Thoughts and other trivia...

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Square Peg

Like a lot of other stuff, this is something that I’ve written a few times in my head but that’s just about as far as I often get. Because, when I’m at it, things cause my mind, which is forever racing anyway, to drift into this raging stream of consciousness and get tossed around and, before I can even realise it, I’m off on a tangent. And, to tweak something I read on the wonderful Frank & Ernest comic strip over ten years ago, having wandered that far, my mind is way too weak to then scramble back on course. So, obviously, I never get down to writing it for real.

(Incidentally, this Demon of Tangents, who controls the Stream of Consciousness, is a little like the mythical Scylla and Charybdis – heed the call and you’ll be lost forever. But, Odysseus-like, I’ll try and resist.)

For someone who is otherwise largely practical, I have an almost bookish notion about relationships and friendships and responsibilities, etc. It’s a little silly, I know, especially because everything around us is changing so quickly that it’s getting hard to hold on to anything these days. I guess this also explains where my cynicism comes from. But, I’m digressing.

If you’ve watched enough films, read enough books and, generally, kept your eyes and ears open, chances are, you would have heard someone say that, sometimes, love is not enough. Last week, a friend wrote about it and then I heard it in a film and then I watched a woman say it to a man in a television series. And, like every other time, I wondered what it meant. Hell, I’ve wondered about it so much that I even started to write a full script about it two years ago!

I’ve also wondered how it comes about that, all of a sudden, everybody says this all the time. Today, as I read the Murakami lines - If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking - it all made some sort of sense. And, I don’t mean this in a condescending or superior sort of way.

That it doesn’t always work out, I know. Sure, things can go bad in relationships and between people. Of course, people can fall out of love and grow apart. I completely understand what it means to love someone enough to let them go because, in such an instance, it’s about putting the other person’s interests before one’s own. And, that’s good. But, I just don’t get this sometimes-love-is-not-enough business because, to me, it seems a case of trying to have it both ways. It’s what the sociologist called a compromise with an uncomfortable truth in another context in my film.

As far as I’m concerned, what brings people together keeps them together. If that is in place, everything else finds a way of working itself around it. Barring, of course, some really extenuating circumstances that may make it impossible. It’s when it begins to dry up, for either party, that the breach occurs. (Odd choice of words because, usually, it’s abundance that causes the breach.) :-)

To me, it’s really tragic that we’ve reached a stage where we seem to think that love is not enough. Because I really wonder, if love is not enough, what will ever be?

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