In The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an Angel (or a foreign sailor with dirty wings) lands in a poor couple’s back yard. They are puzzled at first, but invite over the neighbors to help them figure out what they are encountering. Soon, they have stuffed the old man into the chicken coop, where the chickens groom his wings and charge admission to see the angel. They do nothing to protect him from the elements or the people they bring in to see him, and throw him scraps to eat.

In the end, when his wings grow in more fully, he stands up and flies away, leaving the family behind him, I think that what the old man stands in for is the most important aspect of this story. It is clear that he represents something, but I see numerous things that could fit what he stands in for. Literature is partially about empathy; learning to appreciate the differences in people and see through another’s eyes.

One interepretation that fits him, I think, is that he could be the representation of how we treat those who are different than ourselves; of another race or gender. In the text, we know that he speaks another language, and when the family hears him, they don’t understand it, but from hearing it, think that maybe he’s not an angel, but a lost foreign sailor. (The neighbor convinces them that he is indeed an angel, but that just goes to show how human he was, and that they recognized that.)

Yet, human or angel, they thought it was okay for them to stuff him in a chicken coop and let people throw things at him. What they did, regardless of the humanity they saw in him, was treated him like he was less than human. An animal. Which is what humans do when they come in contact with the strange. During the pre-civil war era, Americans decided that Africans were not human, (and it is a very very dangerous thing to keep narrowing your view of what a human
is) and thus treated them as beasts of burden. Deciding upon your superiority is very dangerous.

At one point, they said that they didn't have the "heart" to club him to death, as if had they not been so squeamish, that would have been an acceptable, or even the correct, thing to do. This, along with the ending (where the wife felt "relieved ... both for herself and him") where the wife is glad that he is out of her hair, also made me think of the impact of being so selfish that you can only think of yourself as complex and multi-layered, but others, especially those who are unlike yourself, as props, that you an stuff into th chicken coop for your own amusement or personal gain, which, when you think about it, is a very slave-owner mentality.

Reading The Boys Next Door, I kept wondering if it was okay to laugh. Some scenes walked the line carefully and made me wonder if laughing would entail laughing at the “boys” because of their handicaps, or laughing with them because of humorous moments they had, as people with disabilities.

I found myself so amused when Barry went into his pro golf, but that seemed less amusing when he was talking to his abusive father; I was laughing when Arnold was threatening to move to Russia, but immediately felt guilty.

The whole play I walked this line, although I got comfortable. Then, near the end, Tom Griffin hit me straight in the heart with the line, by Lucien (in this breaking-the-fourth-wall lucidity). “I stand before you a middle-aged man in an uncomfortable suit, a man whose capacity for rational thought is somewhere between a five-year-old and an oyster. (pause) I am retarded. I am damaged. I am sick inside from so many years of confusion, utter and profound confusion. I am mystified by faucets and radios and elevators and newspapers and popular songs. I cannot always remember the names of my parents. But I will not go away. And I will not wither because the cage is too small. I am here to remind the speices.. of.. the species. I am Lucien Percival Smith. And without me, without my shattered crippled brain, you will never again be frightened by what you might have become. Or indeed, by what your future might make you.”

Is that true? It certainly sounds profound. Do the damaged among us – anyone who is less than fully whole – make us uncomfortable because w e know but for luck or the genetic lottery or grace of God, we could be like that? The handicapped are less than functional; they are not less than human, and this play was so … humanizing; giving them humor and heartbreak and silly little dates where they sat on couches and talked about keys.

I think that this play goes out of its way to create not sympathy, but empathy for our fellow man who is a bit (or a whole lot) different from what we have come to expect as the norm. Even the title ‘The Boys Next Door,’ places them not far away, but as people who could literally live down the street, who could work in our mom and pop corner stores, frequent our libraries.

This play made me uncomfortable, made me see the ugliness inside of people; inside of me. (The heart is deceitful above all things and no man can contest.) It was like looking into a mirror and seeing how ugly people are, in the same way that Lord of the Flies does, but it also was very, very beautiful and touching.

I give life half of my attention. I've always been quick on my feet, and most of what I encounter makes sense to me after giving it a few moments of thought, or reading through the instructions, the explanation; write it out to me in words and I get it; explain it to me and I don't usually need to ask you to repeat yourself.

But I don't open myself up; I don't let things change me because I can do them on autopilot. I don't have to dissect words and look them up, for the most part, because I see them and they make sense and in my head I'm already making connections and picking out allusions to T. S. Eliot and Emerson and Thorough.

Reading Reading for Transformation, I just kept thinking about the way I read. Granted, I do get into what I read, I understand it, and I can break it down into thematic elements later, but I rarely give it all one hundred percent, don’t pull it in close and let it change me. I’ve lost that high school breathless wonder that expected each piece of literature to be the one that changed my life, because I was right back then, Whitman and Salinger (PBUH) and Oscar Wilde and The Love Song of J. Alfred; they meant something to me, held me captive while I thought about what they had to say, but it’s never been a spiritual practice.

I’ve never “meditated” on poetry that wasn’t from the book of Psalms, or Song of Solomon (and even that I give sketchy half-attention to because I’m a bona fide child and that book sort of weirds me out sometimes), giving it a chance to reverberate in my bones. I let words into my head, drenching my thoughts, and permeating my language, but not into my heart; my heart is off limits. I’m going to try it that way.

"Darkness is a question that must be asked seriously. Quick or sure religious answers to darkness offer us no hope because they shut down the question."

I love the set up of this syntax; the idea of "darkness" as something of a question, and not as something to be avoided. Corrigan has been drilling in the same idea, the same turn of phrase bout this subject since the beginning of the semester: there are no pat answers, or, there is no reason to rush towards them. That our faith and lives are not defined by the fact that we have questions, doubts, uncertainties, but how well we go about our journey for answers. Wrestling with grief, with sadness, with uncertainty doesn't make you any less of anything.

Jesus wept. Showing up four days after his friend had died, Jesus didn't arrive in a flowing superhero cape, toss aside the stone at the door of his tomb with one hand and fix the situation with a phrase called out in a booming voice: he wept. He was not an observer of Mary and Martha's suffering; he experienced it with them.

