The Jackette

 

Rummaging through my mother’s antique dresser, looking for scotch, or some other stoic spirit that could bide me well through a teenage evening of debauchery I discovered hundreds and hundreds of old love letters bundled in twine in an old biscuit tin. Cautiously I untie the knot of one bundle. They weren’t signed from my mother but from my grandmother Thora;

“All I want to do tonight is not write a line or speak a word but snuggle down in your arms, my head on your shoulder and my soul in communion with yours in the perfect unity of our love. And that is what I’m going to do now. Goodnight my darling, I love you so,

Thora”

Eyeing off a bottle of port I returned the letters to their cave. They served some interest. I was sixteen and currently engaged in a heated debate with a girl at school over the meaning of love. She had asked if I loved her. I asked her to explain what love meant. She couldn’t. I tried.

It was my first crisis of meaning. I should have just told her I loved her rather than tussle over semantics. The meaning would have followed the proclamation. As Irving Singer writes: 

“What looks like a seizure from without - the innocent and hapless individual suddenly being struck by an arrow from cupid’s bow - may therefore be taken as a manifestation of meaning being created in accordance with whatever needs or desires the lover accepts as paramount at the moment.”

The only issue with cupid’s arrow was that my paramount need and desire, was a need and desire for meaning. The arrow would not strike until I could manifest meaning.

I sought the letters. I believed the meaning of love could be uncovered in their bittersweet correspondence. I only had to read that line again to know it was not. She did not want to write or speak a word, only to snuggle down in his arms.

“All I want to do tonight is not write a line or speak a word but snuggle down in your arms, my head on your shoulder and my soul in communion with yours in the perfect unity of our love.”

 He was stationed in Egypt and the world was at war. She was home on a cliffs edge in New Zealand. They would not see each other for years. They would not snuggle in each others arms. She wrote that the communion of their souls was the perfect unity of love but would they not reach this communion without performing the ritual of the embrace. She did not want to write a word but she did. She wrote the word soul. She wrote the word love.

If the word love was never written would she have loved?

Love lies in that little squiggle that hangs from that sentence. The question mark. Love lies in every mark. I scoured the pages of the letters seeking to define every other word written if I could not define the word love. Soon I saw there were only a sparse collection of markings, of symbols, of words that I could concretely define. Symbols of things that I could see, things that I could taste, things that I could smell, things that I could hear and things that I could touch. Love was not one of these things, but love was some thing. As Heidegger writes:

“When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.”

Love is not shaped by clay. It is shaped by language. It is shaped by symbols. Love does not mean anything, but love is the opportunity for meaning. As Singer writes;

“Love, like life itself, is a plastic process. It varies in conformity with temporal vicissitude. It rarely stays the same for very long.”

Love in its plasticity cannot exist in a stable state but in these letters it is written and it exists in a physical form. It exists in this world as a few scratches of line. It exists as LOVE.