#-figure something out to express it even in the minutest sense and how much his experiences form and embolden and disquiet him and GODDD

[quillheel]

─  romantic gestures.   bold what applies to your muse , italicize if there's potential / it depends.

holding hands · buying flowers · cooking · cuddles · writing a poem / song · holding door open · tying shoe laces · sharing a milkshake with two straws · offering their jacket when it's cold · kissing in the rain · publicly confessing love · long walks at the beach · doing the titanic pose on a boat · taking cute pictures in a photo booth · sharing a taxi / uber · kissing the back of their hand · slow dancing · getting tickets of their favorite artist / sports team / other · introducing them to your parents · lighting candles · flower petals on bed · love letters · star gazing · brushing / doing their hair · picnics · teaching them to play an instrument / sport while gently guiding their hands · compliments · late night drives · taking selfies together · drawing them · self-made gifts · massages · proposing with a family heirloom ring · lending them your favorite book to read · paying for dinner / coffee · mixtapes / playlists · surprise birthday parties · feeding them · handing them keys to your apartment · making space in drawer for their clothes when they stay over · sharing a blanket · couple costumes · tucking a hair strand behind their ear · running after them at the airport / keeping them from leaving · moving cities to be together · blowing a kiss · breakfast in bed · defending them in a fight (verbally / physically) · joint bubble baths · dropping the L-bomb ("i love you") · dedicating a song at the karaoke bar to them · wearing their clothes · yawning before putting an arm around them while watching a movie · granting them the last bite (from meal)

tagged by: stolen from @infog <3 I legally HAD to tagging: @tenebriism @braveryhearted @autonomousxselves @fantomevoleur @musesofthesun @pluviacuratio @tendercoded / @manebloom / @lncanting @cozyfarms @deiscension @shadowedresolve @sakuaxe @lovlorne @leuvspell @adoranoia and you!!!! ( multi's, decide as you please! )

[elisaenglish]

Love, Pain, and Growth: The Forgotten Philosopher, Poet, and Pioneering LGBT Rights Activist Edward Carpenter on How to Survive the Agony of Falling in Love

“Self-consciousness is fatal to love. The self-conscious lover never ‘arrives.’”

“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” James Baldwin reflected in his final interview. “An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her superb meditation on the dignity of love. Both the danger and the responsibility of love lie in this refining of truth, which is at bottom a refining of self, for we are the sum total of the truths by which we live. In love — in the beauty and brutality of it — we can come completely undone. But we can also make and remake ourselves. From our formative attachments to our great loves, relationship is the seedbed of our becoming, the laboratory of our self-invention and reinvention.

Nearly a century before Rich and Baldwin, the English philosopher, poet, and early LGBT rights activist Edward Carpenter (August 29, 1844–June 28, 1929) examined this eternal question of how we grow and refine ourselves through the turbulent process of love in his uncommonly insightful 1912 book The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human Evolution and Transfiguration (public library).

A correspondent of Gandhi’s and a close friend of the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, who also believed that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance” — Carpenter was one of the first Western thinkers to incorporate ancient Eastern philosophy into his moral universe. Entwined in mutual admiration with Walt Whitman, he went on to influence writers like D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster.

Carpenter composed his treatise on love two decades after he met his own great love, George Merrill, at the ripe age of fifty. They would spend the remainder of life together. Several months after Merrill’s death, Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke. He died a year later and was buried next to his beloved.