We imagine God as this supernatural Mr. Incredible, coming just in the nick of time in response to our cry for help, instead of as a co-sufferer. We forget that in Jesus living a human life with human limitations and exposure to temptations, he really does understand. I imagine him sometimes, facing temptation with a serene face instead of a twisted brow, his character out-of-line with the idea that temptation might actually, well, tempt him. But if Jesus came down here with no desire to sin, with nothing in his physically human makeup trying to warp him towards saving his own life, or towards his own glory, living a sinnless life means little. It's like saying that the only way a snake can "sin" is to grow wings and fly, and thus, snakes are saints.

I'm not rushing to an answer, because when I shake in the dark, I want to know where is God when little girls are getting sold into child prostetution, or when people literally starve to death on one side of the globe and people spend tens of millions on researching the cure for a disease called "having unluscious, short eyelashes" or any number of things that make me sick to my stomach, but when I finally do get there, and you can't call it a pat answer, because it doesn't leave me settled; it doesn't fit over my face like a snug, warm, blindfold, but I know that God is suffering, too. I think it's especially important to remember that today; that Jesus suffered and suffered hard so that we, as his people, could bring more pain to his heart, every day, but also so that some of us could be spared, if we'd only say "yes."

Happy Easter, everybody.

I spent forty beautiful minutes at Lake Bonnie Park, reading Mary Oliver and Robert Hoss.

While I was reading Hoss’ poem, I just kept thinking about the astounding similarities and defining differences between the two’s world view. Even more than Mary Oliver’s poetry, though, I kept bringing it back to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

Robert Hoss looks at the world and is wowed. Not being able to sustain wonder, he says, is an evolutionary coping mechanism to getting us out of worshiping nature and onto more productive ventures. If we could be as amazed at everything as we were the first time we saw it, or experienced it, “we’d have never gotten off of our knees.”

Clearly being amazed by the world is something deeply personal.

Walt Whitman, in the same way, is always delving into nature. (Oliver, too. I keep leaving her out like the redheaded stepchild.) He’s amazed by the texture of grass and the scent of the woods and wet moss, and the perfume of the world and the call of the birds, the toads, the wild cats. He is always talking about replying to the call of the wild.

Mary Oliver, in the same way, references nature in a glorious, gorgeous simplicity. The common ground between all of them is their reverence of nature. Between Oliver and Whitman, though, in their natural world, God is never far off.

Walt Whitman says that the grass is like a handkerchief, dropped by God, so that people can explore it and prod at it and ask who it belongs to, and they will find his signature in the corner.

Hoss looks at the grass and comments on how inexplicable the evolution of the world into something this diverse and beautiful was. Where Whitman sees God, Hoss sees “cells dividing” and multiplying in complex ways. His eyes are open, much more than anyone I know, but his heart seems to be closed.

i.

I fall onto the earth,
heavy like the wave against the coast,
and just as naturally.
my hipbones were made to dig into the earth
as defined as shovels,
to anchor me into the grass.

ii.

The suns rays are like golden liquid today,
and they greet me like an old friend;
I get the sense that they have travelled
a thousand miles to nudge me with warm fingers.

I feel swallowed by their heat,
my heart patting a happy rhythm through my shirt,
digging itself a burrow,
half in my rib cage,
half-escaped into the soil.

iii.

Whitman says that this grass
is a handkerchief dropped by God,
so that we can search every inch.
And maybe he meant God, of Israel,
or maybe god, a literary device
that means something to old poets,
a kind of textured idea that sits in place of
love or justice or maybe condemnation
but I have my face pressed into the grass,
and I can feel capital-G-God's signature against my face,
as flamboyant as any John Hancock.

In my head, I can't help but smirk as I wonder,
"Whose?"

iv.

My philosophy is mind over matter,
so today I am nourished not by food,
but by photosynthesis,
and instead of the heat swallowing me whole,
I will swallow it:
absorb it through my leafy arms,
breath it in, hold my breath to wring every
drop of sunlight from the air.
It is summer
and my body is limitless.

v.

When I look at nature,
I use mostly my heart and my eyes a bit,
and leave my glasses at home,
so that I can see it face to face.
The edges blur, but the color is more than real.

vi.

A girl thinking about the near-nudity
of deep summer
told me she relies on water, lately,
and asked if I was doing the same.
Determined today to soak up only the sun,
I can't help but think about her.
The oak tree, maybe he's embarrassed
about the size of his roots, but I have my doubts.
I, though... I told her no.
I explained that the dimensions of my hips,
they didn't have anything to do with the
dimensions of my heart,
and that my legs could take me past ten miles of asphalt
if I put one foot in front of the other.

"Nature" and "human" are not such dissimilar ideas.
"Art" is not so far off, either.

If you took a blueprint of my body, or yours,
you would see how perfectly the joints fit,
how gloriously functional every chamber is.
A portrait of my crooked heart would show
that one of the doors opens and directs traffic
the wrong way
down a one way corridor.
Still, it's beaten a million times,
to bring me here,
to right here,
to right now.
So that I could swallow the sun on a steamy afternoon.

vii.

When I get up,
I comb bits of tree-debris and dry grass from
my hair, that too, wind tangled,
a modern day Rip Van Winkle,
and the world is different.
Darker now, and cooler,
the remnants of a summer afternoon's heat
still soaked into the grass,
my shirt,
my skin, warm to the touch.

I kiss the grass goodbye.
I know whose.

viii.

dear world,
my heart is an empty room.
come set up camp.

The first things that struck me about this poem:

1. This poem was s full of casual name-dropping allusions.

2. This poem is very aware of itself as a poem, and as literature, commenting constantly on poetry and literature.

3. The amount of science dropped just as casually into a poem is much more unusual to find than allusions. Allusions are commonplace, but for some reason (I think because of the distinictons we make between right-brained and left-brained and asking people to identify themselves as one or the other…) we assume that people interested in science and people interested in literature are exclusive audience, and that one reads Nation Geographic and the other reads The New England Review.

4. State of the Planet has such a fundamental curiosity about life and the world around it, while (and this ties into numero tres) also being deeply connected to literature and beauty and unanswerable, doubt churning questions. (“Cells that divided and reproduced. From where? Why?”)

