0078 | July 1, 2019
(r)omance: What Is It?
Romance–with a lowercase “r”–has been a preoccupation in the West since the 17th century. But it’s rarely discussed with any seriousness outside of literature or without pop cultural clichés. The hosts aim to change that.
| C.T. WEBB: 00:19 | [music] Good afternoon and good morning or good evening, and welcome to The American Age podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age, and I am speaking to you from Southern California. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:28 | Hi, I’m Steven G. Fullwood. I’m the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists project. I’m coming to you from Harlem, and it is a nice, toasty 90 degrees. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:38 | And I’m Seph Rodney, PhD. I am a [laughter]– |
| C.T. WEBB: 00:40 | I have one of those too. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:45 | Which? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:46 | I saw one [laughter]– |
| S. RODNEY: 00:49 | I am a senior editor at the Hyperallergic blog, and I just recently published my book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit, through Routledge Press. |
| C.T. WEBB: 00:59 | I don’t have one of those. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 01:00 | And I’m coming at you from the South Bronx. |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:03 | This is to remind our listeners that we practice a form of what we like to call intellectual intimacy, which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together. So I wanted to start off– before we get into the topic, I had a conversation with a friend last night. We’re not very close. I like him a lot, but he has a circle of friends, I have my circle of friends, but we met in graduate school. He’s finishing his PhD in philosophy and religion. Great guy. One of those sort of like if there were more people like that in the world, we’d probably be in a better spot, but he listens to the podcast and he said he tells people about the podcast, and he had a lot of very specific complimentary things to say about what we’re doing about the three-person format and some of the risks that he feels that we take on the podcast. And so I wanted to give a shout-out to him and say, “Thank you, Kyle, for the encouragement,” because sometimes we sit here and talk, and yeah, I look at the numbers and we have 30, 40, we’ve gotten close to 100 listeners on a couple of episodes. These are very meager numbers as far as podcasts go, but I realized a couple of months ago that even, for me at least, and life will change, obviously, for all of us as we age, but even if that was just the number in perpetuity, I would still want to do the podcast because I actually personally get something out of the conversations that we have, and it has value to me. So I hope it ends up having value to, obviously, more listeners, but for me, I appreciate the conversation with you guys. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 02:54 | I feel the same. I feel the same. So we don’t need any listeners. This is what we’re talking about [laughter]. Don’t listen to us. We [crosstalk] these things to each other. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:59 | That’s right. That’s it. Yeah. That’s right. Look, this was Jerry Seinfeld’s thing. It would be as long as it was funny to him and Larry David, then that was enough for those two. I feel like he’s lying because he’s a billionaire, but whatever, that’s okay. So we are talking about romance with a lowercase R this week and probably next week. I had advocated for talking about the Declaration of Independence, but that did not go over well with some folks. A lot of them were very bullish on the idea. This is Seph’s suggestion, which we kind of both enthusiastically joined. I liked the idea because it does kind of stick with our mandate of taking everything seriously, right, so being able to have serious, considerate conversations about things that might otherwise be disdained or ignored in the academy or amongst intellectuals. So Seph– |
| S. RODNEY: 04:03 | And before we jump into this, I just want to kind of remind listeners where we’ve been, so far, this year. And I actually want to remind myself, and I think that’s useful. So I believe we started the year talking about pornography – is that correct? – and then we went on to whiteness or white misanthropy, and then we talked about Michael Jackson, and then we talked about what, if any good, has been generated by the presidency of Donald Trump. Is that right fellas? |
| C.T. WEBB: 04:42 | Yeah, and we also had an interlude talking about the candidates– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 04:45 | Right. The presidential candidates. |
| C.T. WEBB: 04:46 | –the early interlude, but I think that covers it, and I appreciate you doing that. So it’s to remind people that we take multiple podcasts to discuss an issue and come back to it, chew it over. So romance, Seph, do you want to– I mean, sort of what were you thinking about in terms of the topic, and questions, comments? |