Our first experience of great love, Carpenter observes, always shocks and unsteadies us, for universal as the experience may be, it “cannot very well be described in advance, or put into terms of reasonable and well-conducted words.” (In that sense, perhaps, love shares a great deal with loss — we can never prepare for either, and each snatches the reins of our psyche to govern us on its own non-negotiable terms.) He paints the delicious and disorienting madness familiar to anyone who has ever fallen in love:

“To feel — for instance — one’s whole internal economy in process of being melted out and removed to a distance, as it were into the keeping of some one else, is in itself a strange physiological or psychological experience… To lose consciousness never for a moment of the painful void so created — a void and a hunger which permeates all the arteries and organs, and every cranny of the body and the mind, and which seems to rob the organism of its strength, sometimes even to threaten it with ruin; to forego all interest in life, except in one thing — and that thing a person; to be aware, on the other hand, with strange elation and joy, that this new person or presence is infusing itself into one’s most intimate being — pervading all the channels, with promise [of] new life to every minutest cell, and causing 25 wonderful upheavals and transformations in tissue and fluids; to find in the mind all objects of perception to be changed and different from what they were before; and to be dimly conscious that the reason why they are so is because the background and constitution of the perceiving mind is itself changed — that, as it were, there is another person beholding them as well as oneself– all this defies description in words, or any possibility of exact statement beforehand; and yet the actual fact when it arrives is overwhelming in solid force and reality. If, besides, to the insurgence of these strange emotions we add — in the earliest stages of love at least — their bewildering fluctuation, from the deeps of vain longing and desire to the confident and ecstatic heights of expectation or fulfilment — the very joys of heaven and pangs of hell in swift and tantalizing alternation — the whole new experience is so extraordinary, so unrelated to ordinary work-a-day life, that to recite it is often only to raise a smile of dismissal of the subject — as it were into the land of dreams.

And yet, as we have indicated, the thing, whatever it is, is certainly by no means insubstantial and unreal. Nothing seems indeed more certain than that in this strange revolution in the relations of two people to each other — called “falling in love” — and behind all the illusions connected with it, something is happening, something very real, very important.”

Carpenter then makes an astute point that remains thoroughly countercultural in the context of our rather limited and limiting romantic mythologies: He argues that whatever the outcome of a great love, whatever its duration, it is still a triumph and a transformation to be celebrated.

In Figuring, reflecting on Margaret Fuller’s remark at the end of a significant love affair that “the union of two natures for a time is so great,” I wrote:

“Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only ‘for a time’? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity.”

I find such consonant consolation in Carpenter’s words:

“The falling-in-love may be reciprocal, or it may be onesided; it may be successful, or it may be unsuccessful; it may be only a surface indication of other and very different events; but anyhow, deep down in the sub-conscious world, something is happening. It may be that two unseen and only dimly suspected existences are becoming really and permanently united; it may be that for a certain period, or (what perhaps comes to the same thing) that to a certain depth, they are transfusing and profoundly modifying each other; it may be that the mingling of elements and the transformation is taking place almost entirely in one person, and only to a slight degree or hardly at all in the other; yet in all these cases — beneath the illusions, the misapprehensions, the mirage and the maya, the surface satisfactions and the internal disappointments — something very real is happening, an important growth and evolution is taking place.”

Noting that understanding this bewildering phenomenon, having even the slightest sense of “the points of the compass by which to steer over this exceedingly troubled sea,” is an operative imperative for any human being’s personal maturation, Carpenter adds:

“Love is concerned with growth and evolution. It is — though as yet hardly acknowledged in that connection — a root-factor of ordinary human growth; for in so far as it is a hunger of the individual, the satisfaction of that hunger is necessary for individual growth — necessary (in its various forms) for physical, mental and spiritual nourishment, for health, mental energy, large affectional capacity, and so forth. And it is — though this too is not sufficiently acknowledged — a root-factor of the Evolution process. For in so far as it represents and gives rise to the union of two beings in a new form, it plainly represents a step in Evolution, and plainly suggests that the direction of that step will somehow depend upon the character and quality of the love concerned.”

