1. Dedication
This is a page dedicated to a certain kind of conversation: between myself, those lines that I fixate on and hunger for, and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977). You are now entering a confined space. The page you have reached is the ‘inner sanctum’ of the Casket. Here I will not allow words to proliferate, only desire. And desire proliferates when it is bound. So, I impose the arbitrary limit of 150 words per ‘conversation’, intending that whatever lines I choose to speak about (mine or another’s, it matters little) the desire they point to will cry out. Find here force, constraint and pleasure, stemming from this incipit: ‘A single piece of information is varied, in the manner of a musical theme: I am thinking of you.’ So Barthes describes love letters, and you can rest assured that here I am yours. Here, I am thinking of you.
2. Ending ( W.H. Auden, Thank You Fog )
Love and you look to the end of love. Fall into love and your gaze is shocked beyond it. Desiring infinity you crave a limit, especially when you see:
Nothing can be loved too much,
but all things can be loved
in the wrong way.
You thank Auden for saying the first line: it’s a relief to know ‘my love is not excessive and ridiculous after all.’ Yet this gorgeous freedom to love without limit becomes terrifying when we know that there are infinite ways of loving wrongly. No guarantee exists that our excesses may not be mistaken. Worse still, there is no-one to judge and steady this wrongness. But courage: try to find right ways to love. Courage again: sink into love’s wrong. Love will never right you, but you must love, as Auden says, ‘or else fall ill.’
3. Compulsion (Auden again)
As soon as the door opens into love, we cannot cease, we must say more. I spoke of Auden, and there was an end to it. Or so I thought. But now he multiplies, and certain words he said about love must be repeated, in your ear, now. ‘If equal affection cannot be/let the more loving one be me.’ Let me be the one who suffers, he calmly asks. Let me love and be filled with this hunger I do not understand. Let me be overtaken. Let me offer useless prayers. Let me submit. I am fortunate, he seems to say, even if my fortune is broken, because even if you refuse me and turn away, I freeze you into an image in the way that Rodin freezes living desires into bronze, desires that breathe and rise to his hand. Love leavens, says Auden, and we eat the risen image.
