Fragments on Love

Music, writing, and more

love floods from art. this i have known for years.

i have known it since saturday night, when out made me think about my parents and cry for an hour and a half straight. i have known it since the middle of last year, when i spent hours poring over the lyrics of our word — “My father fancied himself a sailor // his study was filled with nautical décor.”

i have known it since my time at iupa, when i first thought about how hopelessly romantic it was that generations on generations of pianists could play the same chopin nocturne, each adding their own meaning to the piece simply by being a distinct person learning it. i have known it since my last years of high school, when in ms. dawson’s expository writing class i first learned that anyone — no matter how young, naive, or inexperienced — could create a beautiful phrase or sentence.

in out — at every semi-distorted echo of my own tumultuous relationship with queerness and family. in the 36 questions musical — during every attempt judith makes at real, unfettered human connection. in these three b-flat octaves in les adieux — hearing “i love you” in my head, one word for each note. in my old college essays — candy bars and cigarettes; white hair and wilted flowers.

this i have known for what feels like forever.

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the thing about love languages, though, is that they don’t show whether you love, ‘cause it’s easy to share time, talk, and give gifts without actually loving. rather, love languages show how you communicate your love. i love you, but you wouldn’t know that from three words alone, so i hope these hugs can explain. i love you, so here’s a box of snickerdoodles to remind you i’m thinking of you.

(anon)

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imagine a knot of ideas in your mind, twisted, gnarled, illegible.

writing, as an act of self-love, feels like finding an end and unthreading it, slowly and carefully. it feels like an act of affirmation. there is substance here. the knot is neither madness nor nonsense; there is value trapped deep inside, and i will hunt it down and untangle it and present it to anyone willing to listen.

writing, as an act of love for others, can be optimizing for clarity. concision. hunting down the correct word-needle in the dictionary-haystack. believing that if i just find the right words, people will feel loved.

(i love you, but you wouldn’t know that from three words alone — so here’s a thousand more.)

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how do i love thee? let me count the ways.
i love thee to the depth and breadth and height
my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
for the ends of being and ideal grace.

(elizabeth barrett browning)

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it is wonderful to be reminded that there are infinitely many ways you can pour love into your art. in my case, classical piano.

long have i derided aphorisms like “to play wrong notes is insignificant. to play without passion is inexcusable.” (beethoven said that, but he’s dead now.)

it’s not because i don’t agree. of course i agree. wrong notes are not significant; “passion” — that nebulous, indescribable catch-all buzzword — does matter. i don’t like aphorisms like these because they feel like an excuse to not do the right things: play with good phrasing and dynamics, respect contrapuntal lines, use appropriate amounts of pedal, all the little things that can be abstracted away as “passion.”

my mentality, unfortunately, is also conducive to doubt. do i actually love music if i’m just pressing keys in the right order with the right amount of force? what if i’m just a rules freak, and that’s why i’m “good” at piano? do i play too dispassionately if i don’t see the need for “passion”?

but every now and then i’m reminded: that polishing a passage to perfection is an act of love. that optimizing my wrist motions to realize the phrasing i want is an act of love. that love doesn’t have to be abstract and untouchable. that love is trying your damndest not to screw up an impossible octave passage because you care about your audience’s immersion and you care that the composer wanted it this way and you can imagine in your head how it would sound if you perfected it.

that’s loving music just as much as feeling emotions or telling stories is.

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roughly speaking, 3 angles of love that are all important. if you work [out] all 3, everything is wonderful :)

1. self love

2. being loved by others (“unconditionally”)

3. being loved by god [the universe]

(d. y.)

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there’s something very weird, dangerous, and beautiful about feeling loved by art.

weird, in that the artist (almost certainly) doesn’t know you. yet they can still create something that feels designed for you. that’s how i felt when i watched out last weekend: how could this group of strangers understand and articulate the nuances of my relationship with my parents better than i could? that’s how i felt when i watched community for the first time, during a lonely six weeks at a music camp, part of a lonelier four years of high school: how did the writers know the sorts of friends i was missing in my life?

dangerous, in that you might be heavily misled. qiaochu writes about this, pretty explicitly. he felt loved by yudkowsky’s writing, by the idea that he could fix his cognitive biases and save the world. it is so easy to be taken in by writing that seems deep or correct.

and beautiful, my favorite — beautiful, in that art can help you access parts of yourself that you’d never be able to otherwise. “rachmaninoff makes me want to write sloppy poetry and call my mother and eat cantaloupe with an unwarranted vigor and bury my heart under a granite angel,” hannah writes.

there’s something very mystical about this all — it’s that we have no choice in the matter. you will be loved by art, whether you like it or not, whether it’s healthy or not, whether it inspires you to greatness or depression or anything in between. an idea will hit you like cupid’s arrow and all you’ll be able to do is hold on for dear life.

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so i practice. cautiously at first, buying trinkets for no reason except it reminded me of you, and bolder as time passes, wandering across [ — ] for hours before holding you tight in my arms. the thing about love languages is that nobody’s limited to one. you grow comfortable with all five, learn each person’s native tongue, and adjust accordingly. i burn my fingers flipping crepes after my mom mentions mille cakes for the third time in a week and drop by carrying coffee for a friend with four exams looming. it’s not that i loved any less beforehand. i just figure that people feel unloved so often not because they actually are, but because everyone’s so stingy with their affection—why not change that?

(anon)

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at warp this year i had a long, long conversation with naman on a walk around camp grounds.

love drips from his voice as he talks about the music he plays — anime covers. he’s very new to the piano, at least compared to me; i’ve played for 18 years by now, and he’s a beginner. but even if he can’t get the exact sound or feeling that he wants, he still enjoys the process of learning things and figuring things out for himself — working on hard problems.

and this is a way in which i love music, but it’s not the same: i like working on things when it seems clear that i will — with enough time and effort — eventually reach the sound and effect i want, or get close enough. he wants to work on arrangements years beyond his experience; i’m terrified by pieces that seem far closer to my ability level, relatively speaking.

i have wanted to find more ways to love art this year. that’s why i took creative writing and music composition last semester. and in those classes i did learn new ways to love art, but there are infinitely many ways and i need not be stingy with my affection.

so why shouldn’t i try and pick up those three impossible etudes? why shouldn’t i write that paper about my friend’s piece, even if i don’t know any music theory? why shouldn’t i play that one anime arrangement i always liked most? why shouldn’t i learn music just for the sake of showing family love, why shouldn’t i sing badly, why shouldn’t i appreciate rather than fear how it feels to be new to an instrument and learn to play the cello, or the organ, or the theremin?

(why shouldn’t i write, openly as ever, about the ways in which i haven’t loved and could love?)