| S. RODNEY: 05:11 | I think what I was thinking about was wondering in what ways romance shows up in my life, because I’m not in a romantic relationship right now. I had one, it just ended last year, a very, very good one, and at the moment, we were mulling over what we’d do next. It came to me that that’s something people rarely talk about. We talk about sex relatively often. We certainly talk about friendships. We talk about professional relationships and how to nurture them, exploit them, extend them, deepen them. We rarely talk about– at least from what I gather with my ear to the ground at the culture, we rarely talk about romance. And romance – I did a little bit of googling – I like what the site, The Good Men Project, had to say about it. The way they described it is that romance is a way of looking at your partner, and it’s a way of savoring their presence in your life. And I like that idea, the idea of savoring something as opposed to devouring it, as opposed to just tasting it. So, say, to savor something is a really kind of unique activity, right, because it’s letting that thing linger on your tongue, and there’s a kind of curiosity to the action, right, because you’re letting the thing linger and you’re saying to yourself– something like when you take a mouthful good wine. |
| S. RODNEY: 06:54 | And you’re saying, “Okay. What’s happening here? What am I tasting? What all is in this complex of notes, of flavors, of hints?” And I thought about how– I don’t think I have a lot of romance in my life. I think I have some intellectual romance, for example, this conversation that we all have regularly. I think I savor the things that come out of the conversation. I think I savor what you both have to say and how we think through things together, but in terms of romance being present in the rest of my life, there are not a lot of– there are some friendships, certainly, I get to savor certain people through and with. But actually, now that I’ve brought up a tough topic, I feel like there’s just kind of a hole in my life, like I’m missing a way to express romance in the way that I think I’d like to. |
| C.T. WEBB: 08:11 | Steven? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:14 | I caught it and catched the ball. So I’m torn between two ways thinking about this, and one is I want to just– I think I’ll just follow up with what you said, and I was thinking about other ways of savoring things in your life that could be romantic, I guess. And so I was thinking about your example on food, and I’ll say, well, you do eat. Everyone eats. And so I was thinking about, well, Seph, do you have a relationship with certain kind of cuisine that you savor or a certain wine, to use your example, or are there other ways for you to have a romantic– even with nature, being outside and looking at trees and grass. I feel like I’m constantly in a state of romance, if we’re going to use that definition in terms of savoring, because I have such great friends, I have abundance in the way in which I live my life in terms of what people will call a career. I read a lot, I think a lot, I try to make delicious food. The thing I had was, when you said romance earlier, when you suggested the topic, I was like, “Okay. Let’s just do a run-through of my romantic life in terms of a partner.” And the one thing I came up with was I don’t have any imagination at the moment for a partner because of the equations and the recipes before, for partners, I don’t have a need for that anymore, whether it was someone to complete me, whether it was someone to bring something to my life that I didn’t have, or some part of me that I’m– what’s the good word? That I’m lacking. So I need this guy here to bring this part of him into my life, whether it’s physical, emotional, intellectual and so forth. I’m like, “I don’t yearn for those things.” So now I’m like, “Okay. Well, Steven, let’s do some imagination work,” and then I fell asleep [laughter]. I was like, “Maybe later [laughter].” |
| C.T. WEBB: 10:13 | So I’ve been trying to chew through what you introduced, so the idea of savoring, and then Steven, obviously, the add-on as far as the imagination to have an additional person in your life. I think I like savoring a lot. I think it is a pretty evocative term for what happens in romance. I’d probably would want to draw a distinction with the food because I think part of the romance is being able to be savored in return, and so there’s an exchange of that experience that probably– I mean, certainly, you can savor food, but it’s not going to fill you, I would probably argue, and most of us in the same way, that actually the experience of being savored by someone else might. And then the other piece of it is the body, right? So obviously, I mean, I spent the first part of the podcast saying how much I get out of the podcast, but it doesn’t attend to my body in the same way that a romantic partner would, and it doesn’t take a kind of responsibility, and I mean responsibility not in the sense of a burden, but I mean the responsibility in the way that one might have a responsibility for a beloved parent or child where the responsibility is something that adds to who we are rather than burdens who we are, and that a romantic partner has a responsibility for your bodily pleasure and for you to be able to enjoy being a body in a way that other more circumscribed intimate relationships don’t have, right? |
