#valentinothenarratives

[unfoldingmoments]

Valentino The Narratives

by : Fatima Farheen Mirza

Once I met a man I could love and in his mouth my name dissolved. Pronounced how my mother whispered it when I was a girl, feverish and falling into fitful sleep. To hear it was like tuning through radio static until suddenly— song. I flinched. Told all my life that love means obedience, I’d made a deal with my child-universe: fine, I’ll live without it. Crossing streets, the thought would come abruptly: I’m nobody’s girl. Wind lifting hair. Wolf without fangs. Winking at the moon herself. Reverse alchemist, I’d turn gold into copper, lovers into time passed.

On his rooftop, the man I could love passed me a bowl of washed strawberries. I pursed my lips. Wore tattered baseball caps, wiped make-up from my face. I did not want to be called beautiful. I wanted to be hidden. Yet every time we spoke a veil in the universe tore— have we lived this life before? For one blinking summer we were magnets dancing, pulled together, repelled apart.

I was proud when I said goodbye to him. Kept my hands in my pockets. Kept my end of the deal. Walked in forests kicking snow and breathing frost clouds. Attended dinner parties, candles flickering, centerpieces spilling peonies. A tour of Laura’s closet, doorknobs imported from Sweden, cedar sachets, dozens of sweaters, all cashmere. I nodded wow and pressed my spoon into my pudding. On weekends, I auditioned dates in red bars. My song on the jukebox, eyeliner all glitter, I popped pink bubblegum and lied with my body. Danced hard until violet sky then hooked my heels from two fingers for the long walk home. All night, all across the city, sirens sang their lonely songs. I wanted to be found.

When asked, Why didn’t you tell him you could have loved him? I laughed. I was twenty-five the first time my mother called me beautiful. Her text read: Never noticed your eyes before. I held my phone until the screen darkened, lit, darkened. My father cried when strangers piled bouquets at Diana’s funeral. Love? My mother said, No one needs love to live.

But once I met a man I knew I could love and I climbed a hundred steps to reach his rooftop. Squinted in the bright sun just to see him. That was my throat parched from the climb, my heart in my chest, rattling like an animal I was ashamed of. I wanted to want nothing. Not even water.

In Paris, I translate nobody’s girl into French: daughter of no one, girl of nothing. C’est moi. FKA Twigs spins on stage and I’m dizzy too. Didn’t I do it for you? How powerful was she, singing from the tender inside of an eggshell. Her desire a creature she claimed. I thought I was proud when I said goodbye to the man I loved, but now I know I was a coward. Afraid to ask a question I didn’t know the answer to. So afraid to be made a fool, I’d fooled myself. For weeks, I’m in a daze. Bakers call after me, holding paper bags of pastries, Mademoiselle, have you forgotten what you wanted? I shatter a glass door. Tell the nurse threading my stitches I walked right through it.

That night I dream a fever dream: my mother is the last uniformed girl waiting by the school gates. The slow drift of snow. When no one comes to claim her, I go.

I wake and take the next train. Call the man I love and say I’m here. I’m ready. Come and pick me up. Make a fool of me for free. St Pancras is lit electric pink too, I want my time with you. 

REF: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/fatima-farheen-mirza

Fatima Farheen Mirza

Fatima Farheen Mirza was born and raised in California and now lives in London. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut novel, A Place For Us, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is being translated into seven languages. Copyright © Fatima Farheen Mirza, 2021 All rights reserved

#Fatima Farheen Mirza #valentinothenarratives #writing

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So I found you, my beautiful friend

Alok Vaid-Menon

is an internationally acclaimed writer, poet, performer, comedian and public speaker. As a mixed-media artist their work explores themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public (2017), Beyond the Gender Binary (2020), and Your Wound/My Garden (2021). They are the creator of #DeGenderFashion: a movement to degender fashion/beauty industries and have been honored as one of HuffPo's Culture Shifters, NBC's Pride 50, and Business Insider's Doers.

