BACTERIA READER 02: A Literary Romance — Authors and their love letters
A metamorphic soul being hurled through time, falling in love over and over, as though they are falling into the curves and edges of another, crossing borders, crossing histories, crossing the abandoned territories of another's form. Romance is what Plato once so paradoxically described as Pharmakon, both poison and remedy at once. Fulfilling our deepest fantasies and darkest fears, that everything we love will be lost, but it will always come back in new forms, wrote Franz Kafka.
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When we think of a literary romance, what comes to mind first is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which is widely known as a queer love letter to Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover, exploring themes of gender fluidity and challenging societal norms through the character of Orlando, who lives for centuries and experiences both male and female identities.
A Literate Passion, is another book that comes to mind and rigorously catalogues the letters exchanged between Anais Nin and Henry Miller between 1932 and 1953. A delusional and obsessive love that spilled into their writing and fueled many recollections of Paris during a time of exhilarated sexual and creative expansion.
In her book, Ecstasies and Visions, containing compelling perspectives on art, mythology and the creative process H.D wrote, “there is no great art period without great lovers.” Insinuating that perhaps the ecstasies we experience relationally might also contribute to our creative visions. And that the creative spirit, or what has been referred to in ancient Greek mythology as Eros, is channeled through both the act of creation and the act of falling in love.
Audre Lorde expanded this definition of Eros in her essay, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, where she introduced a more democratised approach to the erotic. In the essay she is not referring to the erotic in the classic sense of the word, but in a more universal sense, the erotic as a source of finding pleasure in the way the senses open to life.
Lorde describes this kind of erotic relationship with the world as, “the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.”
Reminding us that romance is not reserved only for the love of another, and that every breath can be like opening a letter from the one you love.
WORDS: Shannon May Powell.
IMAGES: Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1807).