On Love and Space

ON LOVE AND SPACE / Lowry Pd "The 'private life' is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect." —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida //T OVE IS A PROPERTY of the space between two people": I ?—?find this sentence in a copy of a letter I wrote to a friend. I don't know whether I thought it up myself, but now it seems like a good starting point for seeing more than my private world. I have been in love quite a few times and have (to make a distinction) loved two women, ten years apart, in a way that feels as absolute as the sun or planets; each of them left me, one of them has died. The second time I lost the irreplaceable—and no lover ever is replaced—I came to the thought that starts this essay, first as a sensation: I discovered, after some months, that my inability to accept what had happened expressed itself perceptually in the loss of the third dimension. I saw as you would if you had only one eye. Analytically I could tell that there must be space between things, because of parallax, shadows, and so forth, but I no longer actually felt space opening before me as something I could walk into. Rather I was always inside a confinement that moved with me. When I looked out of this place where I always was, I felt as though I saw most people from the outside only, as images, though from time to time I would think that I glimpsed someone actually living, actually experiencing space, freedom, time, and felt that I would not experience that condition again. Time, like space, underwent a compression or foreshortening. There was no such thing as leisure. That was how it felt. But what did I mean when I wrote that love is a property of the space between two people? Above all, I think I meant that it is not a phenomenon inside one person or the other ("being in love" is that) but rather something outside—that situation in which space itself is defined and charged with energy by being between two particular people. The energy can be described this 24 · The Missouri Review way: when I love someone, the world common to all people becomes available to me because the beloved is here too. And at last I am not only on the world but in it; from this situation delight arises. I meant, too, something like what Rollo May meant in Love and Will when he said that Eros is the power that attracts us, draws us toward the other, while sex is the force that pushes from behind. The property of space that I wanted to refer to is an attractive one that pulls us not only toward the beloved but also into space itself, into room to act. And I meant that neither person reels the other in, neither is played like a fish on a line, but rather that the attraction is situated in between them, in the space, like a third thing, autonomous. So the attracting Or the attractedness has nothing to do with contest, with "war of the sexes." If one feels some kind of giving in, it is not to the other but to Eros itself. Perhaps the relationship between love and space, as I want to mean it, can be compared to a curious aspect of the notion of the Big Bang. The universe, according to that theory, began in an outpouring of energy (almost instantaneously turning into matter) from what was, at its inception, an infinitesimal point. Here is the curious aspect: the "point" out of which the Big Bang poured was the universe from the start. What erupted out of that "point" was not only energy (also called matter) but also space itself. All space was inside that inconceivable tininess-containing-infinity. When it burst forth it began expanding (into what?) and still does so today. Intuitively, when I imagine a point, I imagine it in a surrounding space. In the case...