love and other demons

I was recently asked if any piece of art or writing I consumed particularly resonated with my state of being at the time. The first thing that came to mind was Orhan Pamuk’s exquisite love story, The Museum of Innocence. Through the protagonist, Kamal Bey’s eyes, Pamuk journeys the entire gamut of emotions that loving fosters with a writing that is both real and magical at the same time. I don’t admire this book only because I am a silly romantic but because it managed to restore my faith in love and passion. The novel has anything but a fairy tale end leaving all its characters exhumed by the passions that drive them. But when I took it up, I was beginning to feel weary by the pragmatic notions of time and tracks, things that had no particular significance to me by themselves, but the discourse of which I could not escape. It was tiring to have to constantly justify a stance which in my mind seemed the most natural or logical, that one must always pursue love for its sake and not as a conduit to things that follow in its wake. If the former happens to bring about the latter it is one thing, but to pursue it in a pragmatic manner would kill my soul I often argued. I would like to share the following two excerpts from the book. The first speaks of passion (even though the protagonist had not fallen in love yet, or didn’t think he had) but manages to be exalting, sophisticated and intensely romantic. The second one is an uplifting passage and something that always calms my sense of disappointment and impatience with any given situation. I don’t think I can ever stop believing in love even if I never actually find it and no matter all the disappointments I have been dealt. And I will always be grateful to Pamuk for the kinship he offered me through his beautiful novel. 

“I would like to say a few things about kisses, though I have some anxieties about steering clear of trivialities and coarseness. I want to tell my story in a way that does justice to its serious points regarding sex and desire: Fusun’s mouth tasted of powdered sugar, owing, I think, to the Zambo chiclets she so liked. Kissing Fusun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction to each other, it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love’s true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I was someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered, and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Fusuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking’s slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as time itself. Could I be in love with her? The profound happiness I felt made me anxious. I was confused, my soul teetering between the danger of taking this joy too seriously and the crassness of taking it too lightly.” 

“Thus, did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life. In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now”, even after living such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happy moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could get worse. If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happier moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

But when we reach a point when our lives take on their final meaning shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment is to acknowledge that it far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementoes preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanies us through those moments.”