“It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio.” – Richard Siken (Scherezade)
“What do I think of love? – As a matter of fact, I think nothing at all of love. I’d be glad to know what it is but being inside, I see it in existence, not in essence. What I want to know (love) is the very substance I employ in order to speak (the lover’s discourse). Reflection is certainly permitted, but since this reflection is immediately absorbed in the mulling over of images, it never turns into reflexivity: excluded from logic.” – Roland Barthes
“Nostalgia, it’s delicate but potent.” – Don Draper (Madmen)
Throughout the summer of 2016, I have spent an ample amount of time immersing myself into the kaleidoscopic varieties of Art. I ventured through museums, journeyed my husked brown boots through exhibitions, and was even welcomed by artists in their home studios across the five boroughs of New York City. Amongst the collections that I have encountered, the most mind-provoking exhibition is the Met Breuer’s “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” showing. The exhibition ushered over 190 pieces of art dated from the Renaissance to the present time and examines the idea of works that are literally unfinished, or that stylizes a non finito–an art technique that renders to be aesthetically unresolved or intentionally fragmented. The artworks that were shown at the exhibit are beautiful yet haunting, perhaps because of how much space and possibilities that the artists have left the viewer to ponder on. There must be a list of reasons why artists would stop on continuing their work. But wouldn’t love be the same way? Sometimes you decide to stop painting on the canvas that you and your lover created not necessarily because you stop loving them but because of those minute reasons. Maybe one of you relocated, maybe you prefer taking an Uber to KFC while they prefer taking long walks to Coney Island, maybe they think Justin Bieber slayed singing in Spanish while you think Bieber needs to take Spanish lessons in the Bronx, etc. Reasons vary and the only thing that we can do is to wonder why we love. But what is love? Sanskrit has 96 words to describe love, while English provides us with just one. Naturally, we constantly grapple on the question of who deserves it and who doesn’t. In the Unfinished, we will elaborate the concept of unfinished love within discourses on art, religion, linguistic, sociology, and bioethics.
The Artist
Fragmented art arouses the mind. As I strode through the Met’s Unfinished collection, I vexed on the amount of time, the expensive art supplies that I have to purchase, not to mention the patience and skills that I utilize on my work. I then ramble on how many possible brunches, sleep and coffee dates that I have exchanged with spending quality time painting and modelling my artistic evocation. Which brings me to a thesis question of, “how does the artist know that this painting is finished?” (Elkins 2011)
Alice Neel, one of my favorite contemporary artists from New York, and whose artwork is a part of the unfinished exhibition, painted a depiction of a black soldier named James Hunter. What’s special about her work is that after Hunter abruptly walked out from a single sitting, Neel never continued her work nor trashed the picture. She signed, dated, titled the work and deemed it as finished.
Gustav Klimt, a renowned Viennese painter, also left his painting unfinished but for an alternate reason. Klimt depicted a posthumous portrait of Ria Munk II that brought people into question. The whole history of this work is incredibly ironic due to how the work was born by death, and died from death. Munk committed suicide after her fiancée called off their engagement; Klimt, who was commissioned to paint her, struggled to portray her in such a way that would plant a wide grin on Munk’s family, then Klimt himself passed away. Both Klimt and Neel have different reasons to why they stopped painting. Neel’s understanding of the beauty in the abstract, while Klimt having passed away - but don't we lovers also have different reasons to why we stop loving?
Saudade and the Surrender
Love is always adhered somewhere in the vomits of personal conversations in bars of cafes and even musical creations. It extends from the vital question of "Are you seeing anyone?" in the beginnings of a romantic connection, to the rapper YG’s 2014 hit single "B*tch, who do you love?”, all the way to the drifting quandary from a friend: "Aw sh*t, are you in love with him?". Truly, does love ever disappear? Saudade, a Portuguese and Galician word, evokes this feeling of potent nostalgia and melancholy rooted from love. You would feel saudade towards a person, a location, an experience, or even food that you have encountered or have not yet to experience. Saudade is what the great Portuguese poet Manuel de Melo conceptualizes as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment that you enjoy” – the joy of having experienced what you have had in that minute, the sorrow you feel of leaving that atmosphere, and the excitement of starting another segment of your life. In the Spanish language, the feeling of love, enamorada, is considered as unending and arbitrary – an experience that you can’t put a wall of an “end” to. But how do we truly know that we are in love?