One of our greatest misunderstandings about love, and mispractices of it, is the tendency to focus on only those aspects of the other that rivet us most intensely — only the physical in an attraction dominated by lust, only the mental in an intellectual crush, only the emotional in a romantic infatuation. Cautioning against such fragmentary simulacra of love, Carpenter writes:

“Love is a complex of human relations — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and so forth — all more or less necessary. And though seldom realized complete, it is felt, and feels itself, to be imperfect without some representation of every side. To limit it to the expression of one particular aspect would be totally inadequate, if not absurd and impossible. A merely physical love, for instance, on the sexual plane, is an absurdity, a dead letter — the enjoyment and fruition of the physical depending so much on the feeling expressed, that without the latter there is next to no satisfaction. At best there is merely a negative pleasure, a relief, arising from the solution of a previous state of corporeal tension. And in such cases intercourse is easily followed by depression and disappointment. For if there is not enough of the more subtle and durable elements in love, to remain after the physical has been satisfied, and to hold the two parties close together, why, the last state may well be worse than the first!

But equally absurd is any attempt to limit, for instance, to the mental plane, and to make love a matter of affectionate letter-writing merely, or of concordant views on political economy; or again, to confine it to the emotional plane, and the region of more or less sloppy sentiment; or to the spiritual, with a somewhat lofty contempt of the material — in which case it tends… to become too like trying to paint a picture without the use of pigments.”

He notes the necessary complementarity of these elements in a truly satisfying love — a simple and rather obvious point, yet one to which we so readily turn a willfully blind eye when governed by a strong attraction:

“The physical is desirable, for many very obvious reasons — including corporeal needs and health, and perhaps especially because it acts in the way of removal of barriers, and so opens the path to other intimacies. The mental is desirable, to give form and outline to the relation; the emotional, to provide the something to be expressed; and the spiritual to give permanence and absolute solidity to the whole structure.”

More than a century before the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh asserted that “to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” Carpenter argues that love is not merely an internal state — it is also an outward practice, to be mastered and refined by engaging every aspect of oneself and the beloved:

“Love has its two sides — its instantaneous inner side, and its complex outer side of innumerable detail. In consciousness it tends to appear in a flash — simple, unique, and unchangeable; but in experience it has to be worked out with much labor. All the elements have to come into operation, and to contribute their respective quota to the total result… Love searches the heart, drags every element of the inner nature forward from its lurking-place, gives it definition and shape, and somehow insists on it being represented.”

If this holistic satisfaction of the soul is the one leg on which love stands, time is the other. In a sentiment that calls to mind John Steinbeck’s beautiful letter of advice to his lovestruck teenage son — “If it is right, it happens,” the Nobel laureate wrote. “The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” — Carpenter urges:

“For any big relationship plenty of time has to be allowed. Whichever side of the nature — mental, emotional, physical, and so forth — may have happened to take the lead, it must not and cannot monopolize the affair. It must drag the other sides in and give them their place. And this means time, and temporary bewilderment and confusion.”

A century before the Lebanese-American poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran contemplated the courage to weather the uncertainties of love, Carpenter adds:

“For the complete action of that creative and organizing force plentiful time must be given; and the two lovers must possess their souls in patience till it has had its full and perfect work… A long foreground of approach, time and tact, diffusion of magnetism, mergence in one another, suffering, and even pain — all these must be expected and allowed for — though the best after all, in this as in other things, is often the unexpected and the unprepared.”

A century earlier, the philosopher William Godwin had written in his stunning love letters to the philosopher and feminism founding mother Mary Wollstonecraft as the two were forging the first true marriage of equals in the history of letters: “We love… to multiply our consciousness… even at the hazard… of opening new avenues for pain and misery to attack us.” Carpenter examines this most bewildering aspect of the experience — the curious interdependence between love and pain, which seems to be an inevitable function of the growth process love effects:

“Love, if worth anything, seems to demand pain and strain in order to prove itself, and is not satisfied with an easy attainment. How indeed should one know the great heights except by the rocks and escarpments? And pain often in some strange way seems to be the measure of love — the measure by which we are assured that love is true and real; and so (which is one of the mysteries) it becomes transformed into a great joy.

[…]

Pain and suffering… have something surely to do with the inner realities of the affair, with the moulding or hammering or welding process whereby union is effected and, in some sense, a new being created. It seems as if when two naked souls approach, or come anywhere near contact with each other, the one inevitably burns or scorches the other. The intense chemistry of the psychic elements produces something like an actual flame. A fresh combination is entered into, profound transformations are effected, strange forces liberated, and a new personality perhaps created; and the accomplishment and evidence of the whole process is by no means only joy, but agony also, even as childbirth is.”

