Love is not a thing we can make demands upon; it has no instinct for servitude; it is elusive, supple, delicate, but if it overtakes us in our stride, its force is unmatched. How else has anyone every described the experience of loving, but helpless? It is the ultimate command, and it has no precise objective: the lover and the beloved, the loving, live together in this impossible atmosphere of urgency and surrender, action and idealism, acceleration and immobility.

We must remember that one does not gain ‘control’ over one’s days by becoming rigid, by adopting hardened postures that remove one from one’s own natural strengths. The ‘control’ is already there; it’s always in our hands... it lies in our inability to be free of freedom... the question is what do we do with it? What kind of ‘control’ do we make for ourselves? Is it generous enough to allow for a brilliant love? Is it squalid, suspicious, causing grapes to wither on their vine?

Control, as we most often imagine it, does not so much serve us as it is served by us... one cannot seek control without forfeiting one's discretion, without interrupting what little choice one has in how to pass from one moment to the next. It is a flexibility that integrates external forces in a useful way... it is the ability to see beyond the urge to command, beyond rebellion or satisfaction, that summons an inner strength to the surface and offers some possibility of transcendence.

Barking at shadows, pursuing discarded aspirations, there is often a population of obstacles, each posing numerous questions, offering resistance, pushing against the push of that parcel of time inside us. There is control, but is there an answer? Can there be, inside emotion, the annunciation of a new world, a universe resolved? In the impetus to act, the thirst for a decision, there is the full future form of that decision, that act. The proper physics is already at work, but the answer itself cannot precede its resolution of the crisis.

Kairos. Mudflats. The first long-awaited, silent track upon an uncharted earth.

Something unlike anything else has presented itself... it is love... born of what surreptitious diligence rotates in the space between us... it is magnetic, unyielding, perpetual... there is only to allow this flood of the timeless to wash over us, to teach us, to rejuvenate and imperil us, to save us from the certain death of a repeated deprivation that we have known, both of us, for centuries that no one else has lived.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

AN UNSIGNED LETTER
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

Still Lifes Cover Page Home Page Aesthetics Cover Page Home Page Portada