5. The subject of this poem, for the first few sections, comes back to a girl. She’s running and it’s raining and she’s observing the beauty of the world and nature. In her bag, is a book, dog eared (well read / well loved) with a title “like” Getting to Know Your Planet, but then the subject of the poem seems to be the world itself; its beauty; its majesty; its history. But it keeps coming back to this girl. She understands the accidents of the universe, because she had an accident spilling milk that morning; and it comes back to her, her hair wet, and windshield wipers clearing her view out of the car.

6. So much geology, along with science and evolution and literary allusions.

7. Some of the imagery and lines were so unexpected. The rest of this will be about my favorites and what I got from them.

A. Section 1: “One of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.” I love the image of this girl, running in the rain, (I privately imagine her laughing) to get to her car, her bag thump-thumping against her bag, filled with a dog eared book. This image seems to be a set up for the entire poem: with the human hungry and curious about the world around her, and experiencing the beauty of it both cognitively read-this-book-a-thousand-times and in a practical, feet-squishing against wet grass sort of way.

B. Section 1: “… that this was something we’ve done quite accidentally, which she can understand, not having meant this morning to have spilled the milk.” The two things I love about this line are that, one, the author uses the typical spilled-milk regret, (something that, as the saying goes, there is literally no use for) to draw a parallel with global warming / temperature change, and two, that a girl can sympathize with an entire planet’s mistake because she spilled a liquid. (Or an everyman object for her failures.)

C. Section 2: “Pacific Salmon nosing against dams … in a rage to breed.” Salmon literally jump up waterfalls to get upriver to breed each year, so the image of them confused and unable to pass a man made structure was really evocative, to me, and pretty much defines the entire theme of this poem.

D. Section 3: “… their bodies must be so strange to them. An artist in Chicago – thinking of a great trading city in Dacia or Thracia – has asked to learn the method so he can sell people dogs that glow in the dark.” Man is always using nature to direct him, getting ideas from it, imitating it. This is unnerving in the most satisfying way.

I love ambiguities in characters. Not only was This Blessed House gorgeous in terms of storytelling and prose, but also the characters. I was totally charmed by perky Twinkle and gruff Sanjeev.

Twinkle and Sanjeev’s characters were revealed bit by bit on practically ever page, even in moments I didn’t expect. One simple action (like when Sanjeev is alphabetizing his library of engineering books) at first glance didn’t mean anything, but on further reflection, represented somehow the totality of Sanjeev. That was just so him. I found myself smiling. “Of course Sanjeev is alphabetizing his library.”

One of the best parts of this whole story, however, was the ending. Throughout the entire story, tension seems to be building between the two because of their differing ideas about the religious trinkets they keep finding. Twinkle is beyond tickled; wants to display them, put them on the counters and point them out. Sanjeev is not amused. He keeps having to point out to her that they are by no means Christians.

Sanjeev seems to keep giving in because he loves her, but at the same time, continues to become more and more frustrated. During the party, where Twinkle is enjoying herself and giving the guests tours of their home, complete with all kinds of Christian paraphernalia, Sanjeev is busy tending to the guests and their practical needs, food and drink and taking their coats.

In the end, Twinkle finds the crown jewel of all of the miscellaneous relics she and Sanjeev have discovered – a bust of Jesus Christ, and Sanjeev (reluctantly) carries it down to where she wants it. This decision, though, doesn’t explain his thought process. It seems to mme that there are two main ways he could be thinking. The first, is that he decides that his love for Twinkle conquers his embarrassment of his eccentricities and quirks.

We’re prone to assume this thought because we fall in love with Twinkle, and can see that he loves her.

The other is that Sanjeev has given in, but for all we know, is simply resigned in a bitter situation he is tired of making consolations in. For all we know, he is thinking about next week’s divorce.

Short Story: The Sunflower, the Seed, and the Scarecrow

NOTE: I'm a part of a livejournal community called Runaway Tales, which is a community for original fiction challeges. We have "flavors" (lists of word or phrase prompts, usually in groups of 30) and "toppings/extras" (things like different mediums, focusing a story on the villian, 5,000+ words, and less than 100 words.) We call anything less than 100 words a "pocky." I decided to write this story in a format we call a "pocy chain."

Each one of these scenes is literally EXACTLY 100 words. (There is no "or less" in a PC.) Getting things down to 100 words really makes you think about which ones are important. I hope you enjoy. I realize I'm not sure which character the focus is on here. I hope they both have layers.

Voila.

----------------------------------------------

There’s nothing sane or normal about Rylie Somewhere. She’s got caged animal eyes, and there’s something almost feral in her slinky posture.

Where she’s neon signs and cigarette smoke curled around her face like vapid quotation marks, he’s origami flowers and promises of better days and smells like flannel and sunshine.

There’s nothing well-adjusted or wholesome about the crook of her smile, or the twists of her labyrinth thoughts, but he can’t help but get tangled up in her anyway, in the threads of her insane life.

When they met, she was a gypsy with a fifty in both shoes.

&&&

He’s got this best friend who is all those things Rylie isn’t; sweet and teasing and well-adjusted. Her name is Zia and mostly she shies from calling Rylie by name.

She does this by not talking about her at all, but occasionally she can’t avoid it, and calls her “the problem child.”

When Nolan asks her about it, half offended and half amused, she tells him that one of them have to be the sane one, and he’s not stepping up to the plate.

She makes sense, but sometimes she wears that black dress and he forgets how to breathe.

&&&

In December, she cuts him out of her life, because he wants to be her knight in shining armor, her Hosea, and she’s never been comfortable being anybody’s anything.

If life is a game, Rylie’s a perpetual cheater, and if feelings were a draft, Rylie moves to Canada every time they get remotely close.

But she’s a botched abortion, so when life deals her a bad hand (two little lines on a stick she paid eleven dollars for) she thinks that it’s maybe she can let him be her rescue one more time.

She doesn’t know what else to do.

&&&

The first night she stops by, needing a place to stay, and scratching at her wrists like she’s tweaking, he hasn’t seen her in seven months.

He’s not even sure how she got his new address. Nolan shoves everything out of the guest bedroom that he uses as a library while she sleeps, regardless.

He tells Zia in an email, because she’ll find out soon enough, and she responds in all caps, with no punctuation. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ARE YOU STUPID SHE’S BASICALLY EVIL, etc.

Thanks for your support, he writes, amused. She’ll be there at the welcome party.

&&&

She decides she’ll only stay for eight months, let him keep her in his little narrow yellow house until then, when she gives it away and it becomes someone else’s squirmy problem.