Over the past decade they have presented at more than 600 venues in 40 countries, most recently headlining the 2021 New York Comedy Festival. On screen, they have appeared in HBO's late-night sketch series Random Acts of Flyness and the 2016 documentary The Trans List. They currently can be seen on the Netflix docu-series GETTING CURIOUS WITH JONATHAN VAN NESS.

Copyright © Alok Vaid-Menon, 2022 All rights reserved

#Alok Vaid-Menon #ValentinoTheNarratives #writer #writing

[unfoldingmoments]

Valentino The Narratives

Leila Slimani

People often ask me why I write. Why do I devote my life to this strange profession that consists of sitting for hours and days on end in front of a blank page? Gabriel García Marquez, when asked, would laugh and say: "I write so that people will love me more. But the great Gabo was facetious and you shouldn't believe what he says. In reality, you can't write to be loved. One writes to tell the truth; truths so raw, so harsh, that they sometimes displease. Once you are at your desk, pen in hand, you are no longer lying or afraid. You are free to say whatever you want, free to reveal your bad thoughts, to be rude, insolent, unkind. Yes, I think I started writing, really writing, the day I gave up on being loved and understood. It is not the love of others that I seek through my books, it is not the affection of the crowd. No, what I want is to ask questions, to raise stones, to break silences.  When I left social networks, people asked me if it was because of the hate messages I received. And I said: "no, it's the opposite". It was because of the love that I left. Because of the hearts, the likes, the applause. I don't want to be liked. It's in total contradiction with my life and my work as a writer. I don't want to seek assent, to be consensual, to please everyone, to live in fear of one word too many, of bad buzz... This Leïla who existed on Instagram I had to kill her like Virginia Woolf says she killed the angel of the house. I had to eliminate this kind and wise Leïla who was so afraid of not being loved. And I tell you, you have to resist. To be a free woman, to fulfil your destiny, you have to fight against this angel who encourages you to always want to please, to be kind and conciliatory, to experience disappointment as a terrible failure. Yes, we are not always loved, but we are ourselves and we are free. I don't want to please the crowd and I stay away from them. Nothing frightens me more than the crowd.  For love, no, that's something else. And there is, of course, something to do with love in writing. I write to talk about those I loved, to bring them back to life, to resurrect my ghosts. I write because I believe that every being is a mystery, an island whose shores you can land on but which you can never fully know. To love is to recognise this, to be fascinated by the beauty and depth of the other person's secret. Of course, I believe in love at first sight, in passion, but that's not what interests me. No, I look at love as a chemist and I remain amazed at the extraordinary reactions that love provokes between two people. Love is patience. It is a block of metal that is certainly not gold or silver, but which resists everything. To little secrets and betrayals, to what is not said and to everyday life. Time passes and erodes the metal and in the end there is only a block, sublime and indestructible. Love is silence. It does not seek to alter the other, to possess it, to empty it of its secrets. We all die unknown, but if we have loved, if we have devoted our heart to another, even for a moment, our life has counted. It is not my books that will bear witness for me when I am gone. It is those, a few, who have loved me. They will lower their eyes, they may say nothing, and a glint of metal will shine in their eyes. 

REF: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/leila-slimani

Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani (born 3 October 1981 in Rabat) is a Franco-Moroccan writer and journalist. She is also a French diplomat in her capacity as the personal representative of the French president Emmanuel Macron. In 2014, she published her first novel. Dans le jardin de l'ogre, published in English as Adèle, tells the story of a woman who loses control of her life due to her sexual addiction. In 2016 she was awarded the Prix Goncourt for her novel Chanson douce. In 2020, she published the first part of a familial trilogy, Le pays des autres translated in English as In the country of others.Leïla Slimani is also an advocate for women's right and LGBTQ rights and she fights for sexual rights in her country, Morocco. She created with Sonia Terrab the movement Moroccans outlaws and was awarded with the Simone de Beauvoir prize. Her book Sexe et Mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc ("Sex and Lies: Sex Life in Morocco") compiles the accounts of many women she had interviewed while on a book tour throughout Morocco

