The Write Thing

There are moments in life when silence is all that is possible. In an odd, untimely way, I believe I had a severe case of this almost for the last two months. Lots of things are changing in my life right now. New doors are opening while others have closed apparently in a much more certain way than I would have imagined, or even liked. Oddly enough, it is in those times when writing becomes the obvious channel. However, I have not written — except for work reasons — for exactly 59 days.

I cannot possibly expect anyone who ever read this blog to even become aware of my return. Those generous souls who would now and then glance at the website for a peek into whatever oddity I would decide to indulge my keyboard into by now have probably given up all hope. Yes, lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. You would do the right thing by refraining from trusting an erratic author. Life is much more beautiful when you do not have to be surprised by other people’s changing moods.

If I were a good writer, I would be able to summarize in a concise text my whereabouts since I decided to put this blog in the freezer. Oh, well…I don’t think I can do that. Therefore, I will speak about the future, about new horizons, about uncertainty itself. Houston beckons, this time for a more permanent contract. What this means is a lot and nothing. It means I still have a job, and new challenges, but it does not bind anyone to anything — including myself. A few years ago, Houston had also seemed to be the place where I would be residing on a longer term basis. However, neither life nor I were ready for the jump, so the whole fantasy only materialized in a short story I wrote at the time and which I named “Letters from Houston”. It was written in Spanish…and I’ll never know why. Houston was on hold, and in a very particular fashion, I was coming out of my own personal limbo of indecision and non-living. Many things changed in the two years that passed since a first door to the US was closed, partially by H1-B quotas and partially by myself. I plunged into my own abyss, emerged half-victorious and wounded, and created my own re-birth, as Sylvia Plath would say beautifully at the end of that prodigious scene of The Bell Jar. I played around the limits of desire and succumbed to the demons of dysfunctional relationships, I naively believed it was possible to set free a repressed love and not pay the high cost of its loss, but I also learned to let go. I learned that letting go is the only way of healing, and the hardest.

Yes, I miss her sometimes…her laughter, her friendship, her beautiful eyes, and I secretly know there will be no letters from Houston, and no Copacabana Palace. We are no more anything, and it scares me to think that I always knew…because I wrote the end of my own story throughout the summers of her absence and my pain and I was right, even before she severed the bond to escape a friendship that now she feared.

Oh, but this posting was supposed to be about my future. Well, nothing is really about the future unless it comes from our own past. So I will raise a symbolic glass of champagne and toast to us, to the land of no regrets, to the bitter taste that time will turn into sweet vignettes of a youthful Paris…the world we knew before, dont je ne regrette rien

I find myself writing on this blog instead. I have been so disconnected from writing this past month…although it is not really the case, as I usually spend most of my time writing for my work. I should probably blame it on the time of the year, or on the fact that November brought her back to me for a brief period of time.

She was here again, in my house and in my bed. She came, she saw, she won. She did all that without my noticing, once more breaking down the barriers I initially lifted between us over a year ago with serene firmness. Now she belongs, and she is perhaps more afraid of that than I could ever be. November is a good month, preceding closure and consolidating the ten months that went before. Whatever it is that you did not do in November, you may not do in December, choosing instead to postpone it for the year ahead. November is like a corner turning around the end to find a new beginning. And now I know there may not be another November in Buenos Aires for me in the shorter term…well, do I?

All of my life I will probably feel at odds with the part of the world where I was born and raised, but I will always defend the logic of its seasons, perfectly in tune with a year that begins and ends in a promising cycle. Yes, a year undoubtedly must end in summer — no, winter is not natural, it just doesn’t feel right. You need the lighter and sunnier days at the end of your year, because endings need to have some form of hope embedded in them. By the same token, a summer in the middle of the year is unacceptable…it is cheating. Europe and America do indeed cheat, so it is the South that makes the promise abide by the rules.

The South therefore received her with open arms in early November, after tsunamis had taken her to mysterious and faraway lands. Once the initial confusion of airport gates had passed and I saw her natural stride take over the arrival hall while she headed for the liberating doors, there was some form of restoration. A few well-built figures had to be dodged before we could get lost in our first embrace and then merge in a soft, tender first kiss. It is indeed in that kiss that all the past vanishes. It is that touch and the complexity of the feelings it conveys that makes the wait that has preceded it and that will follow it worthwhile. It is her hands on my face, her homely kiss, the image that my eyes confirm before them that finally bring a sense, a purpose. Her memory and her miracle converge and she takes shape as a reality, as my reality, and I know I do not want to measure my love or my words like an insulin dose. We will both have to put up with that, with who we are and what we create together. I know I am ready for the road ahead, no matter how many suitcases it entails. I hope she is as well.

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.