In a passage evocative of Charlotte Brontë’s lament, penned in the grip of an unrequited love, that “when one does not complain… one pays for outward calm with an almost unbearable inner struggle,” Carpenter counsels the love-anguished:

“All one can reasonably do is to endure. It is no good making a fuss. In affairs of the heart what we call suffering corresponds to what we call labor or effort in affairs of the body. When you put your shoulder to the cart-wheel you feel the pain and pressure of the effort, but that assures you that you are exercising a force, that something is being done; so suffering of the heart assures you that something is being done in that other and less tangible world. To scold and scowl and blame your loved one is the stupidest thing you can do. And worse than stupid, it is useless. For it can only alienate. Probably that other one is suffering as well as you — possibly more than you, possibly a good deal less. What does it matter? The suffering is there and must be borne; the work, whatever it is, is being done; the transformation is being effected. Do you want your beloved to suffer instead of you, or simply because you are suffering? Or is it Pity you desire rather than Love.”

As useless as the protesting and complaining, Carpenter argues, is any effort to put into words the density and magnitude of one’s feelings — an experience this vast must only be expressed in the language of life itself. More than half a century before the German humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm published his influential book The Art of Loving, Carpenter writes:

“Love is an art… As no mere talk can convey the meaning of a piece of music or a beautiful poem, so no verbal declaration can come anywhere near expressing what the lover wants to say. And for one very good and sufficient reason (among others) — namely, that he does not know himself! Under these circumstances to say anything is almost certainly to say something misleading or false. And the decent lover knows this and holds his tongue. To talk about your devotion is to kill it — moreover, it is to render it banal and suspect in the eyes of your beloved.

Nevertheless though he cannot describe or explain what he wants to say, the lover can feel it — is feeling it all the time; and this feeling, like other feelings, he can express by indirections — by symbols, by actions, by the alphabet of deed and gesture, and all the hieroglyphics of Life and Art.

[…]

Love can only say what it wants by the language of life, action, song, sacrifice, ravishment, death, and the great panorama of creation.”

Carpenter insists that in the experience of love, however imperfect and tortuous, we learn more about ourselves and the world than any didactic form can teach us:

“Love — even rude and rampant and outrageous love — does more for the moralizing of poor humanity than a hundred thousand Sunday schools. It cleans the little human soul from the clustered lies in which it has nested itself — from the petty conceits and deceits and cowardices and covert meannesses.”

In fact, he argues, the teachings of our civilization have been detrimental to our mastery of love. In a sentiment that calls to mind E.E. Cummings’s assertion that “the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself,” Carpenter writes of the art of love:

“Self-consciousness is fatal to love. The self-conscious lover never ‘arrives.’ … And so too the whole modern period of commercial civilization and Christianity has been fatal to love… They have bred the self-regarding consciousness in the highest degree; and so — though they may have had their uses and their parts to play in the history of mankind, they have been fatal to the communal spirit in society, and they have been fatal to the glad expression of the soul in private life.

Self-consciousness is fatal to love, which is the true expression of the soul.”

In the remainder of The Drama of Love and Death, Carpenter goes on to examine what it takes to make love last over the long arc of a shared life, unwearied by friction and unblunted by habit. Complement it with Hannah Arendt on how to love despite the fundamental fear of loss, Rilke on the difficult art of giving space in love, and Jane Welsh Carlyle on loving vs. being in love, then revisit Carpenter’s contemporary Anna Dostoyevskaya on the secret to a happy marriage.

Source: Maria Popova, brainpickings.org (31st March 2019)

[agentverbivore]

Jewish FS prompt: Academy era, Jewish Fitz teaches atheist Jemma about Hanukkah

1) I know I’ve said this to you a couple times now, but I’m still really sorry how delayed this is. irl is lame. 2) this ficlet is inspired both by @buckysbears’ Chanukah headcanons/prompts and the second part of @theclaravoyant‘s prompt! Rated G, canon-compliant Academy era FitzSimmons (in their 3rd year). 

