possibly end well.. and yet I am a moth to a flame.

The road less travelled

Everyone remembers these two lines from the Robert Frost poem, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - took the one less traveled by."

But I looked at the poem recently and the more important part is the verse above:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

When I was at my soul destroying finance job many people advised me to stay there for three years, get a professional qualification and then pursue my dreams. Others justified their lives there by dreaming about some vague time after retirement.

In my mind this is about as logical as planning to marry a rich man, wait til he dies and leaves you all his money before marrying the poor painter you're in love with.

But this simple minded solution was an incredibly difficult and frustrating thing to argue against, because it papers over a point that no one wants to hear. The point made in that verse - that choices lead to other choices and you will never come back to that fork in the road again. It's impossible to keep the other road for another day.

It's impossible to have it both ways. And nowadays, that's a very controversial thing to say.

I recently met an aspiring, female writer in her late twenties. She was looking for a husband, and with it all the trappings of surburban respectability - 2.4 children, house and white picket fence. She concluded that the only way to have it all is to find a highly paid businessman who would support her while she writes. In her words "there can be only one artist in the family."

I wanted to shake this woman so hard - she's symptomatic of all that's wrong in the world.

What kind of writing would she produce with this kind of set up, this kind of mentality? Maybe she'd write great chick lit about women finding rich husbands. A conventional life produces conventional work. She didn't seem to understand that her means have defeated the ends because writing is a mirror for the soul.

Being an idealist, an artist, means really living on the edge of life, reporting back from the extremes of human experience. The edge of the abyss.

For me it's not about being a writer, it's about being that type of person. Writing is only the wrapping for a present. Too often I read bloggers who want to be writers with long, winding entries that have nothing to say, no point to make. Like a gorgeous present that's empty when opened.

I blame in part the relentless consumerism of modern life that tells us we should have it all because we're worth it, and we can have it all if only we try hard enough. But in that case what's the meaning of decisions? How do you find out who you are? Or what is worthwhile vs what's not?

The road less travelled leads to inbalance, and I'm struggling to accept my choice. To be unafraid of extreme experiences, and to not require the conventional.

New Year, Old Problems

... and here's is my problem in a nutshell:

"they danced down the street together like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, beause the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop"
- On the Road

On a brighter note, one of my new year resolutions for 2009 is to enter a ktv competition! (which I'm actually quite good at) followed by visions of me making a side-living crooning at jazz bars...

Shallow rivers

I've always thought men are like shallow rivers, easy come easy go, no long lasting emotions. They always mean it at the time, but when it ends - it ends and they move on. Like daily newspapers, they move with the times.

I thought it was a peculiar and cruel curse of being female to feel deeper and for longer. Unable to forget, we linger on even the thinnest hope of love.

But recently I find myself changing. Maybe it's a sign of growing up, or learning to make decisions. But gone are the days when I loved the same person for four years, even continuing when he dissappeared for a year, even when he had no more interest and it was me alone in my fantasy of a relationship for the last year. Gone are even the days when I ruminate over a mistake for two years and a relationship that could have been.

As I mature I have less and less time. Feelings are no longer all encompassing, they are now compartmentalised into a certain time a certain place. The infinite has become finite.

A year ago I dated a colleague for a while. The time was spent struggling to decide whether to take it further. On one side of the scales were all the criteria - right age, single, nationality, socio-economic background and staying in Shanghai. But one the other side were some unpalatable values, showiness, messy way of handling problems and style over substance. I decided to end things, but continued to linger and obsess over that decision for a good 7 months.

Meanwhile I decided to alleviate boredom with a younger guy, a freshman at college no less. He was fun, but had a girlfriend which was surprisingly hurtful. At the time I did really like him, to the point of needing to have some contact every day. I thought the chemistry was crazy.

But with the nagging discomfort of the girlfriend situation I gradually cooled off, and when he went back to the US it was a clean end for me. Six months later I've had only faint desires to contact him, which I never acted on, and now I honestly can't remember what I saw in him. The age gap was so great, we really had nothing to talk about. And having a girlfriend but cheating like that really made him a despicable guy in my eyes.

Next was a guy, an exchange colleage I'd already known for a few months by then. We hung out a lot, and the more I got to know his personality the more I admired him. But it was 5 months into his 6 month placement that we had a deep talk where we found more and more in common. We read the same books, like the same obscure topics like philosophy and religion. Each time further that we meet it was closer to something. On his leaving party on the last day, something happened. But of course he was leaving and never coming back. I contacted him once just with a polite message to say goodbye.

I spent the next week moping. Even the next two weeks going over the depth of feeling and connection we shared. Surely, I thought, by all rights, this is the real thing.

But, three weeks later I have a new crush, and a totally different kind of chemistry. And I'm convinced this is the ultimate type of person for me, though again, sigh, this particular example is not. Right person, wrong situation again. Now I look back on the last one and think, it wasn't really right.

I've gone from four years, to two, to one year; then 3 months, now 3 weeks.

I'm making progress. I'm getting adept. I'm practicing the skill that keeps you sane and makes it possible to risk it all - the skill to survive the cycle of falling in and then falling out of love.

Another factor here is decision making. Life lessons are all about that. There's a great line in Chinese: 不走回头路 literally 'never backtrack on a past path'

It means making decisions clean. Make it carefully at the time, but never look back.

What is wealth?

This is a weird one, bear with me...

Being wealthy is when you would still want to do what you are doing now if you won the lottery tomorrow

Because it means the things you have now is worth about the same as that $10 million, or maybe even more. It means you already have that wealth.

On the subject of worth and wealth...

It always surprises me how people make these decisions, how much is something worth, and how much they would exchange for it.

Like my father who always said to me 'Not many people are geniuses, you're unlikely to be one of them, you're unlikely to be special'. He was really trying to convince himself. I think he really could have been a genius, could have been special. He was already starting to gain national levels of recognition and fame when he married my mother - chaining himself to a deeply flawed and problematic burden. That bad decision cost him his life purpose.

But in order to justify it to himself, or just to avoid admitting it to himself, he gave up the whole idea of being special, or even the existence of greatness. So that he didn't have to admit he was wrong and make changes.

It always surprises me that people can give up things of the greatest worth for things that are worth really nothing at all. By some magic, some slight of hand, some trick lighting, somewhere along life's path one can appear as the other.

Or maybe that value judgement is really the hardest test.