The truth is, we don’t have an easy language for emotional life. That’s why we have writers.
— Susie Orbach
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
— Tom Stoppard
Where Love Goes
When a relationship is over, where does the love go? Does it disappear like ice in a glass or the bubbles in champagne?
Or does it hang in the air, nearby, waiting to bond you to someone new? Turn into something else like anger or sadness or simply move on?
Today may be a day of candy hearts and paper affirmations, but I’ve been thinking about the path of love undone because several people close to me have recently become uncoupled. One minute the love is there — it’s your organizing principle – and then, it isn’t. You don’t feel it anymore. He doesn’t feel it anymore. You both can’t do it anymore. You have gone from a fluttering heart to a sigh and a yawn. From 90 miles an hour to neutral. Where did it go?
When people fall in love, a little universe is created. A system is made. Energy is exchanged. Love is the motor that keeps everything steady. And when it works, it works exceedingly well.
There’s a concept in physics called The Law of Conservation of Energy. Energy is defined as the ability for something to produce a change in itself or in the world around it. Like the energy between two people in love.
According to this theory, energy cannot be created or destroyed and can’t absorb more than it does to start. It just exists. It doesn’t go anywhere. It is simply conserved.
Energy conservation has three unique characteristics: potential, thermal or kinetic. Seems to me that we could borrow these and learn something interesting about the nature of lost love.
Consider that the love, the energy that you have expended is never wasted. The laws of the universe suggest that the energy you put into that love and that relationship have been banked. The energy has become convertible, useful, allowing you the potential and the energy, the gentle push, to love again.
A version of this post was first published February, 2011.
Bookends
It was a gift slash burden at my high school for graduating seniors to fill a full page of the yearbook with a photograph and a quote. Choosing the right shot and the right words that you could live with — forever — was a big deal. That was pressure, man.
My friend Jeremy, who was handy with a camera, took this picture of me in my parent’s backyard, which turned out well. Nice composition and cool lighting. (Thanks, Jeremy!) But I remember being less worried about the photo, I was 18, after all, than I was about the words. The words really mattered to me.
Reading them now, these lyrics to the Simon & Garfunkel song, “Bookends,” I see a harbinger of personal mission. I seemed to be aware of how I would feel looking at this page in the future. As though I was leaving myself the message that memory was important. That photographs helped us tap into our memories. Not surprising that I am, and have always been, the keeper of the family photo albums. The one who, at reunions, will stir the memory pot to see what bubbles up.
I think we leave little crumbs of memory for ourselves over our lifetime, to go back to. If we are curious.
Grandma’s Birthday Party
When she turned 85, my Grandma Jane decided to throw a party.
This would be her first birthday since my grandfather, and her twin sister, died and though hers was the party house and she was the hostess for everyone’s birthdays (including great grandchildren), this was the first where the light would be shining directly on her. It was unlike her to put herself front and center. And yet, she loved parties, so it was, indeed, like her.
In celebration of the woman who was surfacing, I wanted to make her a collage of her life. I gathered all the photographs we had from her young womanhood to the present day. I wanted to see who see was, separate from her role as my grandmother. But of hundreds of pictures, there wasn’t a single one in which she was there, alone. I remember feeling frustrated by that. Where was the graduation photo? A glamour shot? The one of her, alone, in her wedding dress? I had to cut her face from her twin sisters’ and from babies’ cheeks. I had to remove her body from clinging children and cover up the throngs of guests in the background or foreground. She was, in every sense of the word, a people person.
On February 7, Grandma Jane would have turned 100. When I think of her now, I remember those photographs. I may have extracted her from others with a small scissors, but she is definitely not alone. She will always be attached, to all of us.
Photos by Ellen Blum Barish
A Hundred Words
I’m sad to say it, it being my business and all, but there are just too many out there. Words, that is. As an essayist, I’m biased toward less is more, but I’m also a consumer of words, too and the truth is that I get so much more from what I’m reading – I remember it – when the right words carry the load.
Consider the text message. See if you get a profile of who the texter is here:
I don’t need you to get me.
Can we go bathing suit shopping?
Please call me.
Be out in front in 10.
Can you please drive me to work today?
Awesome I meet you outside.
Can we make dinner tonight? Caesar salad, chicken shnitzel and potatoes? I’ll help.
In study hall.
Can you pick me up?
Bought planner $5.
I’m at Marina’s.
There are less than 100 words above, but I think the reader gets that the texter is young (awesome) – probably high school age (study hall) – probably female (bathing suit shopping), active (pick me up; take me to work), social (I’m at Marina’s) and clearly a lover of chicken schnitzel. We also get that she is in fairly regular contact with the receiver, who is likely to be her mother (all those rides!)
These are the actual text messages sent to me by my eldest daughter when she was a sophomore in high school (when I did indeed feel like most of what I was going was picking her up and dropping her off!)
We don’t need gestures or words that tell us her tone. We just can hear her speak. The rhythm and word choices do that as do the topics.
Experiment with writing spare. When you focus on the nouns and the verbs, you get to the core of the character. Get that onto the page and after you have a sense of what’s there, you can bring in the poetic language.