Head in hands, Fitz stared at his third year holographic engineering textbook and tried to convince the letters to stop swimming on the page in front of him. The final exam was in exactly seventy-six hours, but after introductory xenorganic chemistry, propulsion engineering, and his “SHIELD in Literature” elective, he was starting to feel like a wrung-out sponge. It didn’t help that the exam was scheduled for the absolute last slot in the week, which meant that half the campus was in a festive mood and he was absolutely itching to be able to join them. (From an acceptable distance, anyway.) With all the best of intentions, he had sequestered himself in one of his favorite private study rooms right after dinner. Four hours later, however, and he felt like he actually remembered the salient parts of the class less than he had before. Only having nine-tenths of the textbook memorized was really not up to par.

Just as he was giving serious consideration to dropping his face directly onto the book and taking a nice multi-hour nap, the door banged open and he nearly fell out of his chair.

“Fitz!” Simmons chirped as she plopped into the seat in front of him. “I have a question for you.”

“Bragg diffraction won the Nobel in 1915, seven years after Lippmann,” he managed to get out through a jaw-cracking yawn.

“As refined as your powers of telepathy are becoming,” she deadpanned, neatly dodging the slow kick he aimed at her red Cons beneath the table, “that’s not what I had in mind.”

“I was right, though, yeah?”

Her smile widened ever-so-slightly. “Yeah. And what crystals did they use to conduct the experiment?”

“Rock salt,” he replied promptly, sitting back in his chair. “And you’re late.”

“I ran into Professor Niehaus outside of Carter and had the most fascinating discussion about the reading for next semester. She thought you had some good points about the fall assignments, so she’s thinking about adjusting her syllabus.”

Fitz blinked at her. “I had some good points?”

“Yes. I told her what you said over spagbol at Mario’s a couple weeks ago.” The self-assuredness on her face made him want to give his head a cartoon-dog-esque shake.

“Okay, right, sure, ‘cause why wouldn’t you.” Taking in a deep breath and letting it out in a laugh, he waved one hand at her. “Alright, so, what question’d you wanna ask?”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, reaching into the purple knapsack she had placed neatly on the empty seat next to her. “I wanted to know the precise purpose of dreidel.” Simmons primly placed a lime green, plastic dreidel on the table almost perfectly between the two of them.

He squinted across the table at his best friend. “Dreidel?”

“Dreidel,” she repeated, straightening the top so that it lay parallel to the table’s edge. “The game, not the object.”

A thought occurred to him, and he arched an eyebrow. “Did you steal this from my room?”

The Academy’s Jewish Student Union chapter had held their annual Chanukah celebration the weekend before, aiming to catch students right before most exams began, and this year the party favors had included cheap plastic dreidels. Although Fitz had pretty much only shown up to grab latkes and rugelach and leave, he had swiped a couple of the trinkets to keep on his desk for fiddling with while he studied.

Simmons fought back something that resembled a sheepish smile. “Borrowed, with every intention of returning.”

Scratching at the back of his head, he tried unsuccessfully to figure out what had prompted the question, and why she had asked it now. “Why? It’s not Chanukah yet, doesn’t even start ‘til Christmas day this year.”

“I’m curious.” She continued to stare expectantly at him, and he let out a mildly annoyed huff.

Ever since having discovered that he was Jewish their first year, self-avowed atheist Simmons had taken it upon herself to pepper him with all manner of questions about his religion, only half of which he could answer on the best of days. Being mostly secular in observance himself, he found himself surreptitiously looking things up on the computer just as often as he had a response off the top of his head. One time, she spent forty-five minutes grilling him on the minutest details of his bar mitzvah, and he had ended up needing to email his mum questions when he couldn’t remember everything.

During the pause in which he was deciding how to reply, Simmons waited briefly and then continued: “And you’re the only Jewish person I know.”

