What We Talk About When We Talk About Love(craft)
by Tom Salmon
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love(craft), or What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver if his seminal collection of short stories had been a work of experimental cosmic horror fiction which ruminated on race relations throughout early twentieth century of the United State of America instead of a collection of short stories which sought to explore the sexism and depression which sat at the societal heart of the American working class in the mid twentieth century through a “realistic” lens.
In Short,
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love(craft)
by
Tom Salmon
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
By Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1931)
My friend Ludwig was talking. Ludwig is an intellectual, and sometimes that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his table drinking. Moonlight hrough a small window near the fridge. Best place for a window.
Ludwig, me, Ludwig’s wife Sonia- Sunny we called her- and my wife, Hazel. We lived in Arkham then. But we were all from somewhere else.
There was an ice bucket on the table. We passed the gin around. A well choreographed dance. Occupying our places in that sombre routine brought us to talk about love. Ludwig thought Love a difficult emotion to discuss.
“I’m working on a treatise about words.” He said. “We can reduce them to having almost no meaning. Take love. What is love?”
He’d spent some years in the war before returning to being an academic. I don’t know what sights in a trench could make a man consider the nature of words. He said he still looked back on those years in the trench as the most important years of his life. I didn’t fight.
Sunny said the man she lived with before she lived with Ludwig loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Sunny said, “He turned on me one night. His face was contorted like some ancient gibbering creature from beyond the darkest recesses of man’s imagination. He dragged me around by the ankles. He kept saying ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’ It sounded like ‘I love you, I love you.’ My head kept knocking on things.” Sunny looked around the table. “What do you do with a love like that?”
Sunny was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark skin, and brown hair that hung down her back. She wore a necklace made from strange stones she’d bought from the seaside town of Innsmouth.
“My God, don’t be silly. That’s not love, and you know it.” Ludwig said. “You’re trying to control the word of love. Contort it. You place multiple meanings upon it much as all people do with all words across the varieties of languages but if we continue to apply meanings ad infinitum then surely words shall cease to mean anything at all. The limits of language become the limits of our world. I’m not sure what you call that but you cannot call it love.”
“Say what you want to, I understand your meaning that words merely act as a flawed method of communication, but that’s beside the point. I know what it was.” Sunny said, “It may sound crazy to you but it’s true. People are different all over, Lud. Sure he transformed into a creature that resembled some ancient forgotten aquatic predecessor to large fish and man, okay. But he loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me. There was love there, Lud. Don’t say that the word didn’t mean anything.”
Ludwig let out his breath. He held his glass and turned to Hazel and me. “The fish-man threatened to kill me. Sunny is a romantic. She wants to see the best in fish-men.” Ludwig reached across the table and touched Sunny’s cheek. He grinned at her.
“Now he wants to make up.”
“What is there to make up? I know what I know, and I know that our languages are inherently fallible. If we try to discuss the big topics such as love we should first establish what our words mean.”
“How’d we get started on this, anyway?” Sunny said. She drank. “Ludwig always has words on his mind, don’t you honey?”
“I wouldn’t say transforming into a fish monster can be described as love. I wonder if we can even agree on what the term means before discussing it. Before discussing anything. How can we have a conversation if what we mean by the words we utilise may be different from the meaning taken by the listener?” Ludwig said to Hazel and I, “What do you think about the fallibility of language in the things we discuss?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask.” I said. “I didn’t know the fish-man, and I find myself a fan of Heidegger’s position that language is the house of being. We are who we say we are in that by the act of uttering a word or phrase we bring that utterance to have meaning, meaning on what it reflects about us and the world, and what we, in turn, take from the world by hearing it.”
“In the kind of ‘love’ I’m talking about we confirm through example what we mean by the word before discussing the topic. Imagine had we decided to talk about ‘good’ but that, unbeknownst to us, we never once shared the same idea of what good meant. ‘Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my Good’ Satan.”
