Stillness In Love

by Quincey Martin-Chapman

It has stayed upon my heart and mind our most recent discussion on love. More specifically what love points out in ourselves. I thought to keep this writing cohesive I might have to choose between whether to discuss self-discovery or love. It continues to become clear to me that it might just be impossible to separate the two.

The class discussion’s connection to James Baldwin also became clearer to me as I began to read Giovanni’s Room. The definition of love as what gets rid of the distance that would otherwise keep us apart made a specific quote especially stand out to me. James Baldwin’s main character, David, says at the end of chapter one,

“I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well- by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”

I read “no room in the universe” as the character’s ultimate way of keeping the distance in tact, in turn shutting out love.  Our tendency to remain in motion and busy to avoid looking at ourselves and also getting to know others rings very true. I think about how in class we brought to attention how little we offer and often how little we expect when we ask someone about themselves or who they are. It is much easier to know the basics, to spit out in almost robotic nature our careers and our hobbies, and lists of achievements. But never do we really tell someone WHO we are. Part in problem we truly and fully do not know. But why do we not care enough to try and learn?

What do we have to lose when we really get to know someone? Perhaps it is our ego or our unchallenged, relatively likable, view of ourselves. Anthropology teaches us that it is through others we understand who we are. We in many ways come to know and become cognizant of ourselves through the differences in others we can easily identify. “Because I am not you, I am,” I’ve once heard an anthropology teacher say. I was also once told, however, it is a dangerous thing to define something by opposition, that this in fact is not defining something at all.

So what happens when we go deeper and move past these surface differences? It seems we instead begin to identify things that aren’t so different, things that are actually rather similar to us. Most frightening of all then, we experience the face on confrontation of things we don’t like about ourselves.  A passage from Giovanni’s Room that really took me aback was when the main character was describing the transvestites in the bar, saying that,

“his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely so- resemble human beings.”  

While reading this section I was quite uncomfortable, I was annoyed that the character kept referring to the men as “it”, and even the comparison to monkeys eating their own excrement seemed tremendously offensive.  It was only until the very last line of this quote that it truly set in what his disgust meant. It was the disgust he had for himself.  It seems true that what evokes the most emotional reaction from us does so because it hits very close to home.  It is often said that homophobia is a hatred that actually stems from self-hate and fear of one’s own potential homosexuality.

Returning to the first quote regarding constant motion, David then goes on in referring to his struggles with confronting his sexuality, that the constant motion was not always a distraction and that he was still left to  “fac[e] in myself the terrors I sometimes saw clouding another man’s eyes.”  I felt that this represented so much more than a literal look or a glance, but that in these other men’s eyes was a reflection, a reflection of self.  This reference to eye contact made me think of the film, Tongues Untied, by Marlon Riggs. In the film there was a scene that made commentary on the refusal in the black gay community to look at or acknowledge another black gay man in passing.  In an interview with Lyle Ashton Harris, Marlon Riggs explains the scene as

“the gaze of shame and negation that we know so well. Rather than come to terms with the truths in our lives and the shame, we try to avoid them. We project all of our ambivalence, our hidden terror, our shame, our hurt onto others because their faces look like ours.  We don’t know anything about the man who is up the street and looking at us, but we invest that image, that face with everything inside ourselves and don’t want to deal.”  

This response in so many ways for me summed up Giovanni’s main character, David, and the heart of our class discussion. I believe this applies not only under the umbrella of accepting one’s sexual orientation, but in all our interactions with others. It recalls another thing mentioned in an earlier class, in regards to any act of judgment on a person before knowing them as an act of violence. I also now read this judgment as a form of violence against self as well.

What do we really have to lose when we get to know another person? The pain, the hate, the fear, the violence, and in the spirit of Donny Hathaway, the load we’ve been carrying, “why not share?”  But more importantly what do we gain when we learn another person, when we remove the distance? LOVE.

Love, to me, is also stillness. Our “constant motion” efforts allow, as David suggests, ensures distance, and protection from our fears.  Getting to truly know someone requires stillness. Love requires stillness. When things become uncomfortable and the urge to wriggle your way into an easier position comes, love is being able to remain in that stillness with another. This is not to be mistaken with negative connotation of stillness as simply lack of action. We have been taught that stillness goes hand in hand with the absence of ambition or progress, and we must therefore keep ourselves busy.  But I believe that stillness in love fosters more growth than any packed schedule-planner could ever offer.