Anything more than that would be selfish.

She hadn’t expected for him to treat her like glass, to hold her in his hands like a butterfly-perch, careful not to make her uneasy about where she stood.

She’s a planner, logos with no pathos. She doesn’t have to account for feelings, other than how they factor into how other people react. Except, he’s throwing a wrench into her cogs.

&&&

She doesn’t know any other currency to use after he makes so many adjustments for her to move into his life, so after he throws her a housewarming party, like some kind of newlyweds, she crawls into his bed, attaching her mouth to his, and down his jaw, jugular…

“What are you doing?” he splutters, pushing her away.

She’s confused, because hello isn’t it obvious, and he’s a guy, so instead of taking his question at face value, she asks, flippantly, “Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be the same for you,” he says, and she has trouble getting warm all night.

&&&

She’s got a “killer” last name, just made to be written in lights or on CD covers, but Rylie’s only a Somewhere because her mom thought her stripper name would make a great real name, and so when she tells her friend Delia that she thinks about changing it, she gives her a blank look.

“Are you crazy?”

She gets lost in her head for a moment, because Delia sounds just like Him, all teasing terms of endearment and amused glances.

She thinks about the parasite she didn’t evict from her stomach, smirks hatefully at herself. “I guess I am.”

&&&

He leans over her stomach sometimes to talk to her unborn spawn. It makes her feel something like heartburn but with an added uncomfortable dimension.

“What are you doing?” she snapped, the first time. Soft emotions, soft words, all they do is make her itchy.

“Don’t you think she gets bored in there?” He asked her, big eyes wide, and mouth twisted around a friendly smile, no irony.

“She?”

“I’ve got a feeling,” he said, winking.

She put a hand to her stomach, not yet bulging, but something and shrugged. Her tone was lifeless when she scoffed. “I doubt it.”

&&&

Mama Somewhere used to put her on the porch with a coloring book and a half-circle of mosquito candles when she had clients inside, and Aunt Lucy couldn’t babysit, for hours at a time. Sometimes, she was exhausted and forgot about her.

Rylie learned how to pop her bedroom window by the time she was seven, just in case.

She told him that once, to hurt him when he was being all precious and stupid, and kind of regretted it, in a vague, practical sense. He pulled her into a hug, silently.

She still can’t stand the scent of Citronella.

&&&

By the time her stomach is finally beginning to get round, stretching her t-shirts and forcing her sweaters open like curtains framing her tummy, Nolan accidentally calls her baby a “she” at least three times a day.

Rylie’s still firmly using “it” so she thinks maybe he’s attempting to humanize it.

He says he has a feeling, shrugging apologetically when she glares at him after ever instance.

She knows, though, that it’s a boy. She tells him that and he raises an eyebrow. “Maybe,” he concedes, with a doubtful look.

It has to be. It’s hard to break a boy.

&&&

“I just need her for a few hours,” he finds himself pleading into his phone.

Zia sighs. “No way, Retard,” she jibes affectionately. “I wouldn’t even trust her with a flour baby. Think of the mess.”

“Zeeeee,” he drags out. “She’s pregnant! She probably has … instincts.”

Zia laughed. “Nolan, are you trying to test that out?”

He drummed his fingers against the kitchen table, waiting for her arrival. He lowers his voice to a hush. “She’s not keeping her.”

“You’re trying to change her mind,” Zia breathed. “This can not end well.”

&&&

“This is Zia’s niece,” he tells her, when she comes through the door.

“Ew,” is al she says, a reflexively. Hopefully he’ll think she’s joking.

He laughs, so he must.

“You want to hold her?”

“No,” she says, but she finds the thing pressed into her arms anyways.

“… She’s like a little person.”

Nolan’s amused. “She is a little person.”

She proceeds to spit up on her shoulder.

“Will you get me a clean shirt from the top drawer?” she asks, definitely not freaking out, and he can’t help but think that this is kind of a big deal.

&&&

“Would you hate her any less if she wasn’t so gorgeous?” Delia asks her, and Zia has a fleeting urge to smother her with a pillow.

“You mean if she wasn’t a vile seductress?” Zia corrected, and got serious. “You’re not supposed to be the level-headed one, D.”

Delia arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow.

“Yes, yes, don’t be stupid. Whether she’s hot or not, she’s still an incubus. Succubus?”

“Incubi are men,” Delia confirmed absently.

“Right. When did you get smart?”

“Hey,” she scoffed, “I’m more than a pretty face. Give her a chance, and she might be, too.”

&&&

Zia brings pizza as a piece offering, one night, after Nolan tells her about the Baby Incident.

She doesn’t invite Delia, because for some reason she actually likes Rylie, in an unrestrained isn’t life peachy kind of way, instead of the way Zia tolerates her for Nolan’s sake.

He is going to get his heart broken, and someone has to pick up the pieces.

Except, there are moments in the middle when she witnesses them playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who’s doing the dishes, or playing these stupid games that Nolan made up, like fingershooting, that she almost doesn’t mind her.

&&&

“Let me keep her.”

He startles her so badly – in the middle of breakfast, no less! – that she almost falls out of her chair. He freaks out for a few minutes, before she assures him that she’s just fine, and so is her unborn.

“Number one: totally a boy. Number two: are you insane!?!?”

Nolan keeps staring at her, pretty lucid for being a crazy person.

“I –” he swallows, hard, “I think I’d be a good dad.”

“I know you would,” she says, and her throat feels shredded, like she’s talking around shards of glass. “That’s not the problem.”

&&&

She hasn’t wanted to know the entire pregnancy the gender of her baby (and she’s not an it anymore) because of this feeling.

She can’t give away a girl.

They’re fragile and so easily screwed up, with actions or with words or with looks.

“Your maternal instincts are better than mine, I guess,” she tells him, dark curls plastered to her sweaty face, from a hospital bed.

Rylie can’t get her to latch on and they might both burst into tears at any moment.

He picks her up, tickling her baby cheek with his finger. She sucks on it immediately.

&&&

She leaves her firstborn child in his arms and buys a train ticket.

It’s bee a month and she’s no good at this and she can’t ever make her shut up.

She can’t stay. And she can’t leave. And her heart wants her to do the things that will be the hardest for her, and so she does what she always does: she dodges the draft.

