Maybe romance is a place
When delusional and profound, love is gooey and clay-like, melting to create a deformed and bleeding heart.
2010. Love as a flamboyant red dress flowing on a cold marble. Marina Abramovic is sitting in the middle of the MoMA for an artistic performance titled A minute of silence. Strangers face her for a minute each as she remains still, impassible. In a stagnant trance, it’s the stare and the look in her eyes that first fail when her former partner Ulay suddenly sits in the chair before her. A few years ago, they were already materializing their relationship in The Lovers, one of them pointing a charged arrow towards the other. Thirty years later, they are once again meeting through art. Because love is art. It is a performance and a dance, a ritual to become one, breathe and speak as one for years before the end. Bodies entangled into an intelligible shape. Kissing: saliva to saliva; feeling the smile of the other from the inside. Then, with the end comes a new beginning: from the lovers to the silence. If an arrow was pointed straight at the heart, it is now the gaze that lingers, that creates the imaginary thread that once intertwined their lives together before the tears.
In one last emotional embrace, she reaches for him and intertwines their fingers.
A minute of silence (2010) by Marina Abramovic at MoMA
We think of love as a general concept: it is friable and abstract, impossible to define in idealtypic terms. It does not have enumerable functions, symptoms, anything that can help us go beyond the feeling it conveys to express it, beyond the idea of a movement that remains immaterial and at times inexplicable. We sometimes consider love and attraction as synonymous and interchangeable terms. But there is an invisible line to be drawn between the two.
Attraction is a juvenile play of magnets while love can be - despite the conventional vision we have of it - material. It’s a substance, viscous and rampant with vibrant neon colours, it is growing inside like a pink slimy virus. It’s the pounding of a drum, a chest rising and this substance taking control of the mind, the body, every fibre of the being until nothing remains; love is a parasite that affects all areas of life. It is sentences repeated over and over until they finally gain a new meaning; joy in repetition:
“If it matters you complete me.”
Love Love Love Love Love: the lewdness of the sentence and the word, shameful on the tongue, repeated until nothing but the way the syllables that hit the palate remains. There are 60 different ways to talk about love in Arabic with different degrees that rank from appreciation to devotion, passion, obsession and adoration. Do they compare to the noise of skin collapsing; we know nothing but the passion of the skin, the need to be physical because language isn’t enough. 60 words lack purpose and meaning, do not reflect the viscerality of the feeling. Love Love Love Love Love.
“Kissing on the corner,
Wait for just a minute”
It is redefining the normality, the habit of being, of existing: you dress for love, you breathe and eat and sleep and drink for it until it takes over every ounce of life, every field and theme that it has to offer. When it lingers, it is a toothache, an extension to the epidermis that reaches for the gum and expands.
Love is neon and unnatural, colours so bright you cannot imagine them anywhere else but in the landscape of dreams, in the sound of music from an echoing room; music that transcends sound itself, transports you to a liminal space where you levitate. Music is undoubtedly love and that’s why it is so keen on portraying it, in every aspect and every colour it has to offer. It adds a tune to the dance and leads it. It puts a melody to the unspoken, impossible words.
When delusional and profound, love is gooey and clay-like, melting to create a deformed and bleeding heart.
“I pray for your kindness, heart on a spit.
Maybe romance is a place
For me
And you”
I don’t believe in anything but devotion, far away from and antithetical to tenderness - no matter the softness of the melody and the whispered tongue. I believe in taking the bullet straight to the organs and drawing letters with the blood that springs from it. Grab and bruise the skin. Brutality in the caress - distorted guitar sounds when the strings echo like a heartbeat; it is every touch and every move felt like an aggression, a moment of wavering and transe.
Does the skin remember love, does it keep and treasure the trace of it once it’s gone? Bodies betray us and memories betray the way our bodies felt under another. Breathless. Illusions. Flashing lights as we’re speeding on the highway. Chattered. Spilled milk on the counter like feelings. Bite marks on the back before being led to the stake.
“I hope they never understand us
I put my heart inside your palms”
The rain washes us clean from the sin of the cold October night. The air moves in slow waves around our skins like a hood, the only thing keeping us apart, a barrier so soft yet perfectly solid to the outside world. We will love during foggy mornings, in their sacred intimacy, right before the world awakes. Before the Beginning.
Meriem Ben Mimoun
Songs quoted in order of appearence:
IN THE MODERN WORLD - FONTAINES DC
ROMANCE - FONTAINES DC
NOTHING MATTERS - THE LAST DINNER PARTY
