Oh look, it's Dietrich

"Why is the measure of love loss?....I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first
and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them...."

-Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body


I have been on LiveJournal Hiatus for a few days because I have been furiously writing in my paper journal and in impassioned emails. (When did rhapsodic email communication replace the handwritten love letter? With the advent of that level of speed in written communication, do we fall in love faster? Progress the relationship faster?)

Once again those three words have invaded my life: 'I love you.' Each time I say them to someone for the first time, I am forced again to consider what they mean. Why are they so monumental, when they are so overused? Why are they the specific words that press at the back of my lips, bursting to get out, when my feeling for someone becomes overwhelming? And how does it change when it is expressed to more than one lover?

How is it possible, Winterson wonders (as do I), that the same three words can be simultaneously worn-out and fresh, that these words are the only words for that strength of feeling? 'A precise emotion demands a precise expression,' she says, 'and if what I feel is not precise can I call it love?'

To me, and ultimately to her, the very imprecision and yet total individuality of the feeling is what makes it love.

'I love you' is a place-holder, I wrote to both of my loves, a cipher standing inside our language, waiting to be filled with inarticulable feeling. One can say it to a hundred different people and have it mean a hundred different things, but the thing that links them, or should link them, in my view, is that the feelings behind the words are always complex and powerful. tafkar and I discussed the other night that there should be as many different ways to say 'I love you' as there are Innuit words for snow: 'I love you and you're my best friend.' 'I love you and I want you to be my life partner.' 'I love you, and we can't be together anymore.' 'I love you and if I could fuck you all day and all night I would.'

Yet we use the same words. Is this sheer laziness on our parts? Surely the phrase has suffered from people using it thoughtlessly, distractedly: the sleepwalking sign-off at the end of a telephone conversation. Still others use it to manipulate and abuse: a lame apology for striking your wife in the face, a trump card used to end an argument, like an expensive but meaningless bouquet of words.

But when it is meant and is felt, the words display a complex of emotions, each individual to the person receiving them. A mother might be saying to her son as he goes off to war, 'You are the world to me, I'd die for you, and please be careful.' An old husband might say to his wife of 50 years, 'Your presence in my life gives me comfort, and I'm so proud to have shared this time with you.' New lovers might be saying, 'Your body is like a temple in which I worship, I wish I could consume you, or crawl inside your skin, your touch sears me like a brand.'

But instead they all say, hopefully, tenderly, fiercely, 'I love you.'

I believe that these words are not merely a shorthand but a kind of prayer, an invocation, a phrase of power that calls forth the deepest ways in which we feel for another. Whenever I say it I feel a moment of being lost, as if what I have said has fuzzed over the precise feelings in my head, and a moment of crippling doubt where I wonder if what I have said is truly what I mean. And then I know that I've said exactly the right thing, because it is that sense of danger that accompanies those words that gives them power, the moment where everything I feel for someone distills, without defining and thus diluting itself, into a kind of song.

Fear, when it is named, described, and understood, dissapates, said the author of an erotic story I read recently. So too with love, he fears: when it is pronounced it loses its power. I think not. 'I love you,' said reverently, saves us from that. Not from examining our feelings and desires, which is important, but from trivilizing them by parsing them out: I feel this for you, but not that. I only give you this percentage of my heart, I legislate this love's boundaries. It is an offering, a way of saying, this I give to you freely, and without limit.

What are your thoughts?