Hazel said, “I don’t think quoting Satan is the rhetorical strategy you want to use.” She took a drink. “I didn’t know the fish-man, or anything about the situation. But does it not speak to the unconscious biases of the author of a tale in the way they speak of someone?”
We sat quiet for a moment. At most the beat of a human heart. My wife continued.
“Surely, should a man write down what happened to Sonia’s previous love, surely any description of him would see the language infected with meaning both intentional and unintentional? Take Sonia’s race, if someone were to write down this conversation and they highlighted only her race and not ours would that not show an unconscious societal bias baked into their language from a young age? A bias of ‘normal’ and ‘other?’”
Drink.
“Suppose this conversation was hammered onto a typewriter by a writer of pulps from a specific area of the world, say turn of the century Massachusetts. Would not the way he wrote and spoke show, perhaps in some way, the sources of his inspirations? The works we read and view and love leave an indelible mark upon us and the ways in which we write about the world, indeed they affect the way we view and interact with the world. Are we not, all, the sum total of all lives that were lived before us? Perhaps a writer who discussed the fish based transformation of a man who loved a black woman had some racist ideologies imprinted within his writing, ones we perhaps should look to combat?”
I touched the back of Hazel’s hand. She gave me a quick smile. I picked up her hand. Her hand could have been similar to one that imprinted upon a window beside my bed when I last stayed in the asylum. After Warren and I went to the tomb.
Could I write such a thing down? My statement. If I spoke of his death, wrote of it, would it be about him or about me? An ancient spectre devours your friend. A harrowing ordeal. But if they are dead, when we speak of them are we actually speaking of ourselves? Do we mourn to express the feeling of being alone?
“I know not how much of my soul he authored.” I think W.H. Auden said that about TS Eliot, Sunny said.
“Actually, while we may remember that from a lecture we sat through some years ago I have been unable to find any actual source of him saying that. It may be apocryphal.” Ludwig said.
“All the same,” Sunny said, “I think the ways in which we may half remember quotes speaks to the human ability to extract meaning to current issues by reflecting on the past. The point of the quote, apocryphal or not, is that I agree with Hazel. Her thought that all we are is the collection of previous social mores disguised into an interiorized self. We may feel that we are authentically us bus societal pressures, while invisible, can be overwhelmingly powerful into creating our morals and philosophies. No one is an island, does that not suggest our existences and the finite amount of ways in which we can interact with the world are, in some ways, synthetic?”
We sat around the table for a few moments.
“I’m sorry, you said he transformed into a fish-man?” I asked.
“He did.” Sunny clasped her arms with her hands. “When I left he drank poison. They took him to Arkham hospital. They saved his life. They had to remove his fangs. He later shot himself.”
Ludwig handed me the saucer of limes. They looked to me like the teeth of ancient beings that spoke mad prophecies in desultory tones. Were I a character it could suggest the fears a writer of narratives may have held. If one’s first thought upon the sight of a fruit is a fear of the old and the foreign then perhaps that writer spent too long ruminating and building that fear. The things we think we see in fruit are a glimpse into our interior fears.
Ludwig was forty-two years old. He was tall with curly hair. He lectured at Cambridge and carried that demeanour about him. He was a guest lecturer at Arkham University. All of his lectures came across in his movements, all his gestures, they were precise, very careful. An author may not have mentioned his whiteness, they may have taken it as a standard. Strange to think of as most people on the world live in Asia. Ludwig was a well travelled man, he could have looked like anyone. But he looked like himself.
“He did love me though, Lud. Grant me that,” Sunny said, “That’s all I’m asking. He didn’t love me how you love me. I’m not saying that. But he loved me before he transformed into a fish and he loved me after, in his bizarre, hurtful, fishy way. You can grant me that, can’t you?”