The French philosopher, Roland Barthes wrote: “He is in love: he creates meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.” The definition of love and how you might feel the emotional experience of love is simply a sociologically constructed emotional experience. Clifford Geertz succinctly pointed out: “Not only ideas, but emotions too are cultural artifacts. (1973, p. 81). Therefore, what we will know that we feel love when we are acting of what Hochschild contends as “emotion work”– of which where we are pressured to arouse the emotion we think we should feel through what society wants us to do (e.g texting our lovers religiously, asking our lover how they feel and taking care of them, stalking our lovers’ instagram, etc); this continual arouse for emotional affect will then create an amount of social control. Schahter (1959, p. 128) suggests it: “Just as there are pressures to establish the ‘correctness’ of an opinion and the ‘goodness’ of an ability, there are pressures to establish the ‘appropriateness’ of an emotion or bodily state”.
Psychologically, love is the wild child of attachment. It is architected the same way between adults – built from physical touch, spending social time in contact near one another and positive social interactions (e.g open bodied laughs, and eye gazing). Love is a fruit bowl of hormones and neurotransmitters nestled together in the procreation process between mothers/fathers and infants. The “love” hormones (estrogen/testosterone, and oxytocin) and neurotransmitters (serotonin, and dopamine) would surge rapidly as you continuously spend a copious amount of time with your lover. Soon, you will be harnessed towards this experience and your body will then be conditioned to process them all too quickly. What happens when you leave the person who causes it? Withdrawals would occur. Your body discontinues producing the oxytocins and serotonin, which penetrates on behaviors that are parallel to symptoms of depression or anxiety. Thus far, many people would yell “It’s so hard to move on!” after a breakup, because they feel estranged from the typical stimulation that used to feel from being surrounded with their lover.
Walter Goldschmidt, an anthropologist, calls the wanting to love as “affect hunger”, and contends this as a social and physiological system that conjugates mammals together of all ages and sexes. Affect Hunger in human beings is like the width of a plane ride from New York City to Fiji, wide ranging to different individuals but also be found much more intense and complex compared to other primates. Other expounded research conceptualizes positive interactions as "pair bond”. Pair bonding is generated by the interlocking binds between males and females that involves social connections and sexual activities, incorporating mating and raising of young. Several publications stated that pair bonding is the crux of human society and an elemental event in human evolutionary history. Although, there are ample evidences that points humans to seek pair bond (both social and sexual) continuously, it does not necessarily involve sex, marriage exclusivity, heterosexuality, nor a coherent relationship label. You can acquire pair bond with a relative, the guy who takes your order at Dunkin’ Donuts, a girl you dated for 3 weeks, or the hot guy that you always flirt with in British Lit. Pair bond is a long macaroni necklace of social ties that ranges from asexuality, polyamory to homosexuality. The complexity of pair bonding suggested to be the reason to why humans do better than almost any other organism existing; it is the dangerous Bermuda Triangle at the cusp between the intricately embossed golden pillars of flirtatious unconsciousness to the damp plummets of reality. But once you've whirled into the triangle of infatuation, the question to ask is will you turn to your reasons and pull out your vessel strenuously to escape or would you surrender to the indigo waters and let your holistic self be drowned into the concept of "love"? Both are hard to do. It is a strategic qualitative choice.
In the Qur’an, there is a section to where the holy book questions Islam itself by asking the trivial question, “So have you surrendered?” (Surah 11:14). This brings emphasis to the idea of submission and how pivotal it is to practice the act of submission as a Muslim. When you submit, you take away the focus that you have on yourself to another form of being. It is an incredibly intimate and daunting act of worship because you are prostrating your needs, wants, future (inshallah saying on Surah 18:24) and actions to this unknown form of spiritual guidance. It is not a form of religion, it is an act of complete devotion and conviction that God has the authority to control all walks of life. Thus, worship is a form of love. Perhaps God isn't an entity that you can attain and speak physically right there then on, insofar it is excruciatingly difficult to remain in the path of God or even to contain a relationship. Questions such as: Shall I worship God despite of my sinful actions? Does what God and I have even real? Am I happy when I sing religious songs or recitate verses? Should I still remain in this belief?.
In relationships, you would query to yourself: Am I ready to share the entirety of my personal thoughts and independence with this human person? Would this person accept me despite of my past? What does this relationship lead into in the future? Is this still exciting? Would I still compliment this person despite of their actions and gross haircut? Should I just leave from this and start anew?. In other words, once you have surrendered, the only choice you have is to either stay on your ground amidst the difficulties, or to simply tie your shoes, send back their things, delete their number, and leave.
