In his poem Nahj Al-Sira (A Biography), Qassim Haddad writes:
“Your biography of regret
Like a dictionary failing to define.
Your biography
A murdered man’s sighs
His blood concealing and revealing,
Stuttering with fragments of language
Stumbling over books, below the bridge
On his way to confess.
Your biography
Written by a woman that draws you in with her acidic wine
And moist tobacco
With her disillusioned joy
A woman that spells out defeats
With cheers that were swapped with storms
In drunken records
She craved
And raved,
Passionate
And delirious,
Entangled
And tumbled, let down by a beloved.
A woman writing you
Framing your biography
Of which you made an archive of passion and a dictionary of embers.
A woman who documents your regrets
And embellishes her future with your legacy,
Hoping that you forget.”
***
Humans were created imperfect, with their happiness only fulfilled through the existence of another being. No matter how long the wait is; love has no expiration, as it is always there, growing steadily. Love is like a child said the poets, but we can feel that without asking the poets.
Love is born through understanding, and because of it, it also perseveres; all we must do is have the skill to love. Every day, we drain the ways of admiration. We have a fountain of self-love that gives us the impression that we can conquer many places. This is what fuels our joy of being surrounded by love, which is something we eagerly wish for. We often forget that love tends to go against the wishes of those who seek it; it comes suddenly, sometimes as a surprise, and other times in the form of a tragedy.
People love to love, more than to be loved. That is why many writers dedicate books and pages to their experiences with love, either for its abundance, or its involvement in their lives, as an inspiration to write more, or in pride of their achievements, or they write to understand the reasons of separation and despair that follow them from the past. When the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes was asked: why did you write ‘Diana: The Goddess who Hunts Alone’ about your affair with the actress Jean Seberg? and was it difficult to write? he answered: “Yes, it’s very difficult, but it allowed me to get rid of the problem when I humiliated myself. I wanted to write it this way, away from any stonewalling. I came out of it defeated, but I had no other way out but to narrate my failure in this love through these details of life, which only make sense to lead us to control the other and then lose this control over them.”
Love in its general state is a theoretical concept that has no value. Love is an individual experience that cannot be repeated, as even one single person can be so different with every love they experience. So, to each person who tells their lover that they’ve only learned to love because of them, they refer to the experience of relearning, and the novelty of the experience and its uniqueness. Lovers might share similar feelings and experiences, but they are immeasurable and never comparable, donning a new appearance with each person, creating a brand-new experience. Just like humans, who share some qualities, but never the same fingerprints.
The pleasure that comes with talking about love lies in the pleasure that one gets from talking about the beloved, and not about love itself in the general sense. In another case, talks of love remain an aimless philosophical theory, so it needs specification and direction. This does not include the so called “Don Juans” who give more importance to their repeated romantic conquests than they care for their loved ones and their unique characteristics. For these types of people, the idea of love is more important than who they love. All they seek is the ecstasy and euphoria of renewing love relationships, then all their talks revolve around those constantly flaming feelings.
Shadows on the Ground
The Iraqi novelist Hassan Mutlak would spend his days writing down his thoughts, journals and worries with love and his experiences with his lovers. He never published them as a book during his lifetime, but his relatives published them in a collection after his death. They justified their intrusive behavior as a compensation for his early death by hanging, and that the people mentioned in these writings were the inspiration for some of the characters in his works, thus, these writings about love will be useful in reading and analyzing the rest of his works.
Whatever the justifications and motives, the book was finally published under the title of Kitāb al-ḥubb … ẓilāluhuna ʻalá al-arḍ (The book of love … The shadows of them on the ground). The book was short, but it was jam-packed with various situations, vocabulary, and moments of love; longing, eagerness, anticipation, dates, meetings, dialogues, strengths, weaknesses, separation, patience, sacrifice, advice, meditation… and so many other pure emotions.