Copyright © Leila Slimani, 2021 All rights reserved

#Leïla Slimani #ValentinotheNarratives #writing #love #story

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The End of The Affair

by: David Sedaris

On a summer evening in Paris, Hugh and I went to see The End of the Affair, a Neil Jordan adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. I had trouble keeping my eyes open because I was tired and not completely engaged. Hugh had trouble keeping his eyes open because they were essentially swollen shut: he sobbed from beginning to end, and by the time we left the theater, he was completely dehydrated. I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I’m trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious. Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a dan-ger, as, unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question “Why can’t our lives be like that?” It’s a box best left un-opened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas. The End of the Affair made me look like an absolute toad. The movie’s voracious couple was played by Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, who did everything but eat each other. Their love was doomed and clandestine, and even when the bombs were falling, they looked radiant. The picture was fairly highbrow, so I was surprised when the director employed a device most often seen in TV movies of the week: everything’s going along just fine and then one of the characters either coughs or sneezes, meaning that within twenty minutes he or she will be dead. It might have been different had Julianne Moore suddenly started bleeding from the eyes, but coughing, in and of itself, is fairly pedestrian. When she did it, Hugh cried. When I did it, he punched me in the shoulder and told me to move. “I can’t wait until she dies,” I whispered. I don’t know if it was their good looks or their passion, but something about Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes put me on the defensive.

I’m not as unfeeling as Hugh accuses me of being, but things change once you’ve been together for more than ten years. They rarely make movies about long-term couples, and for good reason: our lives are boring. The courtship had its moments, but now we’ve become the predictable Part II no one in his right mind would ever pay to see. (“Look, they’re opening their electric bill!”) Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan. Call me unimaginative, but I still can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be with. On our worst days, I figure things will work themselves out. Otherwise, I really don’t give our problems much thought. Neither of us would ever publicly dis-play affection; we’re just not that type. We can’t profess love without talking through hand puppets, and we’d never consciously sit down to discuss our relationship. These, to me, are good things. They were fine with Hugh as well, until he saw that damned movie and was reminded that he has other options. The picture ended at about ten, and afterward we went for coffee at a little place across the street from the Luxembourg Gardens. I was ready to wipe the movie out of my mind, but Hugh was still under its spell. He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face. Our coffee arrived, and as he blew his nose into a napkin, I encouraged him to look on the bright side. “Listen,” I said, “we maybe don’t live in wartime London, but in terms of the occasional bomb scare, Paris is a pretty close second. We both love bacon and country music, what more could you possibly want?” What more could he want? It was an incredibly stupid question and when he failed to answer, I was reminded of just how lucky I truly am. Movie characters might chase each other through the fog or race down the stairs of burning buildings, but that’s for beginners. Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings. I wanted to say something to this effect, but my hand puppets were back home in their drawer. Instead, I pulled my chair a few inches closer, and we sat silently at our little table on the square, looking for all the world like two people in love.

REF: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/david-sedaris

David Sedaris

David Sedaris is the best-selling author of thirteen books, including the forthcoming essay collection Happy-Go-Lucky (Little, Brown and Company, May 2023). He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4. In 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift Prize for Satire and Humor and the Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

#davidsedaris #valentinothenarratives #theendofaffair #writing #writer

[unfoldingmoments]

