This essay originally appeared as a takeover for my dear friend Leonor Mamanna’s newsletter, Leave it to Leonor, a brilliant weekly dose of smart thinking, culture recommendations, arty things and more., which always starts out with the phrase, “This week I’m thinking about…”
This week I’m thinking about longing. OK, honestly, I’m always thinking about longing. But this week is the first time I’ve ever contemplated writing about longing publicly.
My original plan--which seemed safe enough at the time--was to write about my Sade obsession... But longing is a force with its own intelligence and it began to insistently pull focus. Things kind of spiralled from there and I couldn’t seem to coax myself back from the ledge--despite the swarm of uncomfortable questions I’d accidentally unleashed on myself. Questions like:
Is it even okay for a happily married woman--whose loving and very foxy husband happens to subscribe to this newsletter (hey, EQ!)--to write openly about longing?
What about a mother of a twelve-year-old daughter (hiya, kiddo!) who is also a loyal LITL subscriber?
Or an art teacher some of whose former students (hello, Zoomers!) are now--post-graduation--all up in her socials?
More broadly, does a solidly middle-aged woman who is gratefully tethered to a dynamic web of stable, healthy relationships and who staggers around in a constant state of gobsmacked wonder at the abundance of her life’s blessings get to muse out loud about how longing shows up in her inner world?
The answer--I keep shakily reassuring myself--is yes. For this I mostly blame my friend Elana Bell whose brilliant book Mother Country opens with this epigraph from feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser:
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”
So. Field Notes on Longing. Here goes.
I was in high school when I first realized that whole genres of music existed at the exact intersection of Very Turned On and Very Sad. But while other kids were crying their mascara off to Morissey and The Cure, I was worshipping at the altar of Sade.
Her music entered my world through the vivid appreciation of my dad, a serious music head who would sooner listen to most “smooth jazz” than stab a fork in his neck, so you can imagine my shock at learning that most of my high school acquaintances who liked Sade also liked Kenny G—an incomprehensible mind-fuck that registered in my teenage brain as a serious glitch in the matrix.
Other kids who copped to liking Sade only did so with the caveat of guilty pleasure and mostly wrote her off as corny, but my teenage heart knew what it knew. It took two decades and a chance stumble down an internet rabbithole to find belated spiritual validation in Hanif Abdurraquib’s prismatic essay on the 20th anniversary of Lover’s Rock, which confirmed the smooth-jazz-transcending realness of Sade that my younger self understood but could not name: “Sade Adu, as a writer,” Hanif muses, “is committed to the truth of an emotion. She is as much goth, or emo, as anything else.”
It was this emotional truth in Sade’s music that first split my world open and initiated me to my own longing. As a pre-pubescent nerd in braces with a bad haircut in the suburbs of Connecticut, I listened to Sade and I longed. Not just for the salty beaches and moonlit cities and smoky bars where I imagined her music lived, or the seductive, melancholy romance her songs evoked, but for her restraint, her trust in her own inner resonance, her lack of fucks about whoever’s gaze might be on her. In an environment where I sensed that belonging could only be grasped at via external validation and through extreme effort--teasing the bangs up higher, cramming for finals harder, belting the audition song louder--I longed to sink into Sade’s effortlessness, and from there to let myself be quietly seduced by my own self-worth.
This first lesson on longing was the most truthful one, and also the hardest to hold onto: that longing is different from desire, or thirst, or craving because it isn’t about striving or consummation.
A desire can be met. A thirst can be quenched. A craving can be satisfied. But longing defies action. Longings are landscapes.
As adolescence gave way to adulthood, I promptly forgot that first lesson and mostly abandoned the landscapes of my longings. Longing got mixed up with desire and began to feel dangerous. I started to believe what our culture tells us… that a woman’s longing is a first step along the road to perdition, that it carries a wanton energy of recklessness and destruction and that--even if never acted on--it signals, at the very least, a profound and shameful lack of gratitude.
