The Write Thing

I normally would not be writing about this, but I have just finished watching the fourth episode of The L Word and it set me thinking about affinity between human beings. We tend to associate attraction with chemistry between two people, and from there some of us — or most of us — construct relationships. However, I consider chemistry to be only a small portion of the whole sensual experience of loving. It is only a start. The rest, the foundations of what later on will be the bond, is affinity. I looked the word up at Visual Thesaurus and found a couple of definitions for this term:

a close connection marked by community of interests or similarity in nature or character

a natural attraction or feeling of kinship.

The episode ends with a deep, passionate and sad kiss between one of the leading couples in the series, Bette and Tina. Well, I’m not going to digress with the full story of these two, as that would involve summarizing five seasons. So, if you are a follower you will understand what has just happened. If you are not, the DVDs are for sale. Maybe eighty percent of the viewers felt the same, or something similar, when they saw their kiss last night. In the last scene, the kiss is the only substitute for the words that they use to pretend they are doing fine dating other people when, in fact, every step along the way they realize more and more where they belong. Why? Because the affinity is there.

Now, is that enough to sustain a relationship or to keep a couple afloat? Maybe not. Sometimes people need to move on to other things. Sometimes, they need to move on, only to come back to the beginning strengthened from the experience.

…But don’t you see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older) and so I have to take my little precautions. Thats why I put the emphasis on ‘recording’ rather than feeling. But donkey West knows she has broken down more ramparts than anyone. And isnt there something obscure in you? There’s something that doesn’t vibrate in you: It may be purposely — you don’t let it: but I see it with other people, as well as with me: something reserved, muted — God knows what…It’s in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central transparency — sometimes fails you there too….

Virgina Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West. November 19, 1926

As I read this I thought of how many of us would identify with Woolf’s words. Human beings have different ways of showing and hiding emotions. Here Woolf speaks about “precautions”. Who doesn’t take precautions in relationships? Maybe some of us don’t even when we feel that something does not “vibrate” in the other, and when we start assessing what the other is like in the presence of other people but us.

History would claim Vita was a free woman, able to do as she pleased. Maybe her freedom resided in the way she did not have to take precautions, in this non-vibration Woolf so clearly felt. There is nothing more difficult than to chase a vibration that does not exist. Paradoxically, the other is not aware of what goes on inside, and becomes a rampart like the ones Vita herself “broke down”. That is the cost of freedom.

A few years ago, I started a weblog. Those were the days when people actually called blogs “weblogs”. Years went by, my blog soon was out of fashion, and the whole venture was discontinued. One could argue that it was too much work, or that things started happening too fast and there was suddenly not enough time to write anymore. Now, seven years after that initial effort, I thought that a second chance was well-deserved. We are online again, on a formal structure, but with a clin d’oeil to those who have a literary inclination. Why donkey? It comes from Donkey West, the nickname that Virginia Woolf used to refer to her friend, fellow writer Vita Sackville-West.