The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
If you've read James Baldwin you can recognize how powerful it is for him to say that.
"I love my partner more than any other person in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize them perpetually".
Why doesn't my sentence work, except for the lunatic? Because America is not a person or an object, it is an idea and praxis. He loves the idea, but perpetually criticizes the praxis.
But I find it inappropriate to use the pronoun “she/her,” as Baldwin does. It is an “it,” an idea/praxis (in this case, in other cases it can also be a geographical location).
"An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.” This is true. People write because they have something to say. Baldwin had something to say, and he spent his life saying it. But many who thought they got his message didn’t get it at all....
That message was simple. We’re afraid of love, because we’re afraid of exposing our true selves. To manage that fear, we invent meaningless categories—Black, white, homosexual, heterosexual—and “other” the groups we don’t belong to in order to avoid a reckoning with ourselves."
IMHO that is a very optimistic take. Often it's self-serving "just write" mentality and the results are not very interesting or useful, some use writing as a thinking tool (pg comes to mind), others, most?, do it to sell something, perhaps themselves. And all this stuff that comes out that sounds good, is convincing, but misleading (aka lies or wishful thinking). And the rest is derivative or a few good (old) ideas mixed with lengthy fitting examples.
But maybe we are afraid, because some like to stab straight to the heart, anything that is exposed?
Homo homini lupus ..
But fortunately I experienced circles and groups where opening up is not met by an attack, but rewarded with true connection. They are a bit rare, though.
I often frame love as emotional intimacy, and when the level of closeness is very high, just like with physical intimacy, one can get more hurt. Can't get stabbed from far away. But also can't kiss from far away. One slight movement could mean a kiss or a headbutt.
So yes, I think feeling that close to someone has the risk of really hurting us...but also helping us.
Nicely framed! Something I am often in limbo about: how open/intimate can I be with this or that person. Often you only see the thin line after you stepped on it or over it. Then it leads either to shame or regret.
Indeed bravery is needed to walk close to that line.
I recently learned as well that expressing emotional intimacy can be seen as a dance. You reach out and bravely await a response that might come or not, and that might be positive, negative or indifferent. Your move, their move, and so on.
Maybe try contact improvisation, then it becomes a literal dance. Emotions expressed as body motions. And you act and react to others. Exploring, moving forward, or backward and block yourself again. How you feel it. And also deal with rejection. Cool, that move was too much, I back off. No big deal, I also set my own boundaries. And maybe I open later. But all that I didn't really learn in school or in childhood. There I rather learned to keep my walls up.
You'll end up suffering either way, at least suffer with love, dignity, and self respect.
Philosophers (and of late Psychologists a much younger field) have been telling us right from the time of Plato(mind = appetite vs spirit vs reason) to Hobbes (reason vs passions) to Freud (id vs ego vs superego) to Kahneman (System 1 vs System 2) to Haidt (Elephant-Rider metaphor) etc that our minds are imperfect machines.
So the simplicity of the message doesn't guarantee reception. The assumption is such unreliable machinery can receive messages perfectly. And that assumption constantly breaks down.
So from Baldwin you get to philosophers like Charles Taylor who tell us - the Church, one of the worlds oldest surviving institutions (not by accident), had to deal head on with this problem, since different minds interpret their messages very differently. Some minds we know in the "name of almighty god" will happily do whatever they feel like. Power has many ways of exploiting Love. So what do you do?
Judge them, label them, name and shame them? That was the first reaction and it was done in public as a large spectacle. But the system then evolves to private spaces where the act confession happens to a trained priest. If well trained, such people don't just put the focus not on shame and guilt but on growth. So until the person feels safe and encouraged to Recognize and talk about harm caused, which is what is supposed to happen in the intentionally architected safe space of a confessional (very similar to therapy), then there is a possibility for growth.
But if you notice the architecture today has totally flipped, the chimps are running around naming and shaming each other full time. So we have lots to learn from what has been tried out in the past. Charles Taylor is a good starting points for people interested in this stuff and how to create such possibilities in the real world.