The book is divided into two chapters. The first is Ẓil al-Bāshiq ʻalá al-arḍ (The Sparrowhawk’s Shadow on the Ground). It brought back memories of teenage love and attempts to prove oneself during university. As was the nature of that unstable and unclear stage, texts in this chapter were scattered and unclear, full of mystery and symbolism. Ther are moments of conflict between writing and cultural advancement and emotional relationships that are conducive to fulfillment and tranquility. “Anything other than writing is completely invalid, or at the very least, pointless.” Writing caused him to lose many relationships; at that age, girls were dissatisfied with being second to his utmost priority— writing. But despite his sadness over losing them, he did not object. This situation forces him to answer one question: Why do you write? Although he admits that the goal of achieving social recognition and fame is present at the back of his mind, he believes that any answer regarding his writing principle is a betrayal to writing. And interpretation is a revolt against writing.
Love is the art of managing distances. Excessive closeness kills eagerness, whereas extended periods of separation and large distances cause intimacy to slip from one’s mind. Love is like a special recipe that requires its ingredients to be added gradually and moderately, rather than all at once.
During this stage, Hassan’s perception towards love shifted. The success of any relationship between two people “depends on a constant and endless discovery of each other’s personalities, which gives the certain impression of their personality. Either it depends on their depth, in which they can give and give without ever running out. Or otherwise, it may depend on their superficiality, in which neither of them feels the need to uncover more about their partner, they are simply satisfied with a surface reading. And as long as that surface continues to go through natural change like the seasons change the earth, then it is enough to keep the relationship going until they stop looking at one another.”
He concluded the first chapter of the book as if he were done with writing about love, titling the finishing paragraph as the conclusion. In this paragraph, he wrote “memories are somewhat of a fatal weapon; to live those moments again, and relive the pain, to reinterpret those moments to figure out whether it was a moment of joy, only to acknowledge under the guise of remembrance that it was not a moment of joy, but a bitter pain.” He goes on to convince himself to break the pen and stop the suffering that comes with recalling memories; “there is no point in continuing to judge oneself, as long as the result remains the same: a feeling of destruction and insignificance.”
He returns in the second part of the book, titled Ẓil al-qamar ʻalá al-arḍ (The Moon’s Shadow on the Ground) which he devoted to his later, more mature experience of love as a married man with a daughter. He talked about his journey of love with Huda, whom he pursued after she captured his heart. She found herself entering fleeting relationships with failed love experiences; he wanted to save her from herself, to heal her, and marry her. His early death took him away from her, but it failed to rip his love from his heart. This part of the book consists of his journals of being separated from her, and the letters he wrote to stay connected, with texts and love letters that overflowed with pure sweetness and beauty.
According to Hassan Mutlak, a healthy relationship between a man and a woman is a choice. We must choose the one we love, and who loves us without any compromise, without any humiliation. To love with our dignity kept intact, without having to kneel. It is knowing when, how, and why we should say yes or no, at the right time. To love honorably, to give our bodies, secrets, sorrows, and dreams to the one we love.
In the first part, al-Bāshiq (Sparrowhawk) refers to Maisoon, a fellow student at the university he attended, whereas al-qamar (Moon) mentioned in the second part’s title is Hashimiya, who was a teacher at the same school that Hassan was a principal. We are told in the foreword by Hassan’s brother, the writer Muhsin al-Ramli, through his explanation of the two titles, that we are exposed to the nature of both of these relationships. The first one was more arduous and harsher than the second; as the Sparrowhawk is a bird of prey, and through that we can sense the connotations of flight, hovering, the ability to attack at any moment, while the second relationship fills us with tranquility, romance, light, and peace.
The Cult of Emotions
Our perceptions towards love are unstable; it is wrong to think about meeting our current desires and perceptions of love ten years from now. We worry about how we will keep the flame of ecstasy burning at that time, making us lose sight of the high –and certain— probability of our desires and perceptions of love changing completely. It is enough for us to search for those who check the list of what qualifies them to continue with you in terms of morals and religion, without paying much attention to changes in personality and status.
