From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Missing the heartbeat
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 17:03:55 GMT


In article <Btv4BI.Gn7@cs.vu.nl> fjvwing@cs.vu.nl (FJ!!)
writes very movingly and very directly about himself and his
emotional life:

Because I don't know that I'm capable any longer of the kind
of honesty -- and was it courage, compulsion, daring, or
maybe foolhardiness? -- with which his posting was so
redolent, I don't think I can respond fully.  But of course
I am grateful, and I want to show that, for his sake if for
no one else's.

Rather than comment in the usual way, according to his text
-- to do so would seem to me some kind of violation -- I'll
instead give a few of my own thoughts on some of the
feelings and yearnings he talks about,

Since my high-school experiences are so very like his when
it comes to the heartbeat that is his metaphor, I won't say
much about them here.  It's also possible I had that rich,
emotionally thrilling and wearing texture in my life a bit
earlier than he did -- I was 11 when it all burst forth for
me, falling in love for the first time.

And there must be some difference, too, in the happy fact
that I did not have to hide or mask my feelings, though at
times I thought it prudent to be less than candid about the
scale of them, they were that grand.

Instead, I'll talk about what came after I was in college,
about what I thought love was then and what I think it is
now, from my own perspective.  In all of this, you are to
understand that the feelings are no one thing; rather, they
are a kaleidoscopic jumble of many things, something of many
colors, many facets, even of conflicts.

It's awfully hard to be sure what any other person yearns
for, since we are bound to filter such things as FJ says
through our own prisms.  In my case, some of it would be
memories of prisms.  But nevertheless, the heartbeat he
yearns for is one I've heard several times in my life.  At
the risk of misinterpretation, let me put it this way: no
one was ever loved more than I, nor had a richer experience
of lavishing love upon another than I have had.  Do not take
that as anything like a boast, for to do so would be to miss
the point.  In the first place, love cannot be quantified,
so in this context, "not more than" must be seen as
qualitative.  And by that I mean only: everything I ever
wanted, and much more (more than I could ever have imagined,
had I not had the opportunities I've had) has come my way.

By the time I was FJ's age, two of them were in the past,
one was going on, and nine more (undreamed of then, of
course) were to enrich the future.  *Every* time, that
person was for me *the* one, and I was for them as well.  In
each instance, that one was the best, the best ever, and, I
was quite convinced, the best possible.  Since in this
context we get to define ourselves, for me that *was*,
simply, The Truth.

And each was forever.  By this I don't mean I failed to
recognize that the past had seen ruptures and that even
absent future ruptures (or merely changes, as the case might
be), eventually *something* would happen.  No, instead I
mean that the moment in each moment was *so* complete that
everything I wanted, everything I *ever* wanted, everything
I *could* want, was right there, right then.  

Indeed, one of the most satisfying things, to me, was the
very immediacy of loving and being loved, its fullness and
sufficiency in every sense.  I know of nothing -- I suspect
not even death -- that is so fixed in the present tense as
love.

Rather unlike FJ, perhaps, I never had the feeling that
there was anything like his "I'll never know, never really
know" idea about the thing while it was going on on.
Somehow, maybe dumb luck, I was always so fixed on the thing
right in front of me that I never had room for doubts or
worries or even hypothetical speculations.  In short, I
*knew*, I was *sure*, and I was sure the other person was
sure as well.

All that notwithstanding, I had one love affair that was
notably insecure.  As it has turned out, it was the last
one, a six-month terror that turned me completely inside out
just ten years ago this fall.  I was never so crazy before
or since as I was during that half year.  I had no prior
concept of what anxiety really was, and today I can't really
tell you why it was I did that to myself.  All I know is
that I did, that I went (he says as undramatically as he
can) to the brink and very nearly over it.

It was the one and only time I fell in love at first sight,
and I mean it literally: as he got out of the car to walk up
to my front door (a friend was bringing him over to get rid
of him), I was watching out the window and in milliseconds
was a complete goner.  And mind you, I was 47 years old at
the time.

Perhaps it was that I had had no lover for four years at
that point, doubling the sum total of all my prior periods
of loverlessness since age 11.  But I had this *powerful*
sinking feeling, and I knew in an instant that I was lost,
completely lost, inevitably drowned.

The closest I can come to understanding this is that it was
an aesthetic response, for he was -- still is, I see him
every couple days, he works two buildings away -- simply the
most good-looking, beautiful man I've known.  I have a
wonderful photo, in which he looks like what I call a
Persian prince: perfect in every regard.

The story of what went wrong, though incredibly complicated,
is easily told: nothing went right.  But it's quite a
comment on love, I think, that none of that lover's story
contradicts or compromises what I've said about the others.
It was True Love, it was all-encompassing, it was singular,
it was forever, and it was fabulous.  Disastrous, but
*fab-u-lous*!

To try to bring this to some closure, I guess I will cite
FJ's posting after all.  He says: 

>I want puppy-love.  I want to know what it is like to have
>someone as crazy about me as I'm about him, I want the
>moments racing through my veins, I want those fields of my
>emotional landscape back but I want to explore the part I
>know is there but where I've never been.

It *is* there, I'd say, and after having explored it at very
great length, I hope you will be at least as lucky as I've
been, for it is like nothing else on the planet, that I can
promise you.  As befits *fabulous* things, this being a
fable means there must be a moral at the end.

Very well, then.  Potential exists to be unlocked.  Do so.
Don't wait, do it now.  This is the only time there is.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson
NeXTmail w/attachments: anderson@yak.macc.wisc.edu  Bitnet: anderson@wiscmacc
Room 3130 <> 1210 West Dayton Street / Madison WI 53706 <> Phone 608/262-5888
Newsgroups: soc.motss