Valentino The Narratives

Michael Cunningham

    He has no idea.     We pass a cigarette back and forth in the shade of the highway bridge, sheltered from the L.A. glare.  His forearms are dusted with pale golden hairs.     We call each other Man.  We call each other Dude.     He takes a drag, pinching the cigarette between thumb and forefinger.  He talks languidly about girls, about buying some older guy’s third-hand piece-of-shit motorcycle, and then about girls again.      Cars whiz by, their tires perilously close to the toes of our sneakers.  It isn’t safe, sitting here so close to the road, on this strip of crackled concrete, but there aren’t many places for us to go, unobserved and still too young to drive.     I say something about girls, myself.  I have no idea what, exactly, I’ve said, but I know it’s off kilter.  Suddenly—it seems sudden, to me—there’s a new language, one in which I am not quite fluent.     “Uh-huh,” he murmurs.     His eyes are dark and always wide open, as if everything, everything in the world, is surprising to him, but he’s too suave to mention it.      I tell him about a dream I’ve had:  a fire in a tree, wolves running.     He nods patiently.  I know nobody wants to hear about anyone else’s dreams, even if they’ve survived sixth grade together.  But I’m trying to tell him something, in a code so personal there’s no worry that he’ll understand.        “They could have been after me,” I add.  “Or they could have been escaping from me, I couldn’t tell.”     “Scary shit, man,” he says, handing me the final nub of the cigarette.  His Inx t-shirt, passed down to him by his legendary older brother, is peppered with holes.  There’s a dime-sized one centered over his heart.      “Dude, I live for scary shit,” I say.  We both know that that isn’t even remotely true.     He nods again, pokes at the modest little hole with a fingertip.  He has no idea.     He says, “This old shirt is disappearing on me.”     “It’s here for now, though,” I tell him, trying to be wised-up and philosophical, someone who can still command his attention.     He smiles ruefully, telling himself a private joke.  A single ringlet of dark-blond hair is sweat-plastered to his forehead.     “For now,” I add, doing my best to forestall myself as a small dancing figure, bows and pirouettes, all but lost in the landscape.  Trying, as best I can, to tell him that I know, I do know, and that I’ll be as graceful as possible about it.     “Right.”  He’s lost track of what it is we’re talking about, but doesn’t let on.  I toss the cigarette butt into the ground with offhand force, hoping it’s a disillusioned, foreign-movie sort of gesture.     “I like to think I’m right,” I say.  He nods agreeably.  He starts talking about the motorcycle again.  He turns sixteen in three weeks.  He’s got savings from his after-school job scooping ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s in the mall.     I’m trying to listen, trying not to think too much about that curl of dampened hair.     He says, “I could at least get to Chicago on that bike, before it falls apart.”     I don’t know why he’d want to go to Chicago, beyond the fact that it’s somewhere else.  He speaks often, lately, about being somewhere else.     “Or maybe even New York City,” I say.  “Before the bike falls apart.”     “Right.  Maybe even that far.”     He still respects our childhoods together.  He is courtly, in his way.  He’s possessed of a grudging kindness.  He always has been.      “Who knows how far you could get on that thing.”     Cars speed by, leave snatches of music in their wake.  Kiss the sky lingers for a moment, before it blows away. REF: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/michael-cunningham Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham the author of six novels: A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (which won the PEN Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as a collection of re-imagined fairy tales, A Wild Swan and Other Tales, all published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown, a non-fiction book which was published by Random House. He is a Senior Lecturer in English, Creative Writing, at Yale University