Except, he’s been her center of gravity for far too long.

At the first stop, she buys a ticket back with the emergency fifty she’s kept in her shoe since she was a kid.

&&&

She breezes back into his house past midnight, and only realizes when she’s halfway to her room that the door isn’t locked.

He’s asleep at a kitchen chair, little Norah resting against his shoulder, a bottle still in his hand.

“Hey,” she murmurs, pulling him gently from sleep.

“Hey,” he says, before he’s even got his eyes open – like responding to her is second nature to him now. Then,

with his eyes blinking away sleep, “Hey!”

He looks down at the sleeping bundle in his arms, a sleepy grin on his face. “Mommy’s home.”

Maybe she’s ready for this war.

1. Gorgeous. A poem that reads like a song and echoes in your mind like the ocean in a seashell. This poem drew me in and made me fall in love with it, even with phrases that turned me on my head.

2. This poem feels so dated in the best way. I thought at first its tone was so very fifties - sixties - seventies because it was written then, but by the end of the poem, it’s apparent that the subject is dated, or at least, is talking about (and the narrator is thinking about) the past. Perfect blend.

3. I love the sense of well-rounded, well-read worldliness that comes from this poem. Madame Descartes is clearly very sharp, even in her old age, dropping the names of famous photographers casually, on a friend – basis, and talking about cameras and her famous photographs and quoting her reviewers with her tongue planted firmly in her cheek, and referencing St. Lawrence.

4. Some really gorgeous lines: “not tea, but her usual sequence of afternoon aperitifs, in slender glasses” … “the late novel that embarrassed several continents.” … “sea-blue eyes that’d commandeered both men and newspapers for forty years.”

5. I love when figurative and metaphorical language is mixed. The last line, I realized that the man had come to talk to or interview Madame Descartes, and she leaves him stunned and awestruck of how self-possessed and clever she is, enraptured in her stories, and feeling self – conscious; (metaphorically) turning the tables that he is (quite literally) ripping like a small child.

6. All of the language of her eye made the “nearly opaque” line, about her eyes, pop out at me on a reread. A famous photographer for years, and now at this lunch, she makes it obvious that going blind or not, she still sees much of what the world does not care to.

While reading Sonny’s Blues, the language of it struck me before anything else. The author uses rapid-fire literary devices piled on top of each other delicately, like stacking dominoes on top of each other, each one shifted a little bit like a staircase. A few times, a metaphor would build on another, and I’d have to go back to the first and reread the chain reaction to realize what the sentence was talking about.

The first really interesting one comes early on – in the second paragraph, “a great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting … sending trickles of ice water up and down my veins.” He uses metaphors and similes and figures of speech with the same regularity that other authors commonly use nouns, or adjectives.
Each one made me think. They say that the difference between an artists brain and someone who isn’t particularly creative’s is the unlikely connections that creative people make. While reading this, I kept seeing what I’d call and unlikely connection metaphor and realize that it makes perfect sense, but that it was not something I’d ever think of.

“… the baby brother I’d never known looked out from the depth of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light.” This simile, like many of the authors, is not just a throw-away; it follow through logically in its other implications; without spelling it out, it made me think of how his brother probably could have been his close confidante during childhood if his older brother had every tried patiently to “coax him” out of the “darkness” instead of fighting with him all of the time.

He also uses a device several times that Navakov frequently employed: ending a figurative sentence literally or semi-literally, and vice versa. (IE ‘She fell out of the chair and into love.’) “walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom.” “and when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness.” “the car kept on a-going and it ain’t stopped till this day.”

This story emotionally affected me on another level, because I have an older brother dealing (or .. not dealing) with addictions to both drugs and pills, and so many of these lines made my heart spasm, describing the urge to look through his brother’s room but not having the courage, and the fact that he suppressed details of his brother to keep himself from going crazy with grief, and Sonny talking about people doing more drugs “In order to keep them from shaking to pieces.” But I can’t talk about that. I would like to say that I was impressed with the theme and emotions dealt with in this story, besides the language, though.

I went to see The Imaginary Invalid on Thursday night and watched the entire play. It was interestingly interpreted, and not at all what I expected. (Actually, on first hearing of the play, I thought it was going to be a modern interpretation of the Oscar Wilde play, The Importance of Being Ernest, because of the name, but even after that when it was just a play by Moliere...)

To be honest, about ten minutes in, my teeth were on edge. After the dancers pranced around in the audience for several minutes, and then Micah Buckley (Argan) spent several minutes performing a monologue in an extremely grating voice, between grotesque coughing noises. Near the end of his solo opening scene, I was practically twitching.

ENTER Rossanna Mercedes, stage left, with an even more over-the-top voice.
At first, I was like, oh brother, but then … they grew on me. Everyone was over-the-top, gaudily dressed, and sitting in neon-rooms, and had a booming and ridiculously accented voice, which, once I got over my initial irritation with, because part of the productions Narmy-charm.

While most of the productions laughs come from over-the-top antics, (Tara and Micah get into a sword-fight with a cane and umbrella as she wards off a spanking) and voices, I can easily see this play toned down and transposed onto a more subdued canvas: it does deal with themes of love; romantic love, faked love, and familial love.

The Imaginary Invalid utilized plenty of TV tropes, fake death, the wicked stepmother, true love and star crossed lovers, arranged marriage, ultimatums, the gold-digger new-model wife, the charming love interest winning the girl’s heart over the big dumb brute (a la Beauty and the Beast), among a ton of others. Most of the play’s charm came from the interpretation of these tropes, it’s giddy silliness covering up serious themes, and dancing “gypsies” and harlequin “paintings” mocking the situations, winking at the audience, letting us know that everyone is in on the joke.

Dear Professor Corrigan:

Working on the old schedule, because it hadn’t run out yet, and I hadn’t realized that you had updated it, I didn’t realized that Monday’s post was a prompted one, on blogging in your class. Please allow me to switch the order of this Monday and Wednesday.

Everything about this class is about experiencing literature on a deeper level, seeing it in three dimensions, tasting it, touching it, and understanding it. After reading out loud a poem about an onion that meant so much more, you chopped one up in the middle of class. We saw they papery skin pulled from it, heard its crinkle, as we thought about what it meant in context with the poem, all of us coming with different histories and grasps on words and nuances, and all of us coming to different conclusions, if similar ones.