In her memoir, ‘Everything I Know About Love’, the British author Dolly Alderton reviews her perception of love at every stage of her life and the resulting practices of this perception. She starts with the concept of love in her adolescence, which she saw exclusively as flirting and intimate relationships. While at that age, she could not comprehend how anyone would choose to spend their night doing anything other than having intimate relationships, this concept evaporated from her mind on her nineteenth birthday. While she was frustrated with being a teenager and “desperate to be an adult; desperate to be taken seriously,” she soon realized that “being a teenager was one big, frustrating, mortifying, exposing, co-dependent embarrassment that couldn’t end fast enough.”
Dolly’s memoir is a memoir of transformations, bad decisions, loss of containment, loss of identity and the search for oneself in the wrong ways. Basically, it is a memoir of adventures for adventurers. She was striving to collect as many stories as possible, or perhaps this late interpretation of her previous life to come to terms with what she lived. She did not hesitate to experiment in order to obtain a valid narrative to write or to spend time in order to reach the next target, no matter how reckless it seemed. Her life was a model for what Margaret Atwood formulated in her saying: “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It is only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
Must we bear the consequences of those who went through these experiences alongside us in search of completing them and not just reducing them to a story?
Body is an important element in evaluating others, especially women, which prompted Dolly to torture herself with exaggerated diets in order to get the praiseworthy body, “Every compliment fed me like lunch”, she says. Also, she tried her best not to be subject to bullying or attempts to sabotage the diet: “I realized a good tactic to get people off my back was to constantly make jokes about how little I was eating. I would bring it up before anyone else did, so they knew it was not a problem, just a diet.”
The role of love is not only to make a person happy and to add fun and joy to his life, in fact the importance of love lies in ending all the things we question about ourselves as humans: anxiety about appearance, lack of self-confidence, inferiority, confused relationship with the body, and so on. All these painful holes in the soul are filled by love as if they never existed, and it sets a foundation in our hearts to receive any happiness. If love does not contribute to filling these holes, then it is not love. The pain of separation is not the grief of the loss of happiness, but the re-digging of those holes and deepening them further, and even increasing their amount tenfold.
Love is not the joy of sharing happy moments, but rather the lack of fear of sharing weakness and bad moments. The Iranian revolutionary Ali Shariati said to his wife Pouran: “You are the only one who, if you had seen my weakness, would not have been heavy on me.” This was something that Dolly did not experience, she had the right language to express her grief to a stranger only, “I could only tell these stories in an ephemeral realm of fantasy in which I had no accountability.”
After her mid-twenties, her perception of love began to mature, and she discovers the reality of relationships that were worth starting, and continuing: “Years later, I would discover that constantly behaving in a way that makes you feel shameful means you simply will not be able to take yourself seriously and your self-esteem will plummet lower and lower.”
Her friends began to enter relationships and get married, and their lives changed after they swore “that nothing will change”, but the nature of married life only leaves such little room for old friends and explains this that “a woman always slots into a man’s life better than he slots into hers.” Love will remain between friends, but the closeness and familiarity will fade.
It is true that Dolly Alderton chose the title of the book ‘Everything I Know About Love’, but there was more that she did not know about love than she did; she did not know what a relationship that lasts more than two years looks like; she did not know how to live with someone she loves and go to buy a house; she did not know how to treat the romantic relationship as a source of support. She was in love, yet she did not have love.
Her first stages were in search of a loud love, describing one relationship as “I didn’t fall in love; love fell on me.” and another “Our relationship escalated in familiarity with the gusto of a foot on a pedal pressed right to the floor”. But she finally reached the conclusion that true love is warm love, regular and lasting intimacy, and a long-term relationship.
The journey of the book spanned more than ten years, starting with the perception of love at fifteen, and concluding it by visualizing love at twenty-eight. She concludes that most often the love that someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself, and that the two partners must make an equal effort to maintain the relationship, and that separation becomes more difficult with age, because while you lose your partner at an earlier stage, you lose a life that you spent growing up together.
