Interviewer: What does it feel like?
Jović: You mean love, I suppose.
Interviewer: Love after growing up the way you did.
Jović: My father never ceases to be a captivating interview topic.
Interviewer: In the past you’ve implied that growing up with him bordered on emotional abuse.
Jović: I’ve always been tentative about putting labels on my childhood. I can imagine my father’s worst moments, but also his best, and the freedom he afforded me was a luxury some children never have the opportunity to possess. I am caught between contrasting images, a kaleidoscope of different faces, moments where I was the Little Match Girl or Cinderella and then a second of incandescent joy. It’s hard to categorize, hard to paint it all with just one brush. I deal in implications.
Interviewer: Is there anything you feel the need to clarify?
Jović: My father wasn’t a monster, but he was monstrous to me.
Interviewer: Oh.
Jović: You wanted to hear about love?
Interviewer: You don’t have to answer.
Jović: No, I want to. I want to talk about love, but in order to do so I want to talk about hunger, because I think love is one of those things we can’t live without and are too embarrassed to acknowledge its necessity. Food we can agree on. Food is a pact. Growing up the way I did, then, was like walking through the desert while starving. Sometimes you see an oasis, and you run to it, and it disappears before your touch. Sometimes someone stops by, and they offer you food in exchange for a favour, so you do it, no matter how disgusting and demeaning, because you’re starving, and once you’re done they don’t give you what they promised, just ride off laughing. So you try to make it for yourself—from plants that bite back and shrivelling sand and an imagination that can’t stand in—but all that’s left is the blazing sun, and the sweat dripping down your back, and you’re so hungry.
Interviewer: And then?
Jović: And then you make it to the palace of your dreams. Only it’s a little shorter in life, and the jewels on the roof reflect the light in a different way. You open the door, you come to the table, and it’s laden with a veritable banquet. But here’s the shock wave of starving for that long: you don’t want to eat. You think it must be a con, a grift, you’ll reach out and someone will take it away—because no one has ever given you what you wanted without a condition. Forget the metaphor for a second. No one has ever loved you without strings attached. It’s horrible, humiliating even, to be this hungry and have no desire left to show for it. There’s got to be an element you’re missing, maybe the food is rotten or spoiled, maybe it will disappear or be ripped out of your hands, because the idea of this being given to you is unbelievable. It’s like coming undone.
Interviewer: But you have to eat in the end. And you have to be loved.
Jović: Right. Even if it swallows you whole, you have to receive love. And that doesn’t have to mean romantic or familial or any specific construction. It just means that at the end of the day you need to walk in and hang up your hat and have at least one person, just one, who wants to hear a recollection of the hours you’ve been apart. I want to qualify this. I want to say it doesn’t have to be an everyday thing, or that it doesn’t have to be about hanging your hat, or that it’s going to be put under duress. And all of those things might be true, in the end, but qualifying a pure statement reduces me to the beggar sucking rotten meat off a bone outside the feast because they can’t believe it could be given without conditions.
Interviewer: You shouldn’t have to qualify it. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation of love.
Jović: At least for me. Did you ever read the Richard Siken poem—I can’t remember the name, but I can remember the line—the one where he says ‘if you love me, you don’t love me in a way I understand’? I think about that a lot. How love is this balancing act, this exchange where you’re trying to be understood and become mortified once you are, where your understanding of love is being shaped and shared with another person and you’re ceaselessly trying to reach a soft spot in the sea, some place where both of you can rest easy. In the middle of the bleak, unforgiving saltwater, you are searching out shelter from the storm, a modern sailor foregoing the stars to reach for a hand. It is mutual understanding that creates love.
Interviewer: It is different for everyone. It’s a battle against your own instincts—searching for a soft spot in the sea, as you say, instead of for the harbour or shore—and it’s mortifying to want someone badly enough to forsake safety. And that process of wanting ends up being something you have to try for with everyone you love, which might be different from others you’re comparing yourselves to, and even if you reach their spot in the sea it turns out it’s not right and doesn’t work for you at all.
Jović: Exactly. To love another person is to face intense mortification, to start sinking in that deep blue sea and scream for a hand, and no one is going to save you except the person you don’t want to see you suffer. And I can’t help but think that both of us are thinking of someone right now, perhaps multiple someones, and perhaps we’d both like to drop the metaphor and start talking about them. Only then the conversation would become unintelligible to everyone other than the two people we’d be talking about. Perhaps then we wouldn’t understand each other, and we’d each have to embark on a soliloquy on how this person’s love does this or doesn’t do that, and where would that leave us?
