i mean you

when you create, you make love

all my students who have taken my class in the springtime know that my favorite passages from morrison’s paradise are not connected in any way to the first line or lines. it’s the wedding scene. it’s the way the question of love is resolved as “unmotivated respect.” last spring, this led to a spirited discussion about what it means to have and deserve love. for all the beauty of a morrison passage, having that kind of love find you in real life makes it all the more striking that it was able to live on the page in that way. perhaps no one in paradise is really loved. perhaps everyone is. love is unmotivated respect but it is the greyest of areas.

art is in that same grey area. this is what i have come to realize and embrace over the last several months.

in october, there was this moment where an artist had given a lot of themselves. there was this big to-do that resulted in them working with a large group of people and the result left them feeling triumphant. deservedly so. me being me, i went to see it out of curiosity and then i went to speak to the artist out of a desire to connect to the thing they connected to in order to pull it off. we knew each other, yes. we talked about the work, yes again. but then as we are pulling away to leave, the artist says i love you.

frozen, i say nothing in return.

months later, there is a gathering of us writers, artists, musicians, and everything in between. there is performance. there are readings. but it is not an easy time because we are not living in easy times. yet here we are sitting with each other, watching the ease of our sitting wreck across the shoals of our difficult world and it is overwhelming in a beautiful way. we can see each other trying to make it all go away and there is such beauty in that witness. i get up and i talk about that. and what it means to be in the middle of this storm with people who have the power to still it but it is yet raging so you don’t know in the moment if you can or will. i am not sure where my words come from but they spill out. then i turn to walk away. the last person between me and the night notices me leaving and says i love you.

i had only known them for a couple days. i don’t believe my ears at first. but then i realize that it was not the first time in recent memory that these words came from an unexpected source. these words captured something that felt right in that moment. and it was necessary for me to quickly slough off the years of a football-hardened emotional core to really open myself up to what was happening (and avoid an awkward moment).

after fumbling, responding in gibberish, taken in by the ecstasy of being seen and felt so tenderly, i return an i love you, too.

it was still hauntingly awkward. but i realized that it was actually true.

what each of these artists had done for me was to offer a reminder of how to create a path toward love and it all started not with an utterance of the words but in the meaning of the act of creation¹. when you create, you make love.

i shared the exchange that night with someone whom i have known i’ve loved for years because sometimes all of that meaning is not evident in the logical reasoning we tend to apply to human relationships, so we seek to understand. not knowing that love resists understanding. their response was i can see if someone knows you they have to love you.

unmotivated respect. living in the grey. this is the kind of honesty, the naming of our condition that becomes more possible when you can resolve this greyness of life with the decision to bear witness and then sit with it all until the bearing produces beholding and then creation. what these artists have done for me is that they have chosen to see and know and hear and feel me.
i mean you.
i love you.

1. there is much i want to say about the concept of hpr and sp tpy and all we know about the ways africans linked utterance to creation—you spoke that into existence—but i will let it stop here.