Love in time of need

A recent write up in the New Yorker, on American novelist and social activist Jack London fascinated me, because, among other things, the write up posed a poignant question in light of London's obsession with conditions of material poverty and hunger: "In the absence of money, food, heat, or other necessities, can there be love?"

This question interests me because I've been studying representations of poverty and representations of those whom we label the "poor" in texts of all kinds and in multiple discourses.

Love is rarely a part of these representations and discourses, because the conditions that inspire emotions of love are not the conditions of material wretchedness. 

Somehow, in our minds, love is associated with an above-the-poverty-line existence. That is why even when we see irrefutable evidences of love in ghettos, for instance, we dismiss and deride them as not love, but animal lust, the consequences of which are bound to be disastrous--teen age pregnancy, unwanted procreation, disease, and finally that all-American dread of dependency on the state (to feed the products of ghetto love).

But Jack London, an early representer of the American poor in fiction, thought otherwise.

Love in conditions of indigence is the theme of London's best-selling novel, The Call of the Wild. But the hero is a dog, who finds love and expresses it by closing his mouth around one of his master's hands, "so fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterwards."

The master recognizes the (feigned) bite for a caress. 

In London's short story, "Love of Life", the bite, from a wolf, has darker insinuations.

At the end of the story, a famished man and a sick wolf lie down, side by side, exhausted after days of mutual stalking. The man, drifting in and out of consciousness, feels the wolf licking his hand, and thinks of how the wolf is exerting its last bit of energy in an effort to sink its teeth in the food it has been wanting to have for so long.

Like Plato, London perhaps reaches for a higher love, the love for one's fellow being, or a more social kind of love, that flourishes in conditions of material destitution. 

He wrote, that the "very poor can always be depended upon [as] they never turn away the hungry." 

He also implies that it is easier to love the poor back. In one of his stories, the hero is a right-wing man who has to assume the alias of a working-class man to do his fieldwork. He discovers that when he is in his alias, brawling and drinking, he is much looser, warmer, freer, and sexually richer; he abandons himself to his provisional identity forever.

Lovely lines

I know this life cannot be lived without dependencies, micro-webs of ritual and ardor and economies of need that bind us all together. But how do we stand up to loss? And love again without holding something back?

Stirring lines from this week's ode to Modern Love, entitled "The Fear of Surrendering", by Julia Anne Miller. 

Miller tells the story of her life being in a loving relationship and at the same time keeping her "Single Girl's Starter Kit," a storage facility that can accommodate "one single girl’s bed, one set of flannel sheets, one pillow, my grandmother’s afghan, one each of various kitchen utensils, one tool kit, one ladder and one box of love letters from past admirers."

Miller pays $189 a month to maintain the Kit in Brooklyn.

Akin somewhat to a bomb shelter, The Singer Girl's Starter Kit has everything a single girl needs in case she breaks up with her boyfriend. 

With sagacity, Miller describes the Single Girl’s Starter Kit as "the opposite of a hope chest."

It's not love, but fate

So says Joshua Rothman in an enlightening account of why we shouldn't confuse the movie version of Anna Karenina (directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright and screen-written by Tom Stoppard) with Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name.

Anna Karenina the film, according to Rothman, predicates itself on romantic love, whereas Tolstoy's is not a love story: "if anything, it is a warning against the myth and the cult of love." 

I agree with Rothman when he says that it wouldn't have been possible for Tolstoy to conceive of a romantic love story, not because Tolstoy didn't have a romantic bone in his body, but because he had conceived of love as one of the many significant things that, when indulged in without discretion, can have extreme consequences:

Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.

Rothman's reflective piece makes me want to read Anna Karenina--again.

Friendship: a refuge

Two recent films, Celeste and Jesse Forever and Mosquita Y Mari, explore friendship as a "refuge".

Set in Los Angeles, C & J is the story of a married couple who continue live in the same house as friends after they dissolve their marriage. Their living situation presents a conundrum as it can't be classified. As Manhola Dargis describes in her excellent review of the movie, Celeste and Jesse "have split up without moving on or out." 

As I read the review, I figured that there is something crucial that keeps Celeste and Jesse together and that "something" is friendship. 

Culturally friendship is either exalted as an empty coinage--everybody uses the word with very little understanding of the fact that friendship is, like marriage and family, an altogether specific kind of institution. 

Else, friendship is seen as a poor and wobbly substitute for the real kinds of relationships--one framed within the family or marriage. Even being boy or girl "friended" to somebody is considered to be more respectable than being simply "friended". 

As Aristotle himself would vouch, compared to marriage and family, the institution of friendship is predicated on absolute parity. Two friends (ideally) share a relationship of laterality, not verticality. 

Unlike marriage and family, friendship remains un formalized as a "relationship". There are family groups and marriage groups that fight for the preservation and political rights of these two institutions, but there are no pro-friendship groups. 

"Friend" sometimes is perceived as the lowest rung on the relationship ladder. When one wants to call a more "serious" relationship off, the usual excuse is, "let's stay friends."

Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever might help rectify the notion that to be in a relationship of friendship is to be a "loser". 

Dargis compliments Celeste and Jesse Forever for daring to come out 

[...] with a story about two people who, together and alone, express an ideal rarely seen in American movies: a man and woman whose equality is burnished in friendship, not just in bed and marriage.

The second film Mosquita y Mari is eons apart from the class structure in which Celeste and Jesse's friendship blossom (though both are set in Los Angeles). 

It's the story of two Hispanic adolescents Yolanda and Mari:

Yolanda, an A student, is the fiercely protected only child of a hard-working immigrant couple who have invested all their hopes in her and who continuously remind her of their sacrifices. The sullen, rebellious Mari is an illegal immigrant and a failing student who lives with her single mother and younger sister; she helps support the family by handing out fliers on the street. A sultry, tempestuous beauty, she is just becoming aware of her sexual power and puts on an air of arrogant bravado.

Yolanda wants to act as a buffer between the harsh world of male-sexual predators and Mari by taking Mari under her wings and giving her free lessons in geometry. 

In the process of spending long hours together--Yolanda and Mari become roommates--Yolanda finds herself falling in love with Mari. Or, at least she experiences strong feelings but isn't sure that Mari would or could return them. 

Yolanda keeps her feelings to herself.

The film doesn't get inside lesbian-love territories, nor is it a "coming out" narrative. It's a story of friendship as a genuine refuge from the onslaughts of an unpredictable and antagonistic world.