“Write only about the things you love,” many said this in slightly different ways. They might be right. The love, or enthusiasm, one puts into one's work is contagious. But so is smallpox. What if one loves to write about the things one detests? Tricky.
“Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous,” writes Kurt Vonnegut. That reminds me of a very short lived love of mine, or perhaps just love for me, that ended up with her telling a few persons not to be my friends. Intoxicating stuff.
A friend once told me that I'm at my best when I write about animals. Of that kind other than chimps capable of self-referential loops, also called self-awareness.
You got it. Let's talk about loops, not love. Or why not about love-loops. That's pretty suggestive.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote I Am a Strange Loop, trying to answer the question of why some of what is alive is conscious, or self-aware. So I've no need to talk about loops; I'll just ask you to read his work. And that's a good thing about books: they can speak for you. What those books will put in your mouth is a never-ending story that I will not never-end here.
Back to the love-loops, J.S. Porter wrote Spirit Book Word. It's a lovely and loving personal story on how he thinks certain writers to have a word that defines them. But then again, Porter's wife, he writes, thinks he “falls in love too easily, much too easily.” He's a writer engaged in a love-loop, if I ever saw one.
Other love-loops that come to mind are Vonnegut's we need extended families pervasive concept throughout his work, and also Saramago's use your eyes to see. I'm talking about these two because I explored their works the most lately. If one could squeeze their body of work, those two droplets of blood in between quotation marks would drip onto the thirsty wooden floor of poetry. But I'm too prosaic at the moment, and I'm picturing a marble floor there instead. And that's a clinical remark.
But what I really need is a love-loop-hole to get out of here. Now imagine that if you please.
