sometimes i think i’m the kind of person who loves cities more than people.
i’ve been told i’m cold. calculating. callous. i would describe myself as obsessive, which is inevitably revealed by the demise of my codependent, intense, catastrophic interpersonal relationships. i pluck people from the sidewalks, weave them into my poetry and plans and plains of love, then have the nerve to act surprised when they can’t keep up with the entirety of my admiration. i don’t know if all my love could be contained to one person, whether i could ever focus closely and carefully enough to ensure they felt it. it’s a daydream of mine, that someone i loved could match the ferocity and intensity of my desire. i try to pour an ocean from one hollow human heart to another; it fits neither container. i’ve been told i’m cold. i never understand the accusation.
cold like the deep sea, maybe, with the weight of wanting and wondering and wandering pressing on your shoulders for miles above. cold like the winter that loves you and doesn’t know how to tell you any other way.
frostbite, too, is a form of affection.
if you asked me what the cartography of the human heart looks like i’d probably tell you it’s a city. with all the ridges of skyscrapers and rustle of winds in the trees, the hum of people’s conversations in the street, great bounding trains travelling from one corner to another. if you asked me what the cartography of the human heart looks like i’d start listing streets, which is why i’m not a doctor, which is why i’m not excavating for rot or ruin but rather the particular explanation for why we feel the way we do. i try to relate structure to function. i try to listen to the heartbeat, see it as a song, work out a melody that i can understand or predict or play again.
clinical is an odd word to use to mean detached; a clinician must care deeply about structure and function and cities, a clinician must be able to peer into your heart and make it work again.
you can’t find the city of the heart on a cardiogram, though i’ve tried. there is your love for your parents: an old apartment, one you’ve moved out of, one you might not visit. there are the corner stores, the friends of times past, the ones you still occasionally pop to for an ice cream and the ones that were shut down by the inspector. there is a garden full of flowers, your interests and your hobbies and your work, not necessarily the job you go to but the work that compels you to keep going, to move forward, the task that has set you to rights on this earth and that you must keep going in service of. there is the train, your dreams, lined up one after the other in each compartment. some will get where they need to and some won’t. the train will keep running. there will be delays—mechanical issues, security incidents, track work—but the train will keep running and it won’t stop.
it seems impossible that with all the developments we’ve had in medical imaging we shouldn’t be able to see this but some pictures require painting and poetry, not cameras and ultrasounds.
my heart is a city, too, which is the only way i know how to see it, and there is a house which has long been in disuse but was once a beautiful place where people would come and cook and sing to the sea. the discerning reader will remember that this is the house of love. it used to be busy, trust me, there used to be people on this beach. now there’s just a sun setting on the sea which will never betray me and cotton candy clouds and a slow, wistful wind in a room i once held court in. the curtains are thin and white and my parents bought them in montreal when they were still young. i never made it to montreal. i watch the ocean within the refuge of my heart, i think that everything i’ve done since january was an excuse to say your name one more time. the edifice of the house is crumbling.
in one sense, a memory is a power generator. in another, it is nothing at all.
people i can worship and build houses about and rewrite the curves of their lips long after they’re gone; cities, although amorphous and shifting in a manner of speaking, are never truly gone from me. berlin has evoked greater sentiment in me than boys ever did, but how do i explain this, how do i escape my long-suffering designation of being unfeeling to admit i think i feel more than anyone i know? that my clean breaks are cover for underlying sensitivity, which i have long-loathed, how my internal cities seem to crumble when touched? and i don’t want to say, it’s easier for me to devastate myself, because being alone is the hardest thing i’ve ever done. all my thoughts are tangled and matted like my hair, it’s difficult to explain. perhaps it defies explanation.
there’s an episode on blaise pascal that éric rohmer directed where an intellectual of the time says (and i paraphrase here) that fighting against the confines of language to truly express yourself is an idiotic goal, but it’s also the only thing humanity can do. i was furious at him for calling it stupid. i was less so when he explained it is a restriction on existence.
if we were able to perfectly and adeptly express ourselves with language, if we could not conceal the barren truth behind the unwieldy tools to use to express it, it seems to me earth would become a particular heaven. behind the bars of syntax there is a real truth, a real feeling. i am telling you that cities are the sites and stories of romance; that the human heart has an entire city inside it; that you can simulate lost love as an abandoned house on a beach. maybe if i possessed the words with which to articulate the depth of my feeling and the profundity of how i think about loss, maybe then i could be understood by you, maybe then there would be no need for writers.
writing is an exercise of the troubled mind to transform the even more troubled world into neat, understandable phrases. (further, mathematics is an exercise of the troubled mind to find solace in abstraction and conception that you cannot find in being, more on this another time.) the invisible city of complete understanding must remain an inaccessible heaven, for in the absence of a reason to labour, to see the light of being understood, why should anyone do anything?
i’m just saying. just thinking. just writing. that’s all i know how to do. that and dream about the cities that have touched my heart and which i hope to touch in return, dream of the return to barcelona and subsequently the return to love.
all my love,
arden.
oh this is so lovely & beautifully written !!