To write is to love
To write is to love, to embody the fabric of writing that inhabits you, as did the first signs engraved in clay and the bonds that filled the symptoms of your primordial emptiness. From your first babblings, you will begin to discover the spirals of affection that would later become maps that would guide your narratives. Today I invite you to think about metaphor. Let the words sprout inside your head, let them resonate in the literary space of your home, which are your thoughts and yours. sentithoughtsTo think is to encounter your voice, feeling the rush of words all trying to call out at once, searching for a place in your brain to sit in turn, waiting for you to carefully select them and carve out a new and unusual life.
Love, like words, is recreated again and again: this is the miracle—literary and emotional. A few moments ago you were immersed in meditation, training your awareness to be open, relaxed, and available, surrendering to whatever had to manifest, without clinging to or rejecting the contents of the experience. For love is born from the shadow of emptiness, like language and the desire for to write poems or narrate moves you to create other fictions that you will end up loving.
The metaphor revisits intimate spaces from the past that resemble others in the present; you feel the impulse to write, like that day you ran off to give what you thought would be your last hug. This is how your creative process works, and also your understanding of love: like a spirit that takes root in a wet hole of tears, rebounds, and rises into words. A word that becomes meaningful when you listen to it, look at it, welcome it into your bosom, and sculpt it into a new miracle.
To write is to love generously. True love is neither bought nor sold: it is given. Although it is never offered entirely consciously. Love, they say, must begin by giving it to oneself, something that isn't always possible; that's why it's not enough. We are in relationship—that has already been written. Love, affection, needs the other, in an act of communication to be decoded. Its ultimate goal should be freedom and honest, sustainable growth. Like words, love touches, can wound, and transform in equal measure. It is an exercise of will and perseverance that demands discipline and patience. Writing, like love, is generous and sometimes burdensome: its fruits require time and another to receive them.
What is the content of your writing? It is not universal and objective, blank and polarized. This voice has often denied the feminine: the other, the one that inhabits the margins, the dissident voices. You, like them, write as you love: with desire on the surface and your pelvis on fire. You see yourself strong and vulnerable, while rising with the will to emancipate half of humanity.
You seek love like words expanded: sketches and isolated notes aren't enough. You want the exact words that will allow you to return home, because your home "is writing, the only fire that never goes out," as Cristina Peri Rossi said. And, like your love, which is not blind, you push the words to tear off the bandage of Themis to borrow other eyes. Love looks with new eyes at the old memories you had banished. It's about resurrecting them and allowing them to return from the war like prodigal daughters to be embraced with all the parentheses of abundance and tenderness.
Love and writing have something of an orphan's quality about them: they are lived in solitude. You are alone in love, as if at your desk or in your prison. You have met many other women who have had to renounce love to search for their own language. "My only drama, the central drama, is language," said Alejandra Pizarnik. Your drama, accept it, is that you run after love, and when you're about to grasp it with your fingertips and capture the verb that signifies the exact moment of capturing it, it leaves you with the word in your mouth. Then, all songs are possible: a fearsome paradox.
To write is to love. To love is to resist, to remain in pause, anchored in silence. Don't wait for love, just as you don't wait for the word or the verse, which will come if it wants to rub your cheek and return to its impermanence. You will have to move again and inhabit the pauses until the miracle of being looked at and pampered occurs once more. It's almost the same as being read by a narrator, a witness to the omniscient love you long for.
Finally, step back, observe your new fiction, and love it as I've told you. Let the text take its own path and be decoded in other, unknown places, also hungry for love and language. Your writing, like your capacity for love, will not be relegated to the background if you believe. Your love, like your verb, has immense weight in the daily history of the fabric of writing that inhabits you.