I've been debating whether or not to write this for weeks.
The beginning of the year saw the end of another very brief and inconsequential fling. That's how I'm training myself to see it, although it probably meant a lot more to me than that, in all honesty. (It's a coping strategy of sorts, and, in any case, the last time I wrote about a similar topic here, the wrong person read all about it and that, as they say, was that). You wonder about it for hours and your mind can't really get any purchase on any other subject, but, for whatever reason it didn't work out. The less said about it the better, but I do want to note that the other person in this very brief and inconsequential fling read my blog. All of it. Apart from maybe my mum, I don't know of anyone else who has done this. Props to Jackson and Watkins, both of whom I suspect are avid if occasional readers; Champ, who once used this blog in a class he taught and Simon W, who chastised me when I stopped writing somewhere back there in May '08 or something.
No-one else has read all of it though and that's why I hesitated for a long time. You can never be sure of your readership, especially on the internet. You cannot guarantee your readership, nor their point of view on what you write, whatever it might be- poetry, blog entries, articles, whatever.
At work recently we've had some research about (going to say it now) Love. Someone in Japan wanted to know about timing and Love for a TV programme. When is the best time to propose, when is the best time to kiss for the first time, when to reject someone or when to ask something of someone you love. Etc.
It transpires that one of the world's premier experts on Romantic Love is an anthropologist called Dr. Helen Fisher. I had never heard of her, but you might. She is very careful to refer to Love as Romantic Love, and in various speeches, papers and books of hers she peppers her work with references to literature and folklore and aphorisms and stories about Love. She talks of it as one of a handful of things to have been found in every known society on earth and as something that people have always been driven to articulate, understand, counsel on. She'll take a quote like, 'The less my hope, the hotter my love' and study fMRI scans of people recently fallen out of a relationship and afix a scientific reasoning for the very emotion that gave birth to this poetic articulation. It's all about the reptilian brain buried at the core of our minds, apparently. She'll explain everything we have ever had to say about love, in our most lucid expressions from the best of our poets, ever, by looking at the brain and pointing to the R-complex in the middle of it all. It takes a little of the fizz out of it all, but reinvests it with so much substance.
Dr Fisher also found activity in the brain region that calculates and measures gains and losses. It's impossible to come through a very brief and inconsequential fling without trying to weigh up what you won and what you lost in it all. Things mostly pile up in the Losses column. But it looks like I've got through December and January with one big Gain, one lesson learned- comedians know it, politicians, not so much: you can't let an audience- imagined or otherwise- get in the way of what you want to say.