At that time in my life I didn’t understand the first thing about how erotic energy works--not just in terms of sexual charge but, as Audre Lorde illuminates in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, as a well-spring of life energy. I didn’t know how to bring consciousness to the interplay of boundaries and tension and spaciousness that keeps that life energy flowing. As a result, a few years into my marriage to the man of my dreams (hi again, EQ), I couldn’t fathom how the erotically-charged object of my longing, a source of thrilling mystery and electricity when our romance blossomed (first in high school and then again as grown-ups), had transformed--through no fault of his own--into a comfortable daily companion and a source of stability and calm. And more crucially, I couldn’t understand how I had let myself get cut off from my own inner source of eros. I didn’t know how to reignite my longing for the person right in front of me, or for myself for that matter, and I didn’t know how to safely integrate my other longings into my rigid notions of what a nuclear family and marriage could be.
And so I did what so many of us are taught to do. I panicked. I assumed my longings would be my downfall. I learned to tamp them down. Keep them in check. Squeeze them into my tightest inner recesses so they wouldn’t engulf me. And predictably, I learned the hard way that the more you shove your longings into the shadows, the more powerful, seductive and potentially combustible they become.
Many explosive choices, hard conversations and therapy sessions later, I’ve learned to circle back around and expand on that first lesson on longing I learned from Sade.
I’ve learned that longing is as natural as breathing, and that it’s healthy--even (or maybe especially) in the context of my partnership--to give it space and dimensionality in my inner life.
I’ve learned that longing is less about grasping after a particular person, place or thing and more about experiencing myself in the erotic aliveness of threshold spaces, allowing my own magnetism to set my wheels in motion, and then letting myself be surprised by where the journey leads me.
I’ve learned that a well-channeled longing is the most potent creative catalyst there is.
I’ve learned that occasionally allowing myself be staggered and hypnotized by an especially compelling longing--the kind that surges up out of nowhere and buckless my knees, obliterates all distractions and gives me no choice but to let myself be held aloft by it--can actually be a space of deep rest and recharge. That as a person who lives in a fractured and frenetic culture who is always being asked to multitask, facilitate spaces for others, and split myself into a thousand fragments to navigate a sea of competing demands, I can find exquisite relief in letting myself be swallowed whole for a time by a singular, all-consuming longing.
I’ve learned that living with my longings intact means giving up on always trying to measure and explain them. That I can accept the quantum theory duality that longing--like light--is both a particle and wave, and that when I try to lock down one form, the other will become slippery and invisible. I’ve learned that to meditate on the point or to ride the wave, you need to be able to hold the paradox of both and stop trying to control either. Enter: faith.
I’ve learned that, in the words of Toni Morrison, “It is sheer good fortune to miss someone long before they leave you,” or: that you can learn to long for what you already have.
I’ve learned that the highest form of longing is self-satiating… a longing for the experience of longing itself.
This week in a poem. . .
Rilke gives the best advice on longing.
This week in a YouTube video…
Please enjoy the awkward, electric tenderness of this Thom Yorke/ Fukiko Takase pas de deux (P.S. I think a solid 10% of this video’s 11 million some-odd YouTube views are mine.)
This week in listening to people saying words about longing. . .
Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power - If you’ve only read this essay and never heard Audre Lorde read it herself, please gift yourself this 23 and a half mins of brilliance (P.S. Esther Perel pulls a LOT from these ideas and I wish she’d be better about citing her sources.)
Esther Perel: The Erotic as and Antidote to Death - from On Being with Krista Tippett. I actually don’t think this is Krista’s best interview--she seems a little scattered to me. But don’t let that stop you: Esther Perel is perfect.