#michael cunningham #valentinothenarratives #writing #literature

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Love in the time of Covid

By : André Aciman

    Friday June 16th, six o’clock in the evening. The subway car is partly crowded. It’s hot, passengers are nervous but desperate to reach home. You’re both standing close but not too close, and for a split second, your hands accidentally touch along the same hand bar. You move your hand right away, you apologize, and need to show you mean your two to three words of apology. No worries, says the stranger with a casual glance. Nothing more. Still, you notice the half-masked face with the velvety glance, the wrist, the hair, even the fingernails, down to the forgiving but self-conscious smile that still lingers to mean It happens and which is aimed, not at you or at someone else in the car, but hovers like a whimsical afterthought that should vanish but doesn’t. You want to see that smile—unmasked. And then you catch yourself staring at that vague sheen of skin along the neck area, which is quite tanned and you wonder how, with whom, and where it originated. You’re dying to ask but can’t even begin to think of the words. Your intercepted look stirs a confiding, ironic glance you hope you’re not misreading, though your caution tells you that this is all in your head, this never happens, and even if it did, it would be a seedy subway moment between two strangers who are just eager to get home, remove their masks, shower, meet friends for dinner, and never think of subways until Monday morning. You can almost hear the old wisdom prevail: What happens in the subway stays in the subway.     A subway is an unlikely place, things aren’t meant to happen here, and strangers know not to buttonhole or be buttonholed. Extended glances are instantly regarded as indecent, and you never know who the stranger is. Still, you wish you could say something, something humorous or mildly bold. How often have you let moment kike this slip by, either because something wasn’t right, or because you were shy, or someone stood too close and could hear, or because a better moment might come soon enough again, better moments always come again—so you hope. Life, they say, is what happens to in the here and now. But life is no more than a series of better next time. So you rehearse dialogues: To “Do you always stare at strangers this way?” your answer might be “No, never, but I have to because we may never meet again.” Or you’re asked which is your stop, and your answer would be a clever “It was two stops ago.”  “Why did you stay on the train then?” “If you ask it’s because you already know the answer.”     You try to say somethings witty.  But nothing comes.     You want to say simple words, even if they’re totally flatfooted. But you can’t even find the words.     Can you think of anything?     No.     Maybe it’s because everyone seems to be staring at you.  Or maybe because your words might unleash a torrent of rebukes. Maybe you fear that un mistakable No, which has been dogging your entire life, because life’s Yesses always disappear; the Nos stick forever after.     But then without thinking: “Would it be totally wrong if I asked you to remove your mask?” you ask.     “Why?”     “Because I want to remember your face.”     “Why?”     “Because something is happening and I’m scared to know its name.”     The mask is quietly lowered.     “Happy now?”     “Yes, very happy.”     But now comes the unexpected, the one you’d put down a million because it’s the last thing you’d ever have imagined anyone asking.     “Your turn now.”     “My turn what?”     “To remove your mask.”     We burst out laughing “Do you believe something is happening?”     “Maybe. I don’t know. Where do you get off?”     “Two station stops ago.” 

REF: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/andre-aciman

André Aciman

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me as well as of Out of Egypt and other novels, essay collections, and novellas. He is the director of The Writers' Institute and teaches Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Copyright © André Aciman, 2021 All rights reserved

#André Aciman #valentinothenarratives #writing #reading #story #love #loveinthetimeofcovid

[unfoldingmoments]

Notes on Love: A Pocketbook

by : Murathan Mungan

1. Every sentiment that makes us feel the world still has a future is related to love. 

2. Love is Creation’s gift to humans. Whether you accept it or not is up to you. 

3. The best forms of love make us discover ourselves. 

4. A fig’s milk, a pomegranate’s seed, dew on grapes—in the right season, they are all love! 

5. The Turkish word “aşk,” they say, comes from the Arabic “aşeka.” It’s the name given to the climbing vine that grows by wrapping itself around the tree, feeds on it and, in time, desiccates the tree.  Nature does not err. 

6. Love is the most durable material in history; look at the poems, songs, stories, operas, novels, plays and film made to understand the undeniable power of love over the centuries. Aren’t you surprised that this oldest of subjects never grows old? 

7. Those who say you love only once assume that the heart is a one-use, disposable object. 

8. When writing about love, you cannot ignore Pascal’s famous words: “Love has its own reasons, beyond reason.” 

9. We ask life for memories, to feel that we are alive.  Love is one of those means. 

10. The ego is not all bad.  A good love, above all, requires a strong ego. 

11. Love is life’s detail work. 

12. I have two hearts; one is mute, the other my translator. 

13. Love always leaves behind stories worth reading. 

14. Often, love owes its written form to having ended. 

15. Regardless of your religion, love is your denomination. 

16. In love’s fever, even your own bones feel like a cage to you.  Your soul mixed with the universe, you cannot escape. 

17. The heart keeps its door unlocked. Love is how the heart periodically updates itself. This is love’s orbit. A cosmic reminder. 

