Good Vibes

If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

“I’ve been on a long journey of learning to understand descents—initiations into the holy darkness of the underworld. I love a good catacomb. I feel at home there. There’s a kind of orientation that I sense that only becomes possible in the dark. Once, I was walking the catacombs outside Rome and I’d fallen to the back of the group. There were two torchbearers—one at the front, one at the end. You have to stay close. A few weeks before our visit, a Boy Scout had gotten lost in those tunnels. Not temporarily. Entirely. The lesson is simple and unrelenting: we do not make it through alone. We walk together. We take turns carrying the light. Story is a kind of torch. It holds us. It marks the passage. I am lucky—for those who love me, who call me back when I begin to slip behind, who remind me: stay. Not for the certainty. Not for the resolution. Not even so that, at last, things might make sense. But to dwell—open, wanting—in the radiant complexity of being alive—with others. With you.”

Marianne Faithfull by Gered Mankowitz, London, 1964.