I was reading something other than heavy clouds this morning for the first time in a while. Czeslaw Milosz’s Song on the End of the World, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and one of my favourite poems since I was in my late teens – Pablo Neruda’s I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You…
“I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.I love you only because it’s you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.”
I have, for decades, struggled with the notion as to whether he meant it of a woman or himself. Both paths are equally as eloquent, both thunderous in their meaning.
One often forgets the power of language, especially in this age of hyper-states. I used to lock myself in my room for hours and write, and felt as if a gilded liberty when I emerged, often into the night air through those sliding glass doors in that unfinished townhouse basement. I would stand there in the summer heat and smoke a cigarette and smile. And that is where we all belong, not in gyms or daily shoving ourselves into check. But out there, singing to the world.