Love

Ancient Greek cultures identify four different types of love: familiarity, friendship, sexual and/or romantic desire, and self-emptying (divine love). Many other cultures also distinguish various other forms of these types. Compared to other emotions, the varied use, understanding, and meanings of love makes it difficult to accurately define. Biological models of love tend to view love as a drive of the human body, like hunger or thirst. A leading expert in the field of love, Helen Fisher, divides the experience of love into three overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. These three stages seek to put a scientific face to the term, and explain love by means of biology. For instance, Lust, is the initial passionate sexual desire that promotes mating, and involves the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and estrogen. These effects rarely last more than a few weeks or months. There are studies in neuroscience indicating that as people fall in love, the brain consistently releases a certain set of chemicals, including the neurotransmitter hormones, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Psychologist, Robert Sternburg, formulated a triangular theory of love, and argued that love has three different components: intimacy, commitment, and passion, and all forms of love are observed as varying combinations of these three components. Robert A. Heinlein wrote that, “love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” The philosopher Aristotle said, “love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” John Mayer is convinced that, “love ain’t a thing, love is a verb.” According to the Beatles, “all you need is love.” But, if you ask me, love was a made up word by a less than articulate guy who made matters unimaginably more complicated for everybody else down the line with his fatuousness.

The Art of The Scar

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. –Leonard Cohen

Scars, they say, never completely disappear. Perhaps your scar is from surgery, or maybe your brother threw a rock at your head. I tripped over a laundry basket and smashed my face into the coffee table the day we were destined for Disneyland. Sometimes scars represent trauma: a devastating accident, a reminder of a mistake.

We also have internal, metaphorical scars. Scars no one sees. But we know they are there.

Our skin is our largest organ. Scarring happens after an injury – it’s a natural process, a part of healing. If the injury extends to the dermis, the organ simply cannot replace the tissue in the same way. Yet we often try to cover them up, spend thousands on laser treatments, drop 20 or 30 bucks on over-the-counter ointment. 

Your body is a magnificent vessel, capable of repairing injury. You damage it, it gets fixed. Just think about that a minute. 

Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repair. Broken pottery repaired with seams of gold – desirable scarring, representing the beauty of the uniquely broken. Kintsugi celebrates the scars, highlights the breaks that create something new. 

Our internal scars cannot be remedied with laser treatment or pricey ointments. Yet they make us who we are. We break to scar; scar to repair: but that repair leaves us changed. And there is beauty in that damage, in the repair process, in the seams. Our outer scars identify us as human, ever-changing, ever-repairing humans. Both our outer scars and our inner scars are our histories.

Eyes on the Prize and Anywhere Else

Eyes on the Prize and Anywhere Else

Look at this television. Now stop looking. They hate it when you look too long. They hate it so much that Ray Bradbury wrote a book about it, but everybody was so busy staring blankly at their television sets that they didn’t understand quite what he was going on about. Even my television tells me to stop looking at it so much, but it cancels my favorite shows when I obey. I don’t know about all that. I’ll tell you what I do know: I know Comcast made nigh on 2 billion dollars in the first three months of 2014. They own just about everything my television says. It’s real kind of them to do that. They own the football, even have Carrie Underwood sing to me about it. They own the funny stuff. Law and Order, too. Hell, they own Brian Williams. That’s just about all I need.

Everybody’s got one. More than everybody. I saw that every house in the country has 2.73 television sets. I guess there's only 2.55 people in each of those houses. We can all rejoice, I suppose. We have a surplus of televisions in the world!

Oh, and I hear guns don’t kill people anymore; it’s the televisions. Those televisions are out to get us if what I saw on my television is to be believed. I guess they’re showing our youth how to kill people en masse and our kids are getting pretty good at it, too. Sheesh. Those darn kids. Those darn televisions. Why can’t they be more like us?

The British, they know about television. They have to the way they’re stuck out in the middle of the ocean like they are. Everybody on the whole island with a television has to fork up over 200 British-earned American dollars just to keep the British Broadcasting Network up and running. That’s pretty fantastic, if you ask me.

The Red String of Fate

Wedding rings, nowadays, seem to be an unavoidable custom when getting married.  As if weddings didn't cost enough already, rings have the tendency to burn through a sizable wad of cash.  The reason we, as unwealthy betrotheds, go along with his tradition of shiny finger adornments is, of course, because of what the rings symbolize--eternal love, commitment, and faithfulness.  Where did this tradition come from, though?  How did a simple band of metal come to represent such strong, amorous values?