18. Some loves are so good that they cannot last.  That’s why you should know when to draw the curtain. 

19. You wait to get on trains that don’t stop at your station, then ask, where is love? 

20. Love is served when the heart is hot.  Don’t let your heart get cold. 

21. Some loves are like storms that stop all of a sudden.  You don’t understand how they ended either. 

22. The great solitude of unrequited love: stays with you wherever you go! 

23. Intricate games and tricks played with a double deck of cards: in love as in every relationship between two people.  

24. Every sentiment of a mind that affirms love only when it has become obvious raises suspicion. 

25. Perhaps love is merely reincarnation. The re-embodiment of emotions, of past hopes and expectations. Of one’s being inside itself.

26. To those who say love is an illusion:  As if everything in the world is real and love alone is an illusion, deception. 

27. If you break up in autumn, it’ll hurt more.  See: The History of Experiences. 

28. Whatever percent of the human body is water, the same is true of love.  Water is life. Thirst scorches.  

29. Love is sometimes just a need for consolation.  All human beings, by our very existence, need consolation. 

30. Can we say, love that turns adults into children turns children into adults? 

31. To assume that our experiences are common to humanity and to name and define them as such is a fundamental deception.  Love too receives its share from it.  We think everything we live through is the common experience of humanity. Yet, at times or often, similarities deceive. 

32. When it’s very cold outside, love is the warmest place. 

33. Some notebooks of the heart never close. 

34. Fear and courage in love too work by the same rules. 

35. I never believed that stingy people could have generous hearts. Weigh everyone on their own inner scales.   

36. Love is an experience in mystery. That’s why some fail. 

37. Keep your love in your blood, your tears for separation... Time knows the time for either to flow. 

38. When in love, some need scarecrows for their scare of heights. 

39. To seek the truth in love is not for the weak-hearted.  

40. Sometimes love is a type of enmity, as enmity is sometimes a type of love. The scale’s bowls keep switching positions. The counterweight that knows not what it weighs with what. 

41. Both love and death show up one day.  Because behind each, there is a life.  The path forward or the life left behind. 

42. Some seek not a lover but an actor to share the lead role with, in a story they author.  This is why their love affairs resemble melodramas or photo-romances.  A similar case: The self-absorbed in search of love who merely longs for an extra in a solo performance. 

43. What some call love is heart flutter, easily managed.  

44. Love has its secret negotiations.  

45. When we fall in love, but truly, head-to-toe in love, all the flaws of the soul, its damaged parts, all the defects of our being come into light. 

46. Where, I wonder, is love in quantum physics. 

47. Some love poems are inscribed in cuneiform - the walls of the heart scarred with nail marks. 

48. Every act of falling in love entails dreams, illusions, hallucinations. It works to fill the emptiness of the unknown with blurry pictures made of the vague lines of expectations.  

49. Just as certain serial lovers we meet in life and art remind us of serial killers. 

50. For some, a new love is like the revised and expanded edition of a book.  You cannot decide which of the two is worse. 

51. Few people touch on this part of the matter: Love is also knowledge. The kind of knowledge you won’t gain in any other way. 

52. Everything heretofore experienced brings you to someone. When he shows up, There he is!  

53. The rest is time spent to realize whether or not he is the one.  After all, to err is human. 

54. Each love is the legend of its beholder.  Personal legend.  As with all legends, it seeks to reproduce itself. 

55. Who wouldn’t want to avoid making the same mistake again? But in matters of love, which heart has ever heeded the scolding of years? Sometimes life forces us to see the same movie again.  Clearly, we’ve liked that movie, no matter how often we were disappointed by its remakes. 

56. Let me just say, there is something called love’s revenge. But don’t ask, what is it like? Just know as much or you’ll remember it when the time comes. Agreed?  

57. Poems, songs, novels, and films show the parts of love worth seeing. Never mind the rest, you’ll hear them from others anyhow. 

58. Love itself is benevolent. Malice belongs to lovers. 

59. Love is the clever trick of death.  Its face that winks at us.  We remember where we had seen it not while living but dying.   

60. I encountered resistance to love as often as I have resolve to fall in love. Stubbornness lacks variety. They all look alike.   