| C.T. WEBB: 12:03 | So I mean, Seph and I, we’re very close, and Steven and I we’re becoming closer, but neither one of you have a responsibility for my own physical pleasure, right, whereas, again, in that fulfilling way, a romantic partner has a responsibility to bring a certain kind of embodied joy into your life. I mean, we’re talking about ideal relationships here, obviously. Romantic relationships are also fraught with all kind of very difficult things. So let me kick it back to both of you and say– I mean, I think Steven kind of already began to answer this question, but we can have a variety of priorities, right, given the length of time we’re here on the planet and the number of choices that people like us, sort of what I call peripheral elites, people with some leisure time and some agency in the things that they can do, you can make different choices about where you want to put your imaginative energies, right? Steven, you were just saying you don’t really have the space for the kind of stories that you were telling about romantic your relationships before. Do you feel– oh, jump in, please. Go. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 13:20 | I just want to clarify that I was saying that I don’t have an imagination around a particular kind of partner for my life because at the moment. |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:25 | Oh, I misunderstood. I understand. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 13:28 | I may have been a bit muddled there, but no, I was thinking that– earlier today, I was thinking– so there were times in my life that I would say after a relationship, “Well, who’s coming next?” And they would, more than 99.9% of the time, match up to something that I was– some kind of energy I was wanting to experience, and I haven’t had that experience in a while and I haven’t done much yearning for it, so that’s what I mean. |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:52 | I get it. I misunderstood. I think you we’re clear. I just misunderstood. So there’s no mold, meaning you’re not predetermining, you’re not deciding ahead of time what you need from someone? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 14:01 | Right. That, and also I feel like I do have agency here, so I feel like there’s a conjuring that I don’t take very light– I mean, I don’t take it lightly that you start to imagine– |
| C.T. WEBB: 14:14 | Good word. Good word. Conjuring is a good word. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 14:15 | –to bring it into existence, and so I’m like, “Well, so what do I need to experience next?” And maybe I just said it on the podcast, and who knows, but it’s funny to think about because before it was a lot of fear-based, someone better love me because I can’t do this work myself. But I didn’t have that language then. What I had was the [inaudible] and the kind of self-helpy kind of thing, but once it really started to kick in it was more than the notion, so yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 14:46 | Yeah. I want to second that. I want to say that for a long time in my life– and I’m sure I know why this is, and then I’ll say what I’m talking about and then tell the why. For a long time in my life, I felt like, because I say that when my romantic relationship ended, I was sort of on the kick of, “Well, who’s next? Who’s going to love me in the way that I need to be loved?” Which, by the way, reminds me of one of the things that was written in the New Yorker about Richard Pryor several years ago. I think the review– and I don’t remember the name of the writer, but at least I remember the name of the piece, A Pryor Love, and it was spelled like Richards Pryor’s name, and apparently, Richard Pryor was just a terror with the women he was involved with romantically. And he talked about– |
| C.T. WEBB: 15:43 | Physically or emotionally or both? |
| S. RODNEY: 15:45 | Well, from the piece, the women were kind of cagey about whether he was actually physically abusive, but I suspect he was, but definitely, definitely emotionally abusive. There’s one woman who was his wife for a long and she said, at the end of the relationship, “I would never live with him again. I’ll say he used to be in my life, but I could never live with him again.” And he may have said this about her– he said this about one of his wives. He said something like she was a really good person, really genuinely loving woman. He said that he hoped, at one point, that she would love him hard enough, strong enough, so that he could love himself. And I remember thinking that at some point in my life, that kind of applied to me but not so much now. I mean, like Steven, I don’t feel like I need someone to fill a hole. No. What I feel very much is I want to share some stuff with someone. I want to have someone to say, ” Wow. Look at this. Look at what’s happening here,” so we can have those kinds of intimate conversations around whatever it is. |
