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On New Year’s Day, I made two resolutions: to wear more red, and to start birding this year. I’m wearing more red, but have yet to start birding. And as I waited for my oatmeal to simmer this morning, I came across an interview with Debbie Blue on her book, Consider the Birds1. In it, the interviewer David Crumm reads back a selection from the book’s introduction:
“Falling in love and identifying birds have similar effects. Normal life is altered; every experience heightened; what was mundane begins to explode with new meaning. You think birds are just birds—undifferentiated fluttering, then you find one magnified in your lens. You recognize its unique markings, lines and color. Your heart pounds. It is a cerulean warbler. It is your new mate. I believe both things have equal power to change your life. I’m not kidding.”
One of my favorite ideas about love is Kelly Oliver’s, which says that love is an ethics of otherness that thrives on the adventure of otherness…[that] requires a commitment to the advent and nurturing of difference.2”
And while it is certainly tempting to hide, omit, conceal, and deny aspects of ourselves that we fear will be undesirable through the lens of those we wish to be loved by, each are barriers to the experience of difference. The more real we become—to ourselves and each other—the more possible love is. And this is one of the most exciting and terrifying things I can think of.
When I began writing weekly Offerings almost three years ago, I started with a seven-week retelling of Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche. I was very interested in romantic love at the time, and also in jealousy. And I wanted to see what this very old tale had to say in the way of those things.
I am not going to retell the whole story, here. But I will say this:
Psyche is the youngest of three daughters. All are gorgeous, but she is the most. She is so beautiful, in fact, that people begin to grow bitter toward Venus, their longtime goddess of beauty. With all eyes on Psyche, people discontinue their Venusian offerings and start worshiping her, instead. Naturally, Venus is furious. Much more than that, she is scared.
Panicked, the neglected goddess attempts to reassure herself how fantastic she is. Superior! Better! Smarter! Richer! Immortal, for god’s sake! But if you’ve ever felt similarly, you’re as aware as I am that affirmations tend not to to cut it, when it comes to these things. She orders her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with “the most miserable creature living…the most crooked and the most vile.”
Here’s the thing: Psyche actually hates the attention she’s getting. She feels objectified by it, and unreal to those who are claiming to love her. She can’t quite put a finger on it, but there’s something deeply suspect about the whole thing. In the people’s feverish pursuit of proximity to her, they overlook her entirely. There’s something in that kind of desperation that is akin to what Deleuze said about the dreams of others, that they are “always devouring, and threaten to engulf us.3”
It’s a tough situation, all around. And as W.B. Yeats warned in The Celtic Twilight, “The admired and desired are only safe if one says ‘God bless them’ when one’s eyes are upon them.” I think he said this because he knew that too many see beauty and think only of having. And the blessing Yeats suggests—which would mitigate the harm of projecting and grasping and extracting—can look a lot of different ways.
I think it could start with becoming more real. More real to ourselves, to begin with. So that others become real to us, too. And I think the work of establishing that more real place is something akin to Yeats’ blessing; a process within which we slow down, make agreements based on real wants and limits, make sure everyone’s clear on what it is that they’re wanting, and what it is they can comfortably give.
Writing about the Cupid and Psyche story three years ago I was thinking a lot about desire and love, but not much about what it means to be real. Despite how unlikeable Venus became in her insecurities, as a deeply devotional person I was super turned off by the people’s disloyalty to her in favor of the new shiny “thing” they’d found in Psyche. What I wasn’t seeing then was how unreal both Venus and Psyche were to these people, and how confusing the whole thing was, as a result.
This language of becoming real has been with me since I pulled the Lovers on New Years Eve, but it blossomed from months of self-confrontation. One of the many fruits that emerged after months of intense mourning was the realization that intimate relationships can last for a time on the denial of needs, but for only so long.
The dance that we do to manage the anxiety of wanting to be liked, chosen, and validated in those early days of romantic love creates a foundation that demands reckoning with, sooner or later. That point of reckoning, when the masks come off, and the real wants and limitations are revealed, is a sink or swim moment. But what makes it more likely we’ll swim is a certain degree of realness—with ourselves, and with others—from the jump.
The Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot articulates love as “to feel something as real in the measure of its reality,” and as that which “awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of the world and to the reality of God.” And, “In so far as we love ourselves, we feel real. And we do not love—or we do not love as much as ourselves—other beings, who seem to us to be less real.”
What became problematic for Venus was that, happy as people were to project their yearnings for beauty onto her she was not real to them. As a reader I was moved to know she had the same fears—of abandonment and rejection and neglect—that I do, as a human. Since the people did not see her as real, Venus was settling for a fantasy of being loved that was ever at-risk. Because she was unreal to the people, she remained unloved by them and thus, they had no trouble leaving. Psyche, too is unreal, and suffers immensely as the story continues. But that’s a tale for another day, maybe.
All of this is to say I’ve been thinking about the project of becoming real so much. At times I have worried that to become real to myself would make others less real, but I am seeing there’s nothing less true. Becoming real to myself is a way in to the realness of others, the world, and God (which I understand as Ivone Gebara does as relatedness4). The more seriously I take my wants, needs, and limits, the more capable I am not only to withstand or respect the realness of others, but to celebrate it.
I have Betty Martin’s book, The Art of Receiving and Giving to thank for a lot of this thinking. In many ways it is a book about becoming real. The entry point to Martin’s work for me—which my therapist beautifully described in a session several weeks ago—was the idea that sometimes when we’re not clear about what we want, we couch our requests in the performance of giving.
For instance, if I desire to be emotionally close to you but feel unclear, ashamed, anxious, or judgmental about that desire, I might offer to rub your shoulders or cook you a meal when what I really want is access to your heart and to know your true feelings.
A shoulder rub may seem harmless, but consider the violence of a government that wants access to land, labor and resources and offers to “support” with “development” that if “agreed” upon will give them access to those things. A desire couched in the language of an offering may feel at best confusing and at worst extractive, manipulative, coercive, and violent.
Becoming real may be a practice that involves three things: slowing down enough to get clear on my wants and limits; trusting what arises through this slowing down as “accurate”; and knowing that what I want matters. Simple as they sound I’m finding none of these easy. I’m also finding that life’s opening up in new ways. Obviously, knowing I want something doesn’t make me entitled to having it. But taking the want itself seriously lets me make an honest request rather than seek to get those needs met in a roundabout, tricky, or non-consensual way.
A request is genuine only to the extent that it assumes the possibility of being denied, which I think is one way to honor the realness of others. But this mutual realness is perhaps what makes love, in the words of Kelly Oliver, “an ethics of otherness that thrives on the adventure of otherness…[that] requires a commitment to the advent and nurturing of difference.”
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
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Thanks to Sean Zabashi for posting this article and passage on Twitter, which is where I encountered it.
I encountered this quote in Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman’s Toward Psychologies of Liberation.
Gilles Deleuze says this in his 1987 lecture, “What is the creative act?”
Ivone Gebara describes God as relatedness in her book Longing for Running Water.
To the realness part. I’ve been reading Pema Chodron’s The Places that Scare You and she focuses on realness of self and others throughout the book through the practice of Tonglen or Metta meditation. Initially I thought it odd because, well, what did the realness of me and others have to do with scary places in me? Of course, one reading will not do AND doing the described practice SEEMS easy but it is not. To be real and experience others as so is the literal heart of love and liberation, perhaps desire itself. It’s a practice we don’t have much practice with...
I have more things to say about this though suffice it here to thank you for your words and ideas. They are expansive for me at the moment. 🙏🏽🧘🏾
thank you. I'm re-reading helen M. Luke's the way of women. I read it years ago but couldn't absorb it then. something about coming into midlife now is creating a resonance. Only a small way through now but your words seems to dance with her idea of thinking, creating that come's via responding - receive-give-receive .... where she see's woman's gift in the 'sphere of relating' as something to revalue. i see this as rather than running/ reaching out to meet the thing and create from air (she says 'spirit') we draw it in take it into depth, stillness (gestate) so expression comes from inside rather than the alternative scrabbled version. the gestated expression is then 'real' . She uses ideas, success, relationships as examples. I'm feeling as you do, that to be this authentic (overused term sadly) and really see others too, is truly diffiult. Feels like an excavation at times.