Do we need to go through the journey to reach the ideal love? Is maturity in a relationship the result of previous experiences or are external experiences enough? Is calm and intimacy a later stage of the hustle and bustle?
Dolly’s experience reminded me of the phenomenon of The Cult of Emotions (El Culte a l’emocio) discussed by the French philosopher Michel Lacroix in his book of the same title, in which he argues that modern humans have come to prefer feelings of irritated shock, trembling, explosion and violent emotion to feelings of contemplation and reverence.
The reasons for this contemporary emotional rush are due to the process of compensation, as feelings fill the gap caused by the collapse of ideologies and grand narratives, and the uncertainty of the future. The death of hope for radical change and the despair of a massive political action calls people to be content with emotional denunciation, and feelings are their means of struggle. Isolation within emotional life is the result of the world going through a phase of radical transformations that are beyond human control. When we cannot act, we react emotionally as a compensatory method.
After mentioning a number of the most prominent contemporary practices that distort emotions in the chapter Gluttony of Strong Sensations, we find a review of the pitfalls of this dominant trend in modern times and the search for noise rather than calm, which can be used to understand Dooley’s disappointment in self-realization and discover her true options in love. LaCroix says: “Tendencies to feelings of shock lead in the fourth place to the impoverishment of the inner life. What enriches your inner life? It is the deposition of felt emotions in the moments when we come to the world in a state of attention.” And while Dolly tries to convince herself after repeated love disappointments that “I am enough. I’m enough. […] I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system,” Lacroix disappoints her poor ego by saying that it is not enough, for “the deep ego is not rich in self-specificity, but with feelings that have developed within it and with enthusiastic contemplative attitudes that have mobilized it.”
Top-Pocket Relationships
At the age of fifty, and after realizing that “all that is left will fade like a cloud that is blown away with the wind.” the Egyptian novelist Gamal Al-Ghitani began to look back in nostalgia, longing and encouraging inclination, both of which are only for the sake of something dear, precious, and far, and is there anything dearer than one’s age? He began writing his collection of books Dafātir al-tadwīn (Notebooks) through his travel and movement between the stations of his life, “and the most difficult travel is the one in memory”. The first part was dedicated to his love stories, girls at his age who captured his heart, he called the first book: Khulsāt alkará. Before talking about them, he admits that his memory has mixed wishes with facts, “Some of them only caught my eyes. I didn’t feel any emotions towards them. Our bodies did not come in proximity. But each of them had an influence on me in a way. One often tells the story of what he wished would be, not what was actually; he sees with wishful thinking what could be instead of what was,” which is a rule that applies to many (if not all) love tales in memoirs.
Almost twenty stories, talking about the women that he was once enchanted by, who made him sleepless. His reactions varied with them, as did the places he met. He admits meeting the needs of those who are older than him, and demonstrating the experiences of temptation with the youngest, inside and outside Egypt, and “outside my home I become more daring”, with an accurate description, and a strong memory in evoking the details of the meeting and the requirements of emotion.
The story before the meeting goes on, as do the details of the selection and the planning of the choice, while the speech is brief after the goal has been achieved. Whoever is satisfied with reading this part of the memoir of Al-Ghitani is sure that he is a womanizer and nothing more; his meetings and trips are all for their sake. Once, he saw a Turkish girl in a musical band in a recording, so he cancelled all his obligations in Egypt and planned three months in order to travel and search for her until he found someone to receive him in Turkey, and he went looking for an image that he did not know anything about, and after he found her, he continued to pursue her in all the band’s concerts for more than a month, until he got what he wanted.
In the beginning, he describes himself: “I was generous and giving, at the height of a sudden love. Rash and impulsive in everything, and one thinks that he is eternally seeking, and that the situation will not change.” But after years pass and experiences are repeated, “my quest begins when I think that I have reached the end of my journey. When I am almost certain that the steps have been completed, the unexpected journey begins in the context of conjecture.”