Blogging about literature has forced us to connect with it, read until we could find something to say. Some nights I cannot wait to get tapping at a keyboard, excited. Some nights I grasp at straws, with no earthly idea what I want to say; feeling unresponsive to a story, or poem, or essay and I reread it and reread it until I feel like I’d do anything to be done with it. And anything, of course, means churn out a blog entry.

I named my blog synesthetic lit because I knew that this is what it would come down to. Synesthesia is an organization of the mind that mixes senses. A synesthete has two or more senses “tied to” each other; Wassily Kandinsky, a famous Russian painter, “saw” sounds, (Golden-yellow, he said, was the sound of a piano’s middle C.) and painted as a way for the rest of the world to see what he saw.

This class and blogging have both been about bringing literature off the page, and into our hands, our minds, our senses, our conversations; to read Whitman in a graveyard and tell everyone else what we’ve felt.

On Thursday night I recited the words of a slam-poet named Anis Mojgani, in the dark. I used my whole body, because I don't know how else to talk; how else to think but through three dimensional gestures.

I am, by nature, terrified.

Of life, of growing up, of speaking in public.

I love stories, and the telling of them; it's the telling-with-an-audience that gets me.

I hadn't expected to read, not really. I'd wanted to go and hear, but never read. When I sat down, Jennica was doing a mic check, reading another of Anis' works Shake the Dust, and I immediately thought I was off the hook because surely she'd do his most amazing poem and I'd be spared the peer pressure of any friend that showed up.

Corrigan was there, too, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself in front of him. And then Mrs. Cotton happened, the resident peer-pressure expert, and Jennica (clearly, she hates me) resolutely failed to perform Sock Hop.

It was nerve-wracking and terrified, and even though I've never had a seizure before, I kept thinking ... there's always a first time. And being on stage, it certainly seemed to be a good time for one. After I got started, though, thoroughly surprising myself by knowing all of the words (at one point I took a deep breath during a dramatic pause, and thought, well, whatever comes out of my mouth next will hopefully be words that are actually in this poem, but no matter, I’m pretty sure I know how it ends, so hopefully I can weave it into the ending, and surprised myself by not having to improve.) ... it was sort of ... fun.

I preformed it again to my mirror that night. It was easier, but it didn't make my heart pump the same way; didn't make my legs turn into useless quivering jelly, either.

I spent an hour at a cemetery, rereading poems about a dead president, like something straight out of The Catcher. Once I got past the surrealism, it was an incredibly interesting experience.

I spent most of my time just wandering through the yard, reading names and dates. I kept wondering about their stories: everyone has one. Everyone. Lots of people's lives are cut short, infants and teenagers and middle aged men: people in love and people still grieving the loss of others.

Since the cemetery is so old, there were so many people that were clearly involved in any of the wars of the past few centuries, but that didn't strike me until the third time I passed a seventeen or eighteen year old man's grave, beside his widow, who'd outlived him by a good forty years.

Walt Whitman, in another poem dedicated to Lincoln, wrote that "This dust was once a man," and it just kept bringing me back to their stories. What kind of men were they? What kind of women did they love? Were the family people?

As soon as we stop remembering that everyone exists -- with the same complexity we imagine in ourselves -- we lose our reverence, both for the dead and for the living others. For the living, we forget to treat everyone the way the deserve, the way Jesus would have treated them, and for the dead, we bury them away, and only think about them when we superstitiously hold our breath when we drive past.

Maybe this is how it should be – let the dead bury their dead – but shouldn’t the living also remember the dead? In what is arguably Whitman’s most famous poem, Song of Myself, Whitman described his lineage in a short line.

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same.

We come from such rich history, and now we exist, holding the current spot in time like the marker in a relay race, and someday we will have passed it on, and our descendents will tell our stories to their children or we may not leave any worth telling, and they will pass our cemeteries, holding their breath for superstitions sake.

Walt Whitman moves mountains with his words. I love not man less, but nature more... every atom that belongs to me as good as belongs to you... and your very flesh shall be a great poem... behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give, I give myself... Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself -- I am large, I contain multitudes.

The problem is, no one talks like that anymore. It's cool to say OMG and dude, and English teachers write lists of non-acceptable filler words for High School seniors who still can't find a better adjective than "cool."

I don't understand, because I'm blown away by his gems, and articulation. I want to get back to an age where our celebrities are people like Oscar Wilde, famed for his wit and nuanced, double layered speech – people having him for dinner weren’t sure if they were being insulted or not, but they sure knew he was clever.

Mr. Swirsky, high school English teacher of my heart, used to say, “everything’s a cycle,” and I can’t help but think it’s time to cycle back for another Renaissance. Technology has never been so openly available as it is now, so why is it not an age where we’re all impressively well-rounded? Instead, technology has done the opposite for us. Our memories have atrophied under the help and ease of which we can reach information. We don’t have to store any facts, because they’re always a click or text or google away.

I wrote my essay to get in here primarily about Whitman (with some cameos from my spiritual life and the ocean and Mr. Swirsky) because when I was fourteen years old I fell in love with with a man who could say what he needed to say, and say it so beautifully that we are still talking about it, two hundred years later; one of whose main themes was nearly always empathy and feeling the pain and joy and sorrows of another, desperately in love with a country who was still a screaming infant with a just-cut umbilical cord at the time.

We neuter God.

Earlier in this class we talked about the idea of something verses the reality of the same something; how we build up ideas of something in our minds the second we are out of sight of that thing, or person, and the moment we reconnect with them again, it sort of breaks down all that we've built them up to be. C. S. Lewis described that in A Grief Observed. He called being in love with the warped idea of something "incestuous".

I think we do that to God: we build up our favorite parts of him; his mercy, his love, and his compassion, but we completely blot out his wrath and his anger and the fact that sometimes, due to human iniquity or inexplicable divine reasoning, hides his face from us. That sometimes he pours out his wrath.

In the Old Testament, God told his armies in several instances to lay waste, or “destroy” a certain group of people. In one, he told them not even to have mercy on the women and children. Not to let a single goat, or infant survive. This picture of God breaks my heart, and I still don’t fully understand it, but I know that this is also the same God that said that he would spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there were only a few righteous men.