“This gets to the root of what I mean.” Ludwig said. “When we talk about love you mention softness and caring with him before his metaphorical transfiguration and transformation, and his brutal violence after. Equating both of those distinctly different forms of societal interaction, one the affectionate and the other the dispassionate is dichotomous. They are not the same. To the point, they both exemplify the societal positions of race and gender that we all occupy different facets of within our western society. It’s 1963. We two men can talk as freely as we wish about domestic abuse as if it were a simple fact of life and not a traumatic event you have suffered through that is, again, shown in the metaphor of your abuser transforming both physically and transforming the manner of their affection to aggression. I would posit that by you trying to use the word love for two conflicting types of interaction that you are instead showing that perhaps the word has no inherent meaning at all.”
“And besides, the fish-man threatened to kill me.” Ludwig drank. “He was always threatening, you understand. You should have seen how Sunny and I lived. We were in refuge from the fish-man. I even bought a pistol, a twenty-two. It felt like I was back in the war. Can you believe that? I carried one for self defence in my coat pocket and a second under the seat of my car. Not that I drove so much in those years, not as I do now. Only whenever I had to travel to a different state for their university.”
Drink.
“It’s strange to think. How we talk about the past inherently reflects our positions in the present to all who listen. Now cars are as populous as man but the fish-man threatened us in 31. The depression, what a word. That I had a car in those days should suggest that I had wealth and privilege in comparison to working men who turned into fish. A working man who had to commute to low paying jobs via bus or train. His transformation could have been almost a metaphor for our economic differences. Differences someone might be unaware of now as we can only say what we say, we may forget something that seems small which could radically change understanding. Alienation within the city. The depression. Change.”
“I’m still hoping to find how Sunny’s last love turned into a fish.” My Hazel said. I touched the back of Hazel’s hand. She gave me a quick smile. It was a warm hand, her nails were perfectly manicured. I encircled her broad wrist with my fingers.
“Sonia and I weren’t married then. Sometimes, I was guest lecturing, I would have to leave for an early drive through the dark. I would sweat before I even got to my car. I never knew if he would be out there, if he would come up through some shrubbery or a sewer, and start swinging. This insane, fish monstrosity. He was obsessed with Sonia. He would find which university I lectured at and call them. He would say he wanted to discuss Kant or Hegel, and when I returned the call he would start making gasping, gulping noises as if he was drowning on air. It was scary, I’m telling you.”
“I still feel sorry for him.” Sonia said.
“It sounds like a nightmare but what happened after he shot himself?” Hazel asked.
Hazel is a curator for the Miskatonic University attached to the university. We met in a professional capacity. She would often frequent my shop to look at the antiques. She remarked you never know what strange or bizarre trinket you could find. She’s thirty-seven, three years older than I am. In addition to being in love, we enjoy spending time together. She’s wonderful to be with.
Ludwig said, “He shot himself in my classroom. I had been lecturing on philosophy while some strange mummy from a forgotten people of a distant land had been set up behind my desk. Thinking back, I am unsure why. Either way, the fish-man with some great difficulty, because of his webbed hands, turned my pistol into his mouth and fired. Someone heard his guttural moans and told the Dean. They came in with a passkey and saw him on the floor, the mummy and its surroundings were coated with his blood which was black but glistened with streaks of bright blue. He had written a message with his most finger-like appendage beneath the mummy in some bizarre script. It was all very odd. Sonia wanted to go in and sit with him in the hospital when she found out. We fought over it.”
“Who won the fight?” Hazel asked.
“I sat by him when he died.” Sunny said. “He gulped up at me, exposed cranium. His gills twitched like he was trying to tell me something but he never could.”
“He was a mad monstrosity.” Ludwig said. “You cannot call that love. If you want to you have done a disservice to the nature of language and open discussion.”
“It was love.” Sunny said. “Sure, it’s abnormal for men to transform into fish in most people’s eyes. But he was willing to die for love. He did die for it.”
“Love is a labyrinth of paths.” Ludwig said. “You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place form another side and no longer know your way about. Your fish-man started in love but got confused. When we talk about him here we seem to actually be able only to debate the very essence of semantics.”
Sunny poured the last of the gin into her glass and waggled the bottle. Mel got up from the table and went to the cupboard. He passed the window. The image sent my mind careening back to my stay in the asylum. Arkham. And the cause of my stay, my terror over the murder of my good friend, Harley Warren. And then Ludwig took down another bottle and I returned to the present.
“Randolph knows what love is,” Hazel said. “For us, of course.” She placed a hand on my knee. I had not been aware I was shaking. “You’re supposed to say something.” Her smile covered me.
My answer was to take her hand and kiss it. A big display. Everyone should have been satisfied. Yet all I could see was the hand on the window of the police station. The same hand that followed me to my years in the asylum. The hand. How easy it is to slip into the past, a turn of phrase, a singular smell, a brief notion, all can send us careening back into our mind. The past is how we contextualise ourselves. When we think of the now we actually think of the then. When we think of the then we use it to understand the now. How terrible the mind. Like a ship, unmoored and set to drift across the foggy seas of then, therefore, and hence.
I returned from my ramblings to find I had still been kissing my Hazel’s hand. I was unsure how long I had carried on.
“We’re lucky.” I said.
“You two,” Sunny laughed, “Stop that now. You’re making me sick. You two are still mad about each other. How long have you been together now?”
“Almost two years.” Hazel flushed and smiled. “But it feels like a lifetime.”
Sunny held her drink and stared at Hazel. Her eyes like unfeeling holes.
Surely, were a writer to speak of the suffering of a woman at the hands of a man, a man who seemed kind and gentle and loving such that when spoke of she used the term ‘love’ and then that writer set about defining her gender, her race, her societal position, then would the trauma she suffered not act as a critique of how she may have been ostracised, wounded, assaulted, or alienated from society because of how the wider mono-culture treated those who, through no fault of their own, deviated from what that culture desired to see? When we talk about the violence enacted upon someone who is of a different class, gender, race, belief, or ideology, are we not talking about societal violence as a whole?
What scars the weight of society leave upon the bones of people.
“I’m only kidding.” Sunny said.
Ludwig opened the fresh gin. The bottle began its dance around the table.
“Lets have a toast. I want to toast love, true love.”
We touched glasses.
#
Outside dogs barked. It was the only sound that broke the oppressive blackness of night. Clouds hid the moon.
Ludwig drank. Sunny drank. I drank. Hazel had finished her glass.
The propensity of the people around me to drink brought up within me a sudden wave of nausea. My stomach sank when I heard Ludwig roll the ice in his empty glass. That soft sound. The fingers that played against the pane, a sole fingernail which tapped to get my attention before it carved a message into the glass.
“What did you say, love?” Hazel asked.
I smiled. As best a man can on such a night.
“We shouldn’t believe in love.” Ludwig said.
“How does one think? How does one know anything? When paired down to its most base components all I can come to believe about life is that we do not understand ourselves. We talk about anything, cars, time, love, fish-men, but all we do is spin in circles around each other. I can no more make you understand the memories that sit within me now then you could make me understand the memories invoked in you. Such a night. We talk of the past but how much is memory and how much is imagination? At what point do we end, one of us satisfied the other understood us, and the others leave still confused? Such is the nature of all language. I wish to believe in love and so I asked you all. Yet we all think different things are what love is. This is because we think we speak the same language but we don’t. We never can. Not until all people who live and will ever live can agree on exactly what every single word means.”
“Lud.” Sunny said. Hazel wrapped her fingers around mine.
“If I told you that I had seen a tree today you would all think of a tree. But it could not be the same as the one I saw. If I spoke of a chair then you may remember a chair. But not the same. Such is the fallibility of language. And yet it is the sole resource we have. Nothing can mean anything. We cannot agree or disagree with each other, we may only think we agree or disagree, because we can never truly grasp what the other means.”
“Lud, please. You’re drunk.”
“I am not drunk, Sonia. I appear drunk. I slur my words. But I am not. It’s a stylistic choice I’ve made.”
“Dear, I’m not criticising but you have carried on.”
“There are nights that I think Plato was almost right. He spoke of the forms of things, the ideal of things. Innately we think of what we know a chair to be; four legs, a back, perhaps wooden. But we ignore not all chairs have some, or even any of those attributes. He spoke of a world beyond this one, some instinctual cosmos that all people are attuned to, from whence all attributes of things must stem. I feel he approached from the wrong direction. The old Hellene thought of worlds beyond ours like some science fiction writer to explain the flaws innate to our reality. Instead he should have realised all our miscommunications stem not from external knowledge filtered through an imperfect world, but through internal confusions filtered through a fallible linguistic mode. The word scary means that I am scared. The word fear means I am scared. The word danger means I am scared. Words are simply noises, like the bleats of sheep. Meaningless themselves. I fear love is simply a noise we make.”
“But you just said, those words do mean things.” Hazel leant forward.
“Ludwig, you’re too much. But I love you.” Sonia said.
“I love you, honey.” Ludwig said.
They leant across the table and kissed. I saw no change in either of their eyes.
“My friend died.” I said.
They stopped and looked at me. Hazel looked at me. I looked at my glass, near empty. I couldn’t see any reflection.
“Warren. He wanted to explore a tomb. Something about it was of interest to him. He died in there.”
“You hadn’t mentioned.” One of them said.
“I don’t like to speak of him. He loved to speak in old languages, he worked as a translator in his studies. Some days he would strut about in the guise of a Shakespearean character and speak to you in limericks, at times he would quote Homer in Greek, or Virgil in Latin, and he would smirk or smile and let you know that he didn’t think you were lesser for not knowing, it was simply rather that he loved to perform.”
I poured the last of the gin into my glass and let it sit there.
“I think Ludwig has a point that words are noises. Inarguable. I understand he wants to interrogate each thing until we agree and that we may never, that there may be the true horror of the unknown at the heart of man. Mathematics may soon put a man on the moon but perhaps we will never truly understand each other.”
Drink.
“I think every element of life is a choice. You choose to rise or sleep, to work or play, to love or hate. Others may attempt to control us but at the end of the day we can take control of who we are and that’s it. So yes, we may never understand each other, and our arguments and conversations may be meaningless without us knowing it.”
Drink.
“But then doesn’t every element of life become a part of a game we choose to play? A linguistic game in conversation, an emotive game in love, so on? If nothing means anything, then I think our most radical choice is to choose to believe in making a meaning for us and hopefully others. I talk of my love for Hazel, and that is romantic. I talk of my love for you two and it is friendly. Same word, different meaning. I understand this, like all talk, can cause confusion, but frankly I don’t care any more.”
They sat silent around me.
Drink.
“All this discussion, all these rhetorical tricks, all this framing, its all useless. Perhaps, underneath all we think and feel and see and say is merely baseless confusions and we are all truly alone beneath the stars. But those stars still shine and I can still see the smile on my love’s face. This more in heaven and Earth than dreamt in our philosophies. Frankly, lets keep these silly games without a winner to our lecture halls and our offices, because frankly, Ludwig, all of us will die one day and I have grown very bored with the idea there is a horror that is unspeakable because we cannot speak. It’s not how anyone in the real world lives.”
Drink.
“In the real world people die. Perhaps they transform into fish-men, or are eaten by the ghost of a mad wizard, or are crushed by a tentacle from beneath the earth, it doesn’t matter how. All that matters is we enjoy what we can before we go.”
The three of them sat quietly around me. I heard Ludwig breathing.
“Nothing is everything, everything is nothing. Fuck it, I want to dance now.”
“There’s a new place down the road.”
“We should go.”
We didn’t move. I could hear my heart beating.
I counted the moments between heartbeats. Above us, away from that human silence, beyond the black clouds, a cold, unfeeling cosmos stretched into infinity. Within it spots burned bright. Closer to those, perhaps, it would not seem so cold.