Interviewer: Lonely, I imagine.
Jović: Since they have no means of imminent response. [laughs] If we were in love, you and me, we could have a good conversation about it. But I suspect that of being worthless to other people, except perhaps as a standard with which to beat their own relationships with.
Interviewer: Do you want to elaborate on that?
Jović: We’ve made incredible strides in terms of our ability to communicate with other people. I flew across the world in a matter of hours to be having this conversation with you, and people are turning on their televisions to watch this interview right now, so that’s another form of communication, and when I get to my apartment this evening I can pick up my phone and call anyone I please, even if they’re thousands of kilometres away. But the technology we have that facilitates our communication, that increases our exposure, does something to create a singular way of life as it should be lived. Without making generalisations, I hope, I think there’s a growing urge to personify the projected ideal—to behave as if your life is one long episode of television complete with product placements and neatly defined arcs, where respite from the ideal or indeed divergence from it is a dreadful sin.
Interviewer: Hmm.
Jović: Yeah. We’ve come to internalise that there’s a way to live, as I said, which brooks no room for improvement or uniqueness, which says I will move through my required years of schooling with relative ease and devotion, meet someone I like an awful lot in my early twenties (so long as he conforms to what those around me have suggested I look for in a partner, otherwise how could I like him at all?), then settle down with a good job and a white picket fence and good schools, because we’re going to try to start a family.
Interviewer: That’s the American dream.
Jović: Have you ever read A Wrinkle in Time?
Interviewer: Yes.
Jović: Do you remember that scene where all the kids come out of identical houses, dressed the same way and bouncing a ball up and down the driveway? All the balls look the same. All the balls hit the pavement at the same time. And all the children’s mothers, who are dressed in the same manner and have the hairstyle, come out of the house at the same time to call the children in for dinner.
Interviewer: I think I remember that.
Jović: That’s what I think of the ‘American dream.’ Lots of kids going up and down the driveway in sync.
Interviewer: Will we ever outgrow the American dream?
Jović: One after the other, a series of boats striking out from the shore, a mutiny of children hoping for something different than what they grew up with—yes, I think that could work. I think if we went out to sea and started reaching for each other instead of the screen we might have a chance. It depends, I regret to inform you, on those that come after us, which means it depends on our changing enough to teach them.
Interviewer: [derisive] Children are the future.
Jović: In a sense. Although I don’t think I’ll have any of my own.
Interviewer: Continue.
Jović: I’ve been quite resolute on the subject. In a way there’s guilt. In a way I think that maybe if I had a daughter, and I loved the person I raised her with, and I loved her without expectation—maybe I could change the way my father raised me. There’s a new dream out there, an ideal that exists for us, one I might be able to grasp had I someone to teach it to. Maybe in the balance of the universe that would change things. I know it can’t, though, and even if it did I wouldn’t want to have kids.
Interviewer: Kids should be wanted.
Jović: Kids should be loved.
Interviewer: No obligations.
Jović: Only your own, only the dream you seek for yourself: only those people should have children. Americans have it backwards. Making children a societal aim, increasing the population with no regard for their growth—that’s a mistake. I have no doubt that there are persons who find the act of raising children to be wonderful and fulfilling who recognize their own wrongs with the same attention they do their children. And those people should raise the next generation. Out of love, not duty, which may be a form of love but not one suited to families. The rest of us, who are sick of painting our picket fences white and wearing rings on our fingers, we should stick to our gardening and let the dedicated handle humanity.
Interviewer: Hmm.
Jović: What does it feel like?
Interviewer: You mean love, I suppose.
Jović: I spoke. You ought to have your chance.
Interviewer: I’m not as eloquent as you are.
Jović: Give it a try.
Interviewer: Love is like lying in the grass on a warm summer’s day. There may be ticks in the tiny forest around you, and there may be dishes piling up on the counter, but the sum total of the universe is lying next to you with an aimless smile on his lips, pleased in that instant to be providing you with any sort of solace. And your hand reaches out between the blades, clutching his, and safety, for a short moment, has been attained.
Jović: How beautiful.
Interviewer: It never ceases to be a captivating interview topic.