This "New Testament God" can become an idol, I think. If you worship a wrong idea of God, can you still call that an idol? As I understand it, Muslims believe in what, on the surface, appears to be the same God, but I believe they worship an idol. ("Who can know another man's spirit?" though) We do the same.

We do believe in a God of mercy overflowing, but in the early years of AD, God didn't have a personality makeover. God is timeless, which would make it ridiculous to believe that over a short time, he became a radically different deity. He does express himself differently after Jesus fulfills the law ... but the character of God doesn't change. I believe in a God of justice, and sometimes that includes his wrath.

The Things We Carry

This story was so interesting, and seemed to say a whole lot, and then a whole lot more by not saying things. The Things They Carried described both the contents of the bags of these soldiers and the contents of their hearts. They carried Uzis. They carried memories. They carried rations. They carried ghosts.

Some of the things they "carried" seemed to conflict: how do you carry love and hate, tenderness for your fellow man and the ability to scoff at his death, terror and courage? But that's what they had to do, so they learned to cope.

Much of this story seemed to be about hiding. Hiding from feelings. Hiding from grief. Hiding from the tenderest emotions. Hiding from the enemy. Hiding from their own ghosts and from whispers in the dark. One way of hiding from the invisible is to compensate with the tangible. Instead of thinking about their ghosts, they make jokes and take fingers and smoke the dead man's pot. They keep pictures and memories to keep the loneliness they carry at bay, like haunted conflicted contradictions. Their heavy, burdensome minesweeper doesn't make them feel safe, but helps them pretend they believe it. His girlfriend doesn't love him, and he knows it from the beginning, but he pretends, getting lost in her letters and a memory of a tweed-covered knee.

Getting lost in her memory leaves him distracted and inefficient, though, and when a man gets killed because of this, once again, Lt. Cross has to put down the intangible band-aid meant to ease hi invisible wounds, stop carrying all that, to pick up his men. In the end, he decides, they'll start carrying every real thing: no more cutting corners, no dropping rations and ammo to make their loads lighter. His job isn't to be loved; it's to keep him men alive.

The minesweeper and the big guns are heavy, but the heaviest burdens are the invisible ones, the lives and ghosts and responsibility of keeping the two separate.

A Grief Observed

There are times when I'm terrified to doubt. There are times when the lights go out and I shake, thinking about the word eternity and what that entails and all of the sudden, I'm dizzy.

I can't relate with loss -- not in any real, tangible way, not in a mom dad sister best friend boyfriend kind of way, but doubt, certainly, strikes a chord with me.

Sometimes, when I get scared, I do everything I can to not ask all of the terrible questions I'm dying to know the answers, the ones that fall like quiet bombs and leave my head spinning. Sometimes the doubts I have are the same as Lewis'; I rarely have moments where I doubt the existence of God, because I've seen him, felt him, tasted him too many times for that, but sometimes it's his character I wonder about -- his love.

It's scary and it feels like swallowing.

Seeing other people (and by that I mean, seeing people named C.S. Lewis, a man who is like a king of Christian thinking) ask the same questions and think the same thing is profoundly shaking, but very cool in a way. That he could wonder about the character and love of God blows my mind.

I think it’s important to savor that doubt. Prof. Corrigan kept saying this week not to “rush to pat answers” or “run to consolation” but instead to let these questions shake us from the inside. When we stop asking the questions that terrify us and make us examine faith, make us turn to apologetics to figure out and demand some answers to questions that are hard to ask, we start relying on blind faith and hocus-pocus.

From there, it’s only a short just to being the homeless person on the street corner rambling to himself, crazier and blinder than an outhouse rat.

The Catcher in the Rye

This is the favorite book of sociopaths everywhere; every disconnected, lonely, bullied kid: the Perks of Being a Wallflower of the fifties.

Mark Davis Chapman, who killed John Lennon (buzzkill) tried to legally change his name to Holden Caufield because of how strongly he identified with the narrator.

The first time I read this book, I was thirteen and starting my sophomore year, lonely in the way that the youngest person in high school typically is, and this book resonated with me.

I read it half a dozen times before I actually got it.

Serial killers and crazies love this book. It's a fact. During this story, nothing happens. The alternate title should be Holden Caufield Gets Lonelier and Lonelier.

He goes around, kicked out of school thinking about how "phony" everyone is and saying things make him "depressed as hell" every three words. At one point, he tries to pay a prostitute to talk to him. That's all he wants, and she goes back to tell her pimp that he's swindled her out of her time with no compensation. He proceeds to beat the crap out of him.

Many people call Holden unlikable; that he has earned his sorrow. I like that idea. There is a part of everyone that is "unlikable," and that part of us wants Holden to find a friend, even when he is prickly and abrasive and a jerk. Life is frequently "unlikable".

At the end, though, and this is what I figured out on reread thirty: At the end of this story, Holden has learned to communicate, connect with people. We know this, because we empathise with Holden. Because we feel for him, and he's told his story.

Serial killers and outsiders and people who can't connect, they empathise with him getting lonelier and lonelier, and his well intentioned love for his sister and getting beaten up by pimps, but they do not see the healing.

Happy Endings

There isn't much that's more selfish than the idea of a happy ending. This story, while jaded and bitter, had some really awesome points.

It really made me think about happy endings, and about how EVERYONE IS THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THEIR OWN LIFE.

This, in connection with the idea of a "happy ending", entails two things:

A. When the point of view character ends happily, there is no second thought given to secondary characters welfare in deciding if an ending is a happy one. In several parts of Happy Endings, people were cheated on, people died by tsunamis and bad hearts, people killed themselves, and people killed other people, or various combinations of several of them. This doesn't matter, because reader focus is on the main character.

B. In the life of, say, the victim of any one of the aforementioned, there were no happy endings. Their stories end with them dead, overdosed on drugs and cheap liquor; shot; cheated on; dying of bad hearts. Bummers. No one would read them.

We forget that other people are real people.

Walt Whitman, throughout his poetry, and especially in Song of Myself, stresses the importance "of imagining others with infinite complexity" because of this: every one of them are breathing, every one is the protagonist.

Other than that, Happy Endings said something else that I found interesting. "So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with."

This seems true both in life and in books. Endings, of life, of relationships, of any good thing, and even plenty of bad things you wouldn't expect to miss, are downers. The beginnings are filled with potential and promise. Everyone loves a new start.

