This post is in response to Mel's question to me about my last prompt entry, about how I define intimacy, whether it is possible with a place. My answers would be a bit long for a reply comment, so I'm putting them up here in a post instead.
In its shortest form, my answer is "No - intimacy with a place is not possible." I've spent some time thinking about the concept of intimacy existing in a few different ways: as between two people, as between two conscious beings, as between two living things in general, and as between a person and a place. The question I wanted to answer for myself was "Is intimacy something that exists mutually between two things, or can it exist only in the recognition of the one?"
Now, I'm a cynical sort of person, but I do believe that intimacy can exist between two people if we conceive of it as a shared perception of mutually sympathetic understanding. Or something along those lines. However, I think that intimacy can only exist when we're talking about a relationship with another human being. I believe that intimacy, properly understood, requires a mutual exchange of feeling.
We all feel certain emotional attachments to particular places, and rightly so. That attachment, however, is one-sided. I have a great love for the Gallatin river, and I get angry when I spot garbage on its banks or when I hear about some attempt to divert its flow for private uses, and that can feel a lot like intimacy. I've spent a lot of time on that river, and I have a number of emotional entanglements with it, whether from memories, personal associations, or because it often feels like a surrogate home to me. However, the Gallatin is simply indifferent to me. If I only conceive of my relationship to the river in terms of how I feel towards it, then yes, it feels a lot like intimacy, like a human attachment. However, if I broaden my lens and consider how the river feels nothing for me in return, it feels more like a private longing, a guarded love that only runs one way. Now, this doesn't necessarily weaken the emotional attachment I feel to the river, but it does keep me from truly calling it intimacy. It's a lot like getting to know the details of someone well, developing a fondness for them, forming an emotional connection to them, and then realizing they have no idea you exist. Granted, if Anne Hathaway would just answer my letters, we could move this whole thing forward. But alas.
We can love, we can need, we can feel a responsibility towards a place, but it is a one-way expression. The places we feel for are not "ours;" they are not our sole dominion. Likewise are they not feeling things. They are something for which we reach, something for which we often yearn, but forever something that exists beyond the possibility of any kind of reciprocation. It seems silly to say it, though, but if we think of it in terms of being a one-way feeling of attachment, it stops feeling like intimacy at all. It starts feeling more tragic.
Oh, Anne...
2 comments:
In logic, I absolutely agree with you. But then I think about those equally tragic human relationships, when one feels affectionate or loving toward another person (to go with the current *definition*) and that other person does not reciprocate those feelings, or perhaps once did but no longer does. If the balance is one-sided in the present, does that mean that the one person is not, cannot be, intimate with the other? I fully understand and want to agree with your ideas here, because they make mad brilliant sense. But the less logical part of me is thinking of all those exceptional instances when reciprocity isn't part of the circumstance. What do we call it instead of intimacy?
Oh we can call it whatever we want. I am grossly unqualified to answer questions like that. I can provide at least three women who can attest to that fact.
I guess if it feels like intimacy, then, in that experiential mode, the presence of reciprocity doesn't really matter. The distance from which we view that relationship (whatever its object) might be the only determining factor.
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