When we are in the early days of love or what we call the "honeymoon phase," we have our attentions fixed singularly on one person. According to José Ortega y Gasset's essays On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme, because where our attention is, there also lies our personality, our beloved becomes our entire reality in the moment. They are the lens through which we see and experience the world.
This would explain why my creative process took a hiatus when I first fell in love with my ex-girlfriend Lorraine. I was caught off guard by how scarcely I wrote songs in those days. The couple I did write were about her. Before this, though, I had already experienced this quite acutely when I fell in love with Capetown. Another first love I had never expected. In fact, every time I travel somewhere new I can't seem to write. I'm so heavily distracted by the characters and views on my adventure. Yet, regardless of the writer's block, it's that complete captivation that makes me love travel so much.
When my attention is deeply captivated by such rapture, I stop creating and instead focus on having an experience. I'm all caught up, busy subconsciously assimilating experiences later needed to inspire new creative work. José points out that when this infatuation period runs its course, as it always does, and we get to the point where it is either severed or deepened into a "calm and steady love," it is as though we are being snapped out of a dream. A mesmerizing love affair turns domestic, a new environment becomes recognizable, an exciting film or book joins a list of other favourites, passionate and novel days become routine. Though still special to us, these things become familiar.
Outside dream land, we are brought back into the normal perspective. Our attention is either slowly or abruptly dispersed from that central focus to others, and other things within life. I remember that I have other relationships in friends and family, and that my time can also be invested in community. I can write a song about politics, loneliness, or universal triumph, not just about this love I have found.
Suddenly the perception changes. Interaction with our beloved is tuned down from the impulsive frenzy of early romantics to the grounded space of daily procedure. It's much like the creative process brought from a spontaneous work of passion into a deliberate daily exercise. Now the true test of love appears in our ability to show up and create consistency in the verb: To display and enact our love on a regular basis so as to nurture the shoot that has just broken ground. Soon to become an imposing and fruitful tree that cannot be denied.
In its recess into normalcy, love then becomes precious in its invisibility; seen on its surface through the occasional public displays of affection (PDA) but unseen in its depth of routine acts of service, selflessness and tolerance, private vulnerabilities and understandings, and domestic conversations of bonding and compromise. The magical love once expressed is not gone, but is now sublime and practical in its working. It is no longer obsessive, but it is reverent.
Tended well, this love grows into a Great Baobab that unwittingly casts it's cool shadow on the rest of our life. Conversely, if neglected, life is left in the scorching sun, deprived of loves transferable benefits. If we recommit to it daily, love can paint other activities and places on which we fix our attention with joy. Our thoughts, feelings and desires are sustained by it. Our existence and what we stake it upon is informed by it. Contrary to the belief that love diminishes work, blogger and essayist Maria Popova says that for the artist or the scientist it "shapes the expression and aliveness of our creative work."
After the "dreamy period" of falling in love it took me a while to adjust to snapping out of it. This is what led me to think that my relationship had something to do with my creative stasis. There was such a misguided blame in my mind for spending so much time and energy on the relationship that I thought that's why my songs suffered. I was unaware that what I had to do was rekindle my relationship with my work by shaking off the singular obsession of that phase. And by embracing the everyday nurturing of love that spills over into other labours of love such as my art.
In retrospect another thing I failed to see as it happened, was how I flourished in my poetry within the span of the relationship. Love gave life and confidence to my performances. The quality of the letters I wrote Lorraine are a testament to this. I just needed to reconnect with my songwriting at that same level of purpose, then the life force of our love would have flowed right into that. This may have all gone over my head then, but I'm glad it's something that I can carry into future relationships.
Cultivated love feeds genius if we let it; bringing all its humble lessons, life giving perspectives, and rediscoveries into our work, for the benefit of our audiences. My only caution? That we take care to choose carefully who and what we love since it shapes the texture of life so deeply.
"Now love is a risky prayer:
Devotion uttered daily that we may not forget its holy verb,
The action word,
Affection to the point of work..."
~ Bongo (Blankets)
Happy World Poetry Day!
This was raw and real, a relatable yet enjoyable read!
This here!! It's as if you knew exactly what I was going through. It was like reading my thoughts, and also hearing the answers to stuff I was asking myself.