Book with happy endings, especially love stories usually don't actually end at the end. "Happily ever after" is an ending that happens during the honeymoon, and cuts out, fades to black before the first argument over who does the laundry, or who put the kids to bed last, and not making bills. And they especially don't end with John and Mary dead.

I like "happy middles" best. Happy "endings" hardly ring true, and leave nothing to the imagination. Tom and Huck will always be little boys on adventures in my mind, because I never read of them being onld and grey and drinking ale looking out into the sunset on their porches together, retired and near-end, thinking about the good old days. Certainly you can't leave a dangling middle, where you don't know if the outcome is for good or for bad, but leaving on a happy moment between acts of life, after the first argument, when you know they can both do laundry, and sometimes someone has to sleep on the couch, but that maybe they'll be okay. That's my favorite ending.

Literature/Katie = OTP

In elementary school, I remember, it was wildly popular to make fun of Hooked on Phonics. When I was three years old, my baby sister was born, and mom bought me Hooked on Phonics. (The two are probably coincidental, as no one would ever do something just to "get me out of their hair." That wouldn't make any sense.) Reading was just what people did in my house, which looks sort of like an overstuffed library, books spilling off the shelves like sugar and pooling on the ground and against the walls, so I taught myself to read: excited and tiny and probably listening to my Winnie-the-Pooh tape player under the dining room table while mom tended to a fussy baby. (That baby just turned fifteen, and she's only gotten fussier.)

Anyways, I remember hearing my first HoP joke, or maybe the first time I'd heard one and connected it to the way I'd learned to read -- by that time being three years old was a little hazy, and I hadn't thought about it. It had seemed normal. I was mortified. Hooked on Phonics was for retards and dummies? I laugh about it now, because, seriously? I let little kids that probably read below grade-level make me feel stupid for learning to read at three years old?

I don't have many memories of being read to because of that; the fact that there isn't much time in my memory that I couldn't read to myself, but I did a lot of reading then, to myself, and to the new squirmy bundle, Exhibit A, or Bethany:

(Even now, I occasionally read to the squirmy bundle who is practically an adult. "No one does voices like your big sister." I am grateful for this connection and time even when my throat is raw and splintered.)

Now, I read anything I can get my hands on; Whitman and Tennyson and Gregory Maguire and C. S. Lewis and John Green and Yann Martel, the way I did in elementary school when I read books under my desks (they were very worth it) but my understanding of literature is different.

My understanding of words is different. Where in childhood, I was wrapped up in words only of the written variety, dismissing music and paintings and dancing because they had nothing to do with articulation, and I knew from elementary school that I'd be an english major. Have always known.

Except, I'm not. I'm majoring in communications because now, with my practically-adult-eyes, I am finding that everything is about connecting, everything is about telling stories, everything is about herding someone towards seeing things through another's eyes, if only for a few hours. Bob Dylan meanders his way through the story of the love of his youth in Tangled Up In Blue, and I think who wouldn't call this literature? Anis Majgoni, spoken word artist, says "all I did was shake my ribcage like a library in an earthquake; I spilled book like holy water... I was one thousand tattered spines, splinters on my tongue from licking the cathedrals. I had worked hard for my sorrow." and my heart stutters the same way it does when I hear The Hollow Men read, or Song of Myself, every atom of me belonging to the story, the way it belongs to you.

I don't know what purpose literature has except to be the roots connecting us, letting us see what life is like for someone who has their own thoughts, to remind us that other people are real, and not props on our stage, to build in us empathy and sympathy and larger vocabularies, and something to talk about on Monday morning.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Words

Words, I think, are like wild animals. You can't keep them in cages. For one, language is always changing, and two, reality doesn't care for language.

We use words, invented language to define our world: we feel a twisting in our stomachs and call it "hunger" or call it "guilt" and in knowing the name of our butterfly-insides, we can move on, or we can dwell on the feeling, but the naming changes it, somehow. It's like the old comparison of English vs the Eskimos: we have a few words for snow where they have dozens. How does this change our experience of it?

In What We Talk About, they all recount their stories and ideas about love. Mel and Terri both give their soapbox speeches right out, in drunken rants and old arguments, and Nick and Laura briefly mention a pro-love ideology, but their love is shown more through their actions. Laura seems to be, at least in this brief window into their day-to-day life, seems to be Nick's center of gravity, and he's content just to look at her, or feel her hand in his. Of course, they're also newlyweds, but I digress.

The point is that they've all defined love differently. Terri stayed with a man who "dragged her around by her ankles" and "tried to kill her", threatening both her and her new husband repeatedly after she left him, claiming even now that his behavior was a manifestation of "love." Mel "loved" his first wife, but now he "hates her guts." Nick and Laura, as far as we can see, neither beat each other, nor constantly inform the other that if they died, they could move on pretty quickly, but when we see them, they're newly married.

The heart of the story seems to be the definition of love. To Terri, Ed's love was terrifyingly real, and nothing will dissuade her from the point. To Mel, love is something that you travel into and can get out of like driving through the bad part of town. Nick and Laura have yet to survive the period of "love" where you treat each other like glass. If the author had a less cynical view of love, I think we would have seen Nick and Laura as tried-and-true, as opposed to the couple whose opinions can be discounted because of their stage in life.

What they're all talking about, to my definition, to the way these words define my life, is codependence (Ed and Terri), infatuation (Nick and Laura), and a state of kind, but shallow, affection that can be killed with time (Mel).

But that's the crazy thing: you can't keep language in a box, because it isn't something stagnant. Language grows and words lose their meanings, and ideas represent different things to different people. The way I define life is the only way I'm capable of it. I cannot see through someone else's eyes; I cannot stand firm in their convictions, I cannot understand what I do not understand without study and convincing. If I try to describe to a blind man what I see, he may not see it.

Someone can say "and then he put a sharp metal blade against his skin and dislodged little pieces of himself," and think they're being perfectly clear, but I probably wouldn't (as you probably didn't) get a picture in my head of someone shaving.

To me, Love is patient; love is kind. Love does not envy; it is not proud.

Or, Love is:

1.	a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

2.	a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.

3.	sexual passion or desire.

4.	a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart.

5.	(used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection, or the like): Would you like to see a movie, love?

6.	a love affair; an intensely amorous incident; amour.

7.	sexual intercourse; copulation.