The oldest record of wedding rings being used during marriage ceremonies dates back to ancient Egypt, 4800 years ago. The bands during this time, however, were not made out of metal, and the value of the material used, whether it be leather, ivory, or bone, was a demonstration of the man's wealth to his intended.  In this sense, the wedding ring was a promise of financial support, and not so much of love and affection as we see it today.

The Romans adopted their own form of the wedding band tradition by using the ring as a way of marking their bride.  Essentially, placing he ring on a woman's finger allowed the man to claim her for himself, treating her more like an object than a life partner.  This isn't like the tradition we know today either.

In Japanese culture, however, there is a myth known as the red string of fate which illustrates that the gods tie an invisible red string around the ring fingers of two individuals.  Because the string connects them together, eventually they will be pulled together and fall in love.  The westernized name for a connection like this is "soul mates."  Under this belief system, the rings were placed in the same finger as that which had the red string attached to it as a marker that the two individuals found their soulmates. The connection between them is believed to be everlasting, as it was created by the gods, and the lovers understand that they will be with no other person than their betrowthed.  This, then, seems most congruent with what wedding bands in the United Stated represent today, but it wouldn't surprise me if the underlying meanings of the ring contain bits of the Egyptian and Roman traditions as well.

Research in CNF

If you write enough, you discover what kind of writer you are; that is, you finally figure out what kind  of pieces you like to write, and what kind you are good at.  I've been writing personal essays for a long time but it's only in the last few years that I figured out what kind of essayist I am:  I'm mostly a writer of researched essays like this one.

I suppose my background as an academic makes it more likely that my instinct would be to look outside of myself to better understand what's going on inside.  But I think my interest in backfilling my narratives with research has mostly to do with how weary I am of telling the same old stories about myself.  I write essays to pull up the tracks on old story lines, to find new ways of understanding things. In my experience, nothing does this as effectively as some surprisingly relevant finding from a book or article that helps me to name the thing I feel.  Once, when writing about nostalgia and the way it directs our gaze in self-defeating ways, I stumbled on a study about something called "pathological nostalgia."  Yes, I thought, that's the kind of nostalgia I'm writing about.

Just as often, though, the research gives me something new to think about. My current project explores my interest in manual typewriters, and in the process of reading everything I could find about the history of the typewriter I discovered that in the 1880s typewriter racing was a national passion.  How weird, I thought.  And how wonderful.  What possibly could make that exciting?  This was new, unexpected material and I spent days fastwriting about it, and now I've added two pages of new material to the draft.

Finally, simple fact-checks can be surprisingly rich for me.  In the same essay on nostalgia, I remembered a solar eclipse when I was ten.  It seemed dark for a long time, and I thought to check exactly how long that eclipse lasted. Historical data like that is easy to find on the internet, and I did find that the eclipse occurred that summer in northern Wisconsin and discovered exactly how long it lasted.  It was shorter than I remembered.  This fact--and the way it was at odds with memory--suggested what a truly dark time that was for me back then. I sensed, as a result, that I was getting closer to the truth of how it felt to be me, and all because of a Google search on solar eclipses.

Voice in Research-Based CNF

Research is an art; synthesizing research, incorporating it into your own work is high art. Those of us who constantly ask “why?”, who constantly wonder things like, “what is that?” or “who did this thing first?” know that there is a beauty in finding something out. It’s deeply satisfying and invigorating – even if we never use that tidbit of information again.

I love research and research writing, so it seems that incorporating research into creative nonfiction would be something I would be clamoring to do each time I write. I have folders upon folders of interesting stuff I would like to write about. What I struggle with, however, is finding the right voice for that sort of writing. 

Joyas Voladoras, I think, is a fantastic example of how to do it “right.” The material is seamlessly integrated into reflection to the point that the reader isn’t consciously aware that they are reading something educational. I love that. I was thinking that it seems that the tone and voice of a piece that uses research will have everything to do with the material. Obviously there is room for elegance and poetics in something discussing hummingbirds and hearts; a piece on dog food can be funny and snarky or something. This is maybe why I’ve struggled in the past: I need to let the material speak, rather than trying to force it into a particular voice. Knowing the contexts and the nature of what you are writing about can help you determine how to talk about it.