romancing :: a playlist

for spring

Sometime in January, jazz musician and cultural critic Ted Gioia a wrote 25 Propositions about The New Romanticism, an essay that has stuck with me longer than most pieces of media do. In it he posits that we are living in an age of New Rationalism, lead by tech overlords:

"Exponents of the New Rationalism are individuals who seem strangely drained of emotion and human connection—Thiel, Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, etc. This is the Rationalist character type—a zero degree of personality. They are people you would trust with a spreadsheet, but not to babysit your child or care for an elder… This zero personality type is obsessed with AI—the god created in its own image—which becomes the defining technology of the New Rationalism. But no matter how smart AI gets, it will never create an app that can forgive. Or fall in love. Or feel the pangs of parenthood. Or grieve the death of a loved one. Or grasp the sublime.”

and

“Rationalism has become voracious and refuses to recognize any limits. It wants to swallow up everything. All human things get turned into an app. Even art and inspiration get replaced by inhuman data—beauty becomes one more output from a cold unfeeling system. The system now wants you to work to assist the expansion of data. And your own value is reduced to the ways your personal data can get monetized. But it doesn’t stop there. The system urges you to seek out more data in your playtime. You even have the option of falling in love with a data construct.”

Gioia theorizes that we are experiencing a cultural upheaval similar to what happened post-Enlightenment, and that the inevitable pendulum swing will hurl us towards a more humane, and community-oriented society, similar to the Romantic Movement that transpired in the early 1800s. He writes:

“The Age of Romanticism had seen the abolition of slavery, protections for workers, prohibitions on child labor, a growing respect for human dignity, and a blossoming of the arts.”

and

“The New Romanticism is more than an intellectual movement. It will be promoted by people who don’t even recognize that label. They will demand a more human-oriented society. They will care about creative expression. They will seek to nurture their souls—and do so without apologies, not worrying about what can be quantified or measured. They recognize the value of intangibles, and the dead-end of a data-driven life.”

I hope he’s right.

I think about this so much, feeling the pull more than ever, to build and nurture an inner life separate from screens and surveillance. In tandem, I’ve been experiencing a sort of generalized yearning for Romance, probably brought on by rewatching Normal People and fucking Heated Rivalry lol. Last summer, I wrote about reading Annie Erneaux’s sex memoir Getting Lost, and how much it affected me, by today’s dating standards, all of her yearning served no purpose materially or socially, and therefore would be considered toxic or inefficient. But Romance as a concept/practice/method feels increasingly necessary, to stay grounded and human, a way to keep the grasp on the tangible and natural, as opposed to algorithmic.

I’ve already been so wrong, about so much in my life. But one thing I have never gotten twisted, is this appreciation for the center of the center, for the precipice of something life-changing and uncertain. The painful humanity of Romance, always so self-absorbed, flawed and impractical, continues to confound and absorb me: when our story was the only story, when we were the only people, no one had ever done love like this, or sex like this, and so everything, strangely and specifically and selfishly, belonged to me. Smoking and drinking beers on the roof, barreling down the highway singing the same song, when the moon is on the water, walking home late at night not even touching, the shyness and excitement, it was all a creative act, this creative thing to participate in, that was happening even as I collaborated in making it… Romance has offered me momentary self-authorship, an opportunity for self-reinvention rooted in deep love & joy, as opposed to suffering.

Experiences like that are rare, maybe rarer than I realized. That longing for some holy out-of-body experience, no matter what I do or who I decenter or whatever the fuck, stays relentless & irrepressible. Even though, when everything ends, as it always does, my instinct is: I am never doing that again. But the seeking runs deeper. A friend suggested that maybe we’ve been indoctrinated as women, by Disney, by whatever, to always be getting after love and romance. I think it’s more biblical than that. If we weren’t after romance with other people, we’d probably be writhing on the ground, having euphoric experiences connecting with god or something else unknowable and holy. Maybe that would be better, to just be enraptured in divine ecstasy.

Probably that would be better.

But I am an animal, and animals, even my dog, like to be touched. He likes to sit right next to me, no matter what, so we are always together. Seeking more is just the condition…

Once, Jen told me that she has to see the sunset every day (Romance), that watching the sunset made her feel more fulfilled and complete, and every time I catch it happening, I think of that and of her, and it makes me feel better. I’m making a point to honor beauty more in my day-to-day, create more Romance and presence. Whatever. It is late afternoon, no dinner in sight yet. I want a cheeseburger, I think. I bought two pink bras today, three pairs of shoes the day before, new, expensive deodorant the day before that, for parties I am sure I will attend in the future, perhaps with people I haven’t met yet.

I return often to a poem I loved in college from W.S. Merwin:

You spend so much of your time

expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

It always feels relevant.

So I made you a playlist for Romance, for the arrival of spring. Here in Texas, it is just beginning to be Spring. None of these songs are unusual, all are obvious, maybe too obvious. But I love them with my heart, so that has to be enough. Every time I share something, I worry that it’s too much, that you are tired of reading and also of me, but somehow we both persist.

I have never been happy to be left alone for long. If you have a party soon, invite me. I’ll be there.

all my love,

Mary