I was sitting writing this evening, formatting some interviews for publication when I was listening to Ablaye Cissoko and had to pause for a moment to reflect on a feeling washing over me.
There is an intimate linkage between death and love. Not its manifestations of dramatization in movies or romance novels. Not in the moment of death and crying, wailing, mourning, and grief when a loved one dies.
Indeed, I watched my only grandfather who I knew, Pete Jacobsen, die in front of me, in the faces of the whole family of his side, a family he built for us. A family he never knew and had to rebuild on his own.
It’s not those moments of death and love that I am feeling. It’s the resolution moments. It’s the idea of a lost love, brief and long, in times prior, as I’ve had six relationships.
The idea of putting those to rest, those feelings, though still flammable(!), is, in a manner of passing-meaning, to put to death a part of oneself for new seeds to plant, to grow, to blossom.
Love requires a continual death of the self, of memories or warped images of personal history. That fragmentary sensation lived as a self in a worldline in the world.
I do not know necessarily the meaning of love in a life, but I know the meaning of life in a love. It becomes empty without it. We all know this, except for the living-dead who know not only not-love but a not-self. The mentally ill who are the selves no longer with us.
The frozen landscapes of a broken self. To love is to know a unified self and to unite this self with another and others, to move on, these must be disintegrated and reunited in the flow of this process called life.
The attachment and detachment from others does, in some sense, mean a flow from one love to another. Those loves, those put-to-rests are the engine of life renewed.
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Photo credit: Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash
