affliction

"Loveeeeeee Song" by Rihanna ft. Future

Lyrics are kind of unimpressive, but there's something dreamlike about this beat that makes me think of warm summer nights. 

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There was a performance artist duo -- Marina Ambrovic and Ulay -- who worked together in the 1970s. Their work together was incredible. In Breathing In/Breathing Out, they connected their mouths and breathed in each other’s exhaled breaths, passing out seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance when their lungs became filled with carbon dioxide. This was the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.

The greatest performance happened at the end of their relationship. Marina and Ulay started at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, walking towards each other. When they met at the middle, they said their goodbyes.

A little more than twenty years later, Marina performed at the MoMa, where she shared a minute of silence with strangers who would take turns to sit in front of her. When Ulay appeared and sat in front of her, Marina reacted with tears in her eyes.

I've been thinking about the idea of synchronicity, fate, yuanfen. I wonder what fraction of people experience the sort of epic, intense, all-consuming one-true-love in their lifetimes. How many people can you list whose names have been immortalized in the same breath as a lover's? These don't always end happily ever after. I think they rarely do. Rodin and Claudel. Sid and Nancy. Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet I wonder why we romanticize these situations, where it seems like all the fire and passion becomes concentrated into a volatile, turbulent brief set of years, instead of fanning out over decades. I suspect deep down, we are far more enamored by the consuming roar of the fire than the slow burn of glowing embers.