The Write Thing

I have just finished watching James Gray’s movie Two Lovers at home, curled up on the sofa after a heavy day of rain and work. While this might not probably go down in history as the best movie I have ever seen, I must confess I was impressed at the accuracy with which hysteria was portrayed in Michelle, the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow. I am not sure that the screenwriters actually wanted to design such a perfect embodiment of a hysterical heterosexual female (well, hysteria also runs in the L-world, let me tell you). If they did not, I would presume that at least they were well acquainted with the type.

The story is about Leonard, a charming and hyper-sensitive heartbroken man living with his parents after being hospitalized a couple of times following a few suicidal attempts. Leonard’s woes apparently originated in a former relationship that bound him to a woman he loved but was forced to abandon due to their condition of carriers of a severe neurological pathology, Tay-Sachs disease. After a while alone, Leonard happens to meet Sandra, a woman who seems to be ready to commit and love him for what he is. However, life is generous to our leading man and bestows him the gift of a peculiar neighbor, Michelle, whom he meets in the corridor one evening as she tries to escape a father that yells at her from inside her apartment.

The story unfolds as a simple tale of conventional dramatic impact, but I found myself astonished at the precise depiction of hysteria in Michelle. You see, Michelle is in love with a married man that is never there for her because he has “a wife”. Although he pays for Michelle’s apartment, one floor above Leonard’s, he gives her the lover treatment, which she obviously protests — hysteria is exclusive…remember this. Michelle finds comfort in Leonard, whom she obviously sees as a friend when all the audience can realize even with their eyes closed that he is head over heels for her, and he’ll pay for it. In all fairness to Michelle, she never really plays the seduction game to him openly, but rather in the hysterical way — that is, preferring to remain blind to the sheepish looks he gives her non-stop. However, completely in line with the hysterical mind, out of the blue she will call him in the small hours of the morning, invite him to meet her on the roof in the freezing cold, and then simply ask him what he thought of her married boyfriend, whom he met earlier at dinner. Does that sound familiar? To the hysterical mind, number three is minimum…two is not even a number. Typical hysterical behavior…let’s put good love to the service or our own petty interests.

Michelle’s selfishness knows no extremes, and she will not stop at anything…unless someone stops her. But Leonard won’t. Why? Because she is beautiful, young and desired, and Leonard wants a minute with her even if it means hell later, when he goes back to his room without having been able to lay a hand on her because he was simply there to help her get what she wanted — and that is not him, but his opinion of her boyfriend. Yet he wants her, like a desperate dog ready to eat the breadcrumbs that fall off her plate, waiting to be acknowledged at least with the leftovers of whoever had her before him.

That is hysteria, which the dictionary describes as ” a state of mind, one of unmanageable fear or emotional excesses “. Fear and excesses, yes, but also absolute selfishness that blinds the hysterical being to anybody or anything that is not her, what she wants, what she needs, right the minute her mind tells her so.

Good movie to see if you are about to fall for the “Michelle” type and you want to have a chance. And mind you, the world is full of them.

I have recently started to read Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics, an interesting view of the science (is it?) of Economics. The book starts with the following definition:

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources, which have alternative uses

As I started going over Sowell’s examples of the efficient use of scarce resources, I thought how they would apply to love. Yes, I know that trying to equate economics with the way emotions work is a long shot. However, economics involves decision-making. Aren’t we always at least a little bit emotional in whatever decision we make? And isn’t the emotional factor at times fundamental to make the right decision? Or shall I say inevitable? Well…on that assumption, we should perhaps face the fact that even love can abide by the rules of economics.

Let me take the following example from Sowell’s book to illustrate this further:

When a military medical team arrives on a battlefield where soldiers have a variety of
wounds, they are confronted with the classic economic problem of allocating scarce
resources, which have alternative uses. Unless their time and medications are allocated
efficiently, some wounded will die needlessly.

How do we apply this to love, you might wonder? First you would have to bear with me, and think that love is indeed a scarce resource…or at least good love is. So, why not allocating love efficiently? Let me put it this way. We grow and are educated to let the love variable justify some of our wildest actions (like taking a plane on a whim to spend a year abroad with the guy you happened to meet when traveling as a backpacker). Is that an efficient use of your time or your scarce resources, be it love, money or anything else? There is no way of knowing, unless you try. Yet the effort of trying here will be less perceived as an inefficient allocation of the scarce resource of your life than a bad financial investment would.