And because it is a biography of his reflections as it is of his love affairs; he told us about his view of places and homelands, as he believes that “the harshest exile is the one in homeland.” As for the place, “In the past, I used to say that a place remains stable while time changes, but I realized later that each place has its own time and contents. Place changes as does time, even if the same feet set foot on it, and the same looks contained it!” During his stories, he would tell us about the books that he would carry during his journey “in my bag, I only carried what I needed for my first few days, and from my library, which I spent my fortune and my life on collecting, I usually took four books: The Holy Quran, One Thousand and One Nights, Dīwān al-Ḥamāsah by Abu Tamam and Nahj al-balāghah (The Path of Eloquence) of Ali bin Abi Talib. That was all.”
One of the effects that writing has on the author is the transformation of his personality to live in imagination more than living in reality, and relying on illusions more than facts, which we find evident when Al-Ghitani says: “I spent most of my life in attachment to various fantasies. I spent time recalling images and representing visions more than in my contact with the tangible and my knowledge of it. The time available is certainly shorter than what is lost.” He even believes that his whole life is based on imagination and that reality alone is unable to open the doors that are hoped, “I did not know the richest things in my life, and I did not realize them except with the power of imagination, and what passed from my age was mostly in wishful thinking. Countless doors were locked in from of me, bolted, and I knocked lightly. Sometimes I screamed, and all I could do was imagine what was behind it and work hard to fill the voids. Some of them were opened to me, I passed them and crossed their doorsteps, and I met nothing but regret and causes of groans.” We find him escaping from meeting with people to be alone with himself and his memories, “I was seeking solitude to recall what happened, to relive it, to see what I did not witness at the moment of its occurrence. A lot of what passes through me, or I pass through, I do not discover its dimensions until after it has passed.”
It seems that twenty stories were not enough for him, and what was hidden was also more than that. He concluded the book by saying: “If I recall what I wished for, I find that what I wished for from women is more than what I have already got.” Although he is convinced that “after it is too late, it is reasonable that the distant aroused in me what the close relative did not achieve, and that the completion of something means its decrease or the beginning of its exhaustion.”
Gamal al-Ghitani’s experiments are a suitable example of the top-pocket relationships that Zygmunt Bauman talked about in his book Liquid Love, which refers to the relationships that one only reaches for when he needs them and pushes them to the sidelines when he does not want them. When eternity is absent, man remains a prisoner of the eternity of pleasure in the moment of pleasure without any consequences or responsibilities. The fluidity of relationships in modern times came because of the weakness of the family sphere and the centralization of privacy and will around the personal sphere, which in turn revolves around the body that is now reduced to sexual validation. In addition to the multiplicity of options and the multitude of temptations, which coincided with the failure of similar experiments, modern humans began to think on the principle: if quality fails us, we will resort to quantity. If relationships are unreliable and obligations are not permanent, he tends to replace life’s relationships with temporary networks. Once they do that, stability becomes more difficult and even the aversion to it. Then, the person loses the skills needed to settle. Hence extreme cases emerge, which call for reversing instinct and entrenching timing and experimentation in relationships at the expense of sustainability and stability. The distant is then desirable, as in the phrase I put as the title of this article, which the Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia mentioned in his spectacular book Voices that Henry miller added to the list of books that any ideal library must contain.
Just as love is a unique state that cannot be compared with others, and performance cannot be improved by repeating relationships, this is a pure illusion. “The kind of knowledge that rises in volume as the string of love episodes grows longer is that of ‘love’ as sharp, short, and shocking episodes, shot through by a priori awareness of brittleness and brevity,” says Zygmunt Bauman. Then, the skills acquired from such relationships are the skills of quick termination and starting over. Whoever tries to test his previous skills will find that love will take revenge on him.
It is not this love that Viktor Frankl and Will Durant meant as the source of the meaning of life, for which it is lived and for which the hardships of the universe are endured. Although the philosopher Robert C. Solomon was truthful in his words. “Love … is not the answer to all of life’s problems,” but it can find the meaning that will help us endure and face pain and overcome those problems.
T1667
