The Literature of Longing

For some reason, I tend to write with better quantity and quality when I'm not in love. Or at least, when I'm not being loved back.

It was a strange realization to make, but if you look at the history of my own works showing up on the Blender, I wrote more when I was wandering that "Post-College Romantic Wasteland" last Fall than I have since I've fallen in love with Mo, and she with me.

There are different factors that could be involved with this. Robin Williams pointed out one in the movie Dead Poets' Society:
"What is the purpose of language?"
"To communicate?"
"No! To woo women!"

sometimes it seems as if he's right on, many of the verses I scraped together, cartoons scribbled down, or stories I've crafted have been to try to impress and intellectually woo someone. Many of the "Love Bites" series were written to remind the first recipient of what possibilities I thought we shared. Café at Night, the story that I get more feedback from than any other, is about the realization that an important relationship has ended, but also contains an exploration the romance as it was. It exemplifies the literature of longing like few other things I've written do.

But that longing is only part of it. I find when I'm in a relationship, e-mail tends to play a large daily role in back and forth talk. (Funny how modern technology shows up in the darn-dest places.) Many of the natural creative juices I have to burn off are utilized in an environmentally friendly manner through e-mail. This bothered me-quickly thrown together e-mails seems unlikely to survive the centuries-- until I realized that the most important thing that I get from writing is communication, and it doesn't really matter if that's in a forum I could share with third parties or not. It also encourages me to write sparkling and witty things in e-mail; after all there is no reason to stop trying to woo the women who happens to be in love with me.

Of course, you're currently clicking through the biggest example of how I've selected to deal with Romantic Literature, of longing or otherwise: I've turned the Blender of Love into an open forum for the writing of any 'Netizen who loves. And what makes this site work isn't me, though I help it along with computer scripts and arbitrary editing, but the community of feeling people have made here. So my perpetual thanks goes out to the writers and readers who have made this site work.

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