61. The thrill of hope for a future is replaced in time by the bittersweet consolation of memories. Old loves, what we experienced as love, what we thought was love, we remake them into new loves, with altogether incomparable sentiments.  In time everyone falls in love with the times they were young. 

62. Some loves carry the traces of idol-worship.   

63. Love means never to give up hope. Trust, commitment, belief: these justify the need for hope, its possibility. Love is a close relation to hope. This is why the words, Love and Revolution, go well together. 

64. True love, true poetry, true art and such “true” characterizations are “truly” problematic. Not only do they provoke inconclusive debates, they also ossify misunderstandings. How are you to measure the authenticity of those who start by saying, “Theirs is not true love in the first place”? Isn’t there something fake about their confidence in their authenticity? 

65. Some loves are the consequence of what came before them. They deceive the lover. What’s reflected in the present is the shadow of a story that was previously interrupted or one that could never begin.  The lover mistakes the shadow for new love. What you call “new” is not easy to build inside you. Everywhere is covered with the remains of the earlier dwellers. 

66. Mockery, smirking under the moustache are among the shields that men hide behind.  Love too receives its share from such mockery. That smirk sets fast in some people’s faces when they really fall in love, while in others, the mocking grin gradually overtakes their entire face, hardens, turns ice-cold, freezes. 

67. Love after prolonged courtship sometimes meets a premature end -- in defeat... You have depleted all your material during courtship, like an over rehearsed actor who leaves nothing for the stage...  

68. Some men are afraid not of love itself, nor of falling in love, but of love’s terror. 

69. What people call thunderstruck is not always thunderstruck. It could also be just an ordinary heart reflex that we want to exalt by giving it a mythic label.  If it’s not lunacy at first sight, if reason isn’t eclipsed for a while, and even worse, if this reason isn’t scarred for life, then it isn’t thunderstruck.  I say this not because I know what thunderstruck is but because I know what it is not. 

70. The hopeless melancholy of those in love with people who lack the inner wherewithal to love; soul-scarring despair. The algebra, the geometry of being human. 

71. Short-lived love seems inevitable for those who don’t let their passion ripen. No love can be confined within the boundaries of the present time. Love itself decides when to warp spacetime. Or seen another way: Love’s spacetime itself decides when it can be warped. Poetic logic: can we call this the heart’s quantum? 

72. Some loves turn into permanent memory in one’s life. You cannot get past them or skip over them. They don’t give you grief or pain but just stay there, as unresolved. There and in the coffer of remembrance, always.  

73. Love never stays as it begins. This is true infinity.  

74. A few constants in the flow of time. 

75. Love and separation have their reasons, eyes shut. 

76. The absence that envelops every place: love’s aftermath. 

77. Some mistake their pyromania for love. Yet what scorches their soul is a desire to burn themselves, looking for a surface excuse. The spark of a face remembered an echo...  The envelop cannot contain the letter inside, you are left with nothing but a scorched soul. 

78. Passion is the most dangerous flammable material. 

79. Certain questions by your lover offer you two options: either telling the truth or fashioning a suitable answer that will satisfy them. Depending on the circumstance, either can later be grounds for separation. 

80. The love we have made to wait inside us yearns to be on stage. Right place, right time, right person. If Aristotle hadn’t said it, let me say it: These are love’s three unities. A rule of life that is not always possible to satisfy. 

81. Those who watch from a distance know some love stories more intimately. 

82. The wasteful love affairs of a greedy-heart and the spendthrift’s poverty have much in common. Yet, the paradoxical difference is significant: it is the first who suffers from poverty while the second from lack. 

83. Those who find almost every word spoken about love as adolescent drivel do not even possess the inner strength to question why they see so much depth in words spoken about loneliness and buffed with the sheen of masculinity. Adolescence is best known by its fears. 