Feeling abruptly tired and cranky, Fitz crossed his arms over his chest. “I dunno the purpose of dreidel, Simmons, it’s a kids’ game. Why don’t you just look it up instead of asking me?”

Anyone who didn’t know his best friend as well as he would have missed the wince that flashed briefly across her face at his words. Her shoulders sunk slightly, and she withdrew her hands to her lap. “Oh. I….”

“I mean,” he continued, feeling an odd need to defend his impulsive response, “you do this all the time with Jewish stuff. You’re an atheist, why d’you even care?”

Looking down at her lap, she took in a small breath. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I mean, you care about it. I thought that… that was what friends do. Be interested in things their friends are interested in. Or, I mean, that’s important to them.” Simmons tucked hair behind her ear and reached over to rifle through her bag. “Never mind. Sorry, we really should be studying.”

Discontent twisted into his stomach, and he scrunched his face up as he resisted the urge to just pretend like nothing had happened. “No, I’m – sorry, Simmons, sorry. I’m just knackered, you took me by surprise.”

“No, really,” she interrupted, piling textbooks on the table in front of herself. “I don’t want to bother you about your religion, it’s not –”

“It’s not bothering me,” he spoke over her, prompting her to actually look up and meet his gaze. “I just – I mean, I don’t like not knowing the answer.” He let out a sheepish laugh, flicking one finger at the pages of his book. “Dreidel isn’t significant or anything. It’s just a game. Think my mum said something once about how it’s adapted from some other European tradition, kinda like how Christians took bits and pieces from the Romans to make Christmas popular. But I don’t even remember what that was, so….” Fitz shrugged. “I just like the gelt and winning.”

Simmons was watching him with renewed interest now, an expression he recognized all too well from their first day of class every semester. “What’s gelt?”

“Those gold chocolate coins. Some parties use candy, too, but I like the chocolate.”

“Is it easy to win?”

Fitz chuckled, and reached out to pluck the green dreidel from the table. “Takes a lotta practice.” With that, he gave the dreidel a rapid flick onto the table, watching as it predictably flipped and spun into a standing position, making minute circles around the table.

Eyes glued to the long-spinning top, Simmons made a skeptical hum. “That doesn’t seem difficult.”

“Wanna try it, then?” He glanced down at the gold watch on his wrist. “What about we study for another hour, and then take a break to play dreidel. I can teach you. Winner brings the other tea before the exam.”

His best friend lit up at the promise of a competition, and she sat straighter in her chair. “Okay. Oh, but – we don’t have any gelt.”

Frowning, Fitz swiped up the dreidel just before it could stutter and jump to a stop. “We could use….” He spent a few seconds rifling through his bag. “I have peanut, crispy, and regular M&Ms. What d’you prefer?”

“Peanut,” she replied, watching as he laid out the three unopened bags of candy next to his work supplies. “How much candy do you have in there?”

“Gotta keep the blood sugar up, Simmons,” he retorted, pulling the nearly forgotten textbook towards himself. “Important for keeping the brain working at optimal capacity.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I think just one bag would have sufficed, but – anyway. Good idea, Fitz. Incentivization is an excellent study methodology.”

Grinning, he ducked his head, both of them settling in to be productive for exactly the following 59 minutes and 35 seconds. Fitz felt rather guilty now for having snapped at Simmons so unnecessarily, but he thought that her eager return to curiosity signaled that she wasn’t upset by his unwarranted response. Even though it didn’t make much sense, he had always been a little guarded about her questions regarding Jewish traditions, feeling that perhaps her atheism would lead to an argument between them. (An argument of a more serious nature, anyway, than the bickering that made up half of their conversations.) Yet, after about two years of friendship, the topic had only yielded them opening up about their families and traditions, and he supposed that was actually a good thing, in retrospect. In truth, Fitz found the explanation Simmons had given for her curiosity rather touching – even if he would never, ever admit it.

[Other ficlets.] [Chanukah ficlet 1 & ficlet 2.] [AO3.]