Sudden Makeout Sessions and The Left Hand
Once you have protruded the word, I love you to someone, you have not only ostracized that person amongst the others in your contact list, but you also love yourself in the presence of your lover. You enjoy the teethy smiles, the senseless jokes that only both of you understand, the commonality of food choices, and the scrumptious habit of giving and receiving (e.g my favorite: massages, sudden makeout sessions, and home-cooked pasta). Aristotle contends this as a habit: something that you train your pain and pleasure receptors to comply with – a compromising activity that end up finding delicious pleasure in the end and find emptiness when it is taken away from you. Because of this habit, insofar through time and space that succumbs your relationship, you have surrendered the locket to your metaphysical existence for that person gnash your emotions into brittle ashes resting on your tongue, or water the most microscopic seeds of your life and let that relationship grow.
This year, I start to unravel the scaffolds what love means by asking the question “What is the opposite of love?” to my friends. Though most of them acclaim “hate” or “indifference”, two definitions that truly strike me is one where my friend Veera stated: “But how do you know what the opposite of love is if you don’t know how to define love through words?”. Another definition is from a friend whom I have had romantic entanglements with – “I think the opposite of love is similar to looking at your left hand. You don’t particularly have extreme feelings about it, but you just know that it exists, it’s a part of you, and you appreciate what it did to you. It's an experience that is only yours to have felt and learned."
In the objective of contentment for an unfinished relationship, it is elemental to see both the goose bumps ridden indulgence and the probability of a painful end at the start of an interaction with your romantic partner. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher wrote: With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. So if then you press your lips against your lovers’, remind yourself that you only kiss humans, and humans may leave you for someone else or perish into soil. However, the experience of being with them is only yours and their emotional reaction is not within your control.
Maserati Quattroporte
Lovers are artists. Artists get inspired by the people propelling around them, or an upheaving atmosphere that would invigorate their minds. Inspirations arouses them to think of various types of textures, a meteoric selection of colors and a latitude of shapes/lines on the canvas they are painting on. Like artists, we would dip our brush into the liquid blood of our affection and stain our love filled paint onto our relationship canvas. The canvas, would later be modeled and stylized by various materials and techniques of love languages. Some people would stroke their brushes to receive romantic connection in form of gifts, an act of service, a moment of undivided attention, an upkeep of assurance or physical touch. People would paint and paint until their affection would eventually run out and needed to be refilled. If the artist is willing, they/s/he would continue to paint. If not, another canvas with a different set of idea would be exchanged for the unfinished work.
One could argue how illogical the inspirations that the artists obtain from, but isn’t love sometimes irrational? Love does not emerge from their cool aviator glasses, ragged leather jacket, voluptuous body, 5th Avenue East apartment, or even their cherry shine 2017 Maserati Quattroporte. It’s that unfathomable feeling that you experience from observing your lover both at their most fragile state and how much they have overcome with you that makes you stay present and burn. People might not be intrigued of why you are infatuated with that individual, but as the artist is inspired by a certain light of a muse, your view on your loved one is your own. It was rational at the time to paint a particular image with your loved one on that canvas, and that’s okay. Besides, you have actually clenched much more knowledge of this world from dating them, even for a short time. Just as Nietzsche has supposed, “Say rather: “It is our work! Let us be proud of it!”
Quite frankly, would you ever erase the love? I wouldn’t. All of them would not be beneficial nor expansive for my life now, but every moment or object that my past loves have charred my mind constantly remind me of how I used to stroke my coarse black brush onto that pigeon white canvas and volunteered to give affection. Thus, as I signed, dated, and titled my piece; I smirk, and sword my nose onwards.
Sources:
Barthes, Roland. New York: HIll and Wang , 1978. Print.
Chapais, B. Primeval kinship: how pair-bonding gave birth to human society. Harvard University Press, and Lovejoy, O. (2009) Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science 326:108-115. 2008. Print
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic.
Epictetus, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The enchiridion: Epictetus. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955. Print.
Elkins, James. "Exploring Famous Unfinished Paintings in Google Art Project | Cezanne, De Kooning, Ofili (PHOTOS)." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 15 Feb. 2011. Web. 11 June 2017.
Goldschmidt, Walter. The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene/ Oxford University Press, 2005. Print
Shott, Susan. "Emotion and Social Life: A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis." American Journal of Sociology 84.6 (1979): 1317-334.
"Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible." Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible | The Metropolitan Museum of Art. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 June 2017.