84. We had loved each other when love was love, didn’t we? 

85. In the end, love stays alone. One day, everyone leaves.

REF: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/murathan-mungan

Murathan Mungan is a playwright, poet, author and songwriter. He has eighty-five books including poetry, short stories, plays, novels, screenplays, thought pieces and essays, all published by Metis Publishing. His poetry book, Yaz Gecer (Summer too Passes), play Mahmud ile Yezida (Mahmud and Yezida), collection of short stories Cenk Hikayeleri (Tales of Valor, to be published by Northwestern UP in 2022), and his recent novel, Şairin Romanı (The Poet's Novel) are among his most well-known works. He has two albums compiling his most popular lyrics performed by popular Turkish musicians such as Sezen Aksu, Yeni Türkü, Candan Erçetin,  Mor ve Ötesi, and Ajda Pekkan; Söz Vermiş Şarkılar and 2020 Model: Murathan Mungan. Copyright © Murathan Mungan, 2022 All rights reserved

#murathanmungan #valentino #valentinothenarratives #writing #words #narratives #notesonlove #pocketbook #notes #love #pocket #book #reading

[unfoldingmoments]

VALENTINO THE NARRATIVES

by: Amia Srinivasan

In a myth revealed by a playwright at a drinking party in a story told by an old man to a young man in an ancient text written by a philosopher and transcribed by the hands of many now long dead, there once were humans who were circular in form. These humans were the children of the Earth, Sun and Moon, and like the Earth, Sun and Moon they were perfectly round and very powerful. Each of these humans had two heads, four arms and four legs. They were complete and, in their completeness, like gods. One day, the gods started worrying that these circle-humans were getting ideas above their station, and that they might soon storm the divine realm. So the gods decided to split each human in two, as one slices a cooked egg with a hair. Each human was divided into two half-humans, each with one head, two arms and two legs. The gods swivelled round the heads of the new half-humans so they could see the cut surface where their other halves had been. The sun god, who is also the god of medicine, stretched the half-humans’ skin to cover the rawness of their wounds, gathering the skin together like a drawstring purse and fastening it with a knot we now call the navel. This way, the sun god said, the half-humans could gaze down at their bellies and remember what they had once been. So it was that human love was created. The half-humans were forever in search of their missing halves, tormented by a longing to render what was now dual a unity once again. Sometimes a half-human found another half-human who seemed to fit, and then these two sorry creatures, pressing themselves against one another, would cry out to the blacksmith god to weld their bodies together for ever. And so, endlessly seeking the restoration of their ancient estate, humans ceased being a threat to the gods.

I heard this myth told once at a wedding. The bride and groom were two halves of one whole, they said, we are one person, behold! What they did not know was that the myth, revealed by a playwright at a drinking party in a story told by an old man to a young man in an ancient text written by a philosopher and transcribed by the hands of many now long dead, was meant as a joke. The joke is that this is a story of love told by foolish lovers, which is, understandably, the nature of lovers. To believe the joke is to think that we should want to return to wholeness, that we could ever be enough for one another. It is a fantasy that forgets decay, death, the hot restlessness of desire. Imagine yourself as a circle, navel-less and two-headed, godlike in your perfect roundness. Still, would you not want more, need more – more than this unbearable plenitude?

The true story of love goes something like this. At eighteen, my grandmother, who was very beautiful, agreed to marry a boy whose face she liked. She had said no to other boys but knew she had to say yes to one eventually, so she chose this one, because she liked his face. It was a kind face. She bore and raised three children, kept the house, soothed her husband’s ego when it was bruised. Most days he would gaze at her face and say that it looked to him just as it did when she was eighteen. One night not too long ago he woke her up to say he was cold. She pulled a wool blanket around him and gathered him to her and then he died. When he was alive my grandfather read many books. Now it is my grandmother who spends her days reading, though the books make her arthritic hands swell and cramp. I last saw her a few months ago, on a screen. She was holding a book, wrapped carefully in brown paper, a book I had written. She was trying to read it, she said, but she wasn’t sure she could understand all of it. Do you know how much I love you, she said to me, do you know. Ref: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/amia-srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Her essays — on animals, incels, death, the university, technology, political anger and other topics — have appeared in the London Review of Books, New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Harper's, TANK and elsewhere. Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, was published in 2021.

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