The question is that love, and its erratic nature, is factored in as a “good” in our society. Even in its most nonsensical expression, love can eventually be validated by marriage. That is where economics enters the picture, efficiency being measured by how well you married — did you pick the affluent guy with a promising career, or were you inefficient enough to take a lazy bum as a husband and surrender to a life with a string of debts and kids? However, I would argue that is the efficient allocation of marriage, not love.

Let us leave marriage aside for a moment now. What about that phone call you are making? Wouldn’t you rather be in bed reading, or moving forward with your thesis, due in two weeks? Instead, you choose to have a lengthy conversation with her in which you exchange soft, loving words with a permanent smile on your face. And yes, you know tomorrow morning waking up will be a major challenge. Is that an efficient or inefficient use of love? Oh, well, I am sure we would have countering opinions here. Is it efficient, because after that one-hour talk you have more energy to resume your writing and finish on time? Or is it inefficient because the rope is now around your neck and you know you won’t have enough time to meet your deadline?

You see? That is the problem. The alternative uses of love — or the time you spend growing it — can be potentially determined by selfishness. Paradoxically, the very essence of good love starts with you, and is only possible when you are fully you. But being aware of your “self” is quite different from being simply “selfish”. Alas, yet for most the line is oftentimes blurred… and then love can be tainted by selfish insecurity, and hence reduced to a question of control. But it is not the control of scarce resources that is efficient, but their good allocation. Control is a misuse of power that has little to do with the efficient management of your time, your life, your love.

Is that the reason why good love — or efficient love, in economic terms — is so hard to find? Is it because our concept of love is easily distorted by our need for control that it sometimes flounders, becoming a sad addiction? Is that why love, unless we are reminded of its cost and the daily efforts it requires becomes a subsidy we take for granted every month until it stops and we are forced to get out there and start anew?

What do I understand by the efficiency of love? I think that efficiency is a consequence of value, and you value what you have struggled to get, or what you know you would regret to lose. People are not easy, so how could love be? Yet we seem to assume that once we get butterflies in our stomach, everything will be all right and nothing else needs to be done. On the contrary, those signs are just the beginning of your knowledge of the grand autre, the stranger who, as she unravels, will push you into a permanent decision-making process…stay or let go. Nothing holds in life, so why should love?

Love is what we feel, but also what we make of it… a scarce, unique resource. Its efficiency depends on the parties involved. If calling her tonight is a sacrifice of your time, and you are giving up on what you really want for yourself that very minute, then you are allocating your scarce resource inefficiently, and it will have a cost. Me? I root for choice instead of sacrifice as the starting point for the economics of good love.

October began with the awareness of what we have gone through in this erratic year of bits and pieces that make our love what it is. There was an initial plan of Paris in the fall, but external constraints pushed it back. Its counterpart was the end of August in DF, the reality and the briefness of you as rain fell heavily outside our window, the partial city that we chose to experience mostly within walking distance of a return to us, always knowing how time once more was against us.

All through our story, we have witnessed life’s ironic game of happiness in slow doses, each of which shed away the delusional advantages of distance, hitherto seen as a form of protection. We learned how to deal with a companion that became rather ambiguous, supporting ourselves in the knowledge that the other was somewhat near, either in word or in thought. Relying on emails and text messages became a given, and our phone calls an indulgence of beggars that were choosers for a little while.

October promised and took away, but we know it will also clear the road for a November that should bring you back into my arms. However, our familiar tyrant now asks more of us, and we can only bow to his desire, having unwillingly made him the ruler of a story that now flows beyond ourselves. In the next few days, I will find myself reading about a small set of islands in the Pacific where you were deployed yesterday and hoping that you will be all right. A new test is laid out before us, and we know it will be hard, violent and cruel.

This time words, once a given, will be withdrawn from us until your elusive return. There will be no phone calls, no tones to guess at the end of the line. We will have to content ourselves with the intangibility of thoughts, hoping they will be powerful enough to see us through this new absence… a wider chasm, an absence within absence.