Hanif Abdurraqib: Object of Sound - This is a lovely episode, especially the interview with Esperanza Spalding in the second half, but my favorite part comes at 16:50 when Hanif shares a snippet of a reading he did in collaboration with singer songwriter Julien Baker at Eaux Claire’s Festival in 2018. The moment wraps us in three concentric circles of longing: the poem itself, which calls out to an imagined stranger with an aching, melancholic intimacy--situated inside a nostalgic description of the energy in the tiny, packed house at the festival where poets read with their listeners physically and emotionally enveloping them--nested inside a broader longing for a future return to that feeling as the world opens up again and live performances resume. The whole thing is sublime. (Please be my friend, Hanif, OK thanks.)
This week in a probably way-too-obsessed-over playlist that I will probably still be editing even after this newsletter goes out . . .
Field Notes on Longing
This week in artsy stuff and photo things. . .
Verrrrrry excited about The Magic HOUR, a gallery walk/ art experience at the Seaport designed as healing liminal space as the city reemerges. Five galleries, two months of live music, artist talks and other programming, lots of intentional threshold energy and definitely a surprise or two. Opening is Friday August 6th. Sign up here for updates.
This week in an IG post…
The queering of relational spaces beyond the binary of friendship v. romance is a perfect site to explore longing I think, less in an explicitly sexual sense for me than as an opening to the eros and pleasure that can animate any space when those energies are invited in with care and clear communication. The post comments showcase a generous spectrum of what’s worked and what’s proven challenging for other people in this realm and represent some of the most expansive, gentle conversations I’ve seen on IG in a long time (with the exception of few dumb troll bots, of course).
This week in a conversation. . .
A couple of weeks ago I spent a deliriously lush and healing weekend with Elana Bell at her home upstate--both the first time we’d seen each other in person and the first time I’d taken a real off-the-grid break away from family and other responsibilities since before lockdown started last March. We spent a lazy afternoon--post-picnic, pre-icy river plunge--under the trees on the banks of the Palenville swimming hole, talking about longing, desire and the erotic.
Here is an excerpt:
KQ: I had a really wise teacher who used to talk about how we are all simultaneously being and becoming, but how it’s quite hard to be in both spaces consciously at once. Like you’re either in a state of relaxation, receiving, you’re being, or you’re in a process of growing and evolving and moving toward some directionality, becoming. And the reality is that both of those things are always true at the same time. But there’s kind of a quantum mechanics of it, like the way that light is both a particle and a wave, but as soon as you try to measure one of them, the other becomes invisible. And I think that paradox and tension are at the root of human experience. The feeling of longing really puts me in touch with the felt sensation in my body, of being in both spaces at the same time and it’s really… it’s hot! (laughs). It’s beautiful.
EB: What I also heard you say is that the longing is a catalyst for you, for creation, for eros, for something in you, so it can be like stimulated by another person, or sparked by a thing you long for--so the desire for something is actually more about setting off on a journey than about attaining the thing. So something comes into your field, a desire or a longing, whatever it is, to be an artist let’s say, or to be with a certain person… and then you follow… and without necessarily getting that thing, you’re suddenly on a journey, and you don’t know where it’ll lead, and ultimately it’s not necessarily about the thing you thought it was and the form you thought it would come in, but like you said, what it opens in you, the liminal space, the threshold space, the tension of wanting and not getting, or working toward something.
To read the full (minimally edited) conversation, go here.
This week in a quote. . .
"We have an erotic mind. And that erotic mind, it is infinite. And eroticism thrives on the ritual and the celebration and the infiniteness of our imagination — and on the forbidden, for that matter, too.
There’s a transgressive element in that. And that’s part of why I became so interested in how do you integrate this force into the domestic life that we also want? What is this dual set of needs that we grapple with?"
- Esther Perel, from On Being with Krista Tippett
This week in a shout-out. . .
In six days, EQ (hi EQ!) and I are celebrating our twentieth anniversary. TWENTIETH!!!! Here’s what we looked like on our first date (we were fourteen. And no, we didn’t date that whole time. Maybe that’s a story for the next time Leonor needs a pinch hitter?) But seriously, shout-out to EQ. He is the very best. Here’s to the next 20 years and beyond.
Me, as the first photo I just stumbled on after being off Instagram for two weeks, because obviously,
Kate