Love Like a Lump of Clay
“Love is a transitive verb,” I’ve heard somewhere before. There are a number of linguistic problems with that statement, but as an aphorism it’s a nice thought. Love doesn’t make much sense in isolation. The sentence “Gordon loves” is technically a complete thought, but it lacks any of the context that would make it meaningful. A natural response would be to wonder who or what Gordon loves.
Love is about relationships: parents and children, friends, partners, teammates, comrades, etc. A big part of those relationships are the actions we take to maintain them. I call my family from time to time just to say hi. In college, I worked out with my friend and roommate twice a week. I’ve visited my sister on her birthday nearly every year since graduating college. I jumped on a plane to Tokyo right as the pandemic was starting because my other sister needed help.
These are important, nearly essential elements of loving, but I am only human and there are days-or weeks and occasionally months-when all I want to do is sit in a room and cry by myself, when I don’t want to be expressive, and when I can’t bring myself to actively maintain a relationship. Or maybe I’m just far away and busy, and we miss each other’s calls. On those days, I think it is sufficient to love by allowing myself to be loved, to be seen in some small way, and most importantly to be changed.
When I told my friend Alyanna that I was going to Santa Fe, she recommended that I check out the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. I vaguely knew who O'Keeffe was, but didn't know anything about her art, and probably wouldn't have gone to the museum were it not for Aly's suggestion. I'm so lucky to have gotten good advice.
One thing about the artist stuck out to me. A big part of her career was based on painting abstractions that she described as coming straight out of her mind, uninhibited and undirected by externalities. Even knowing her claims that nothing in the paintings is real per se, it was overwhelmingly obvious to me that many of the works were depictions of natural landscape, especially the ones made after she moved to New Mexico. The blues, greens, and browns are unmistakably rivers, grass, trees, skies, clouds, and earth to me.
There are probably at least two things going on here. 1) I am already very primed to see a natural landscape after hours and hours of riding through the southwest. 2) The patterns in O’Keeffe's mind were heavily inspired by her surroundings.
I have to take O’Keeffe’s word for it that her subjects were purely theoretical, and if those images really are landscapes on some level, then it follows that her mind itself was altered by her natural surroundings. She must have loved the southwest immensely, to let it impress upon her like that.
A few weeks ago, I visited a brewery outside of Austin that Sam told me I should check out because it’s owned by her “favorite actor and lover” Jensen Ackles. I sometimes toss a coin to decide which road to take because my dad carries a dice in his pocket. I like drinking Lone Star because Mark and Brian introduced me to the little puzzles on the bottle caps. Any meatloaf that isn’t my grandma’s recipe tastes wrong. There’s focus music playing on a speaker right next to me that was a gift from Rachel because she thought it would be easy to transport. I’ve been playing around more with what travel writing looks like to me because Lola lent me one of the best books I’ve read in a while: The National Road by Tom Zoellner.
Tonight for dinner I made a rice bowl with sauteed salmon and fresh veggies that Chris and Andrea made for me one night at their apartment. Later I’ll go to sleep, a lump of clay partially shaped but still waiting to be finished.