| S. RODNEY: 17:05 | And in that sort of reciprocal way you bought up, Travis, I’m interested in having someone show me stuff that I don’t know, that I’m not [inaudible], right, because my world is big and it’s demanding and I have a lot of things to do that are interesting to me, but there’s a lot of the world I don’t see, which is actually one of the reasons why I’ve been talking to people about relationships and whatnot as people do when they get together. And I have kind of come to the conclusion, and of course, this may get thrown out next week, but my conclusion now is that I really want to date someone outside of the art scene, because the art scene can be rather incestuous anyway and rather gossipy anyway, but I’m interested, really interested, in seeing some part of the whole that I don’t already see. |
| C.T. WEBB: 18:04 | Okay. The Richard Pryor analogy reminded me of Meursault’s neighbor in The Stranger, Salamano or whatever his character is, that he’s got this dog that loves him and he’s very cruel to the dog. And the reading of that is he hates the dog because the dog loves him and he hates himself, right? So when you revile yourself or parts of yourself or kind of who you are, how can you accept the love of another person? And if you do not feel that kind of self-love, even though that sounds very dangerously new age-y to me, how can you accept or sanction someone else loving you? Of course, you find that person’s love contemptible because you find yourself to be contemptible. And so the idea of not finding someone in the art scene seems like a pretty rough circumscription for you to draw because that’s what you do all the time, man. Where are you going to– I love Steven’s word, where are you going to conjure some other partner from? That is the stuff– how else are you going to cast that spell? That’s the stuff that you have right now. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:40 | Call Elizabeth Warren. She’s got a plan. She’s got a plan, and I trust her [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY: 19:46 | Right. Yeah, yeah. She probably would. She probably would. Yeah. I mean, of course, that’s the pragmatic notion that I’ve put aside because I’m looking at the idea, right? I’m looking at the– so this guy, and I’m going to try to remember his name. I want to say it’s de Botton. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 20:12 | Oh, Alain de Botton? Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 20:14 | Yes. Right, who started– |
| C.T. WEBB: 20:15 | Oh. Well, all right. So fill me in. Alain de Botton is who? |
| S. RODNEY: 20:17 | Yeah. He started, I want to say it was an institute of practical philosophy or something like that. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 20:23 | The School of Life is what it’s called. Yes. |
| S. RODNEY: 20:25 | Okay, thank you, in London. And he had, in some printed interview, talked about the woman that he wanted to meet and marry, and he had a very specific template. You think that my shit is overly circumscribed. This guy said she has to be the daughter of a medical doctor. She has to be– went to some kind of school, I think, and be pursuing some sort of career, because he had very specific markers for him, of this person’s life, that would jibe well with his own personality and– |
| C.T. WEBB: 21:09 | Intellectual pursuits and stuff. |
| S. RODNEY: 21:11 | Exactly. And it was something– and I remember being fascinated by this. I don’t remember exactly what the reasoning was for the woman being the daughter of a medical doctor, but it was something about having that kind of sort of intellectual, I don’t know, capacity, I suppose, in the home environment growing up. Maybe that teaches something about respect for the body or respect for a– I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t remember what he said, but he found her and he married her. So I don’t know if they lived happily ever after, but he had some boxes to tick, he ticked them, and he got married, so. |
| C.T. WEBB: 21:52 | So I am reflexively suspicious of sort of the belief that our desires can be that– or our needs can be that transparent to us. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:07 | To ourselves. |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:08 | Yeah. To ourselves. I think we are inherently opaque, and it reminds me of sort of that Invictus poem. “It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. I will go out and I will–” it is like the quintessentially sort of Western metaphysic applied to romance. And I mean, that’s probably overreaching because arranged marriages obviously worked on this kind of idea that you would pair people by social breeding, and so it’s probably getting a little carried away there, but the idea that– and so this person goes out and he finds– I mean, one, he’s probably fairly well known, famous, you guys knew who he was. If you are that well known and you have that kind of money, yeah, you have a selection of mates. You can just kind of filter through them until you get to the right– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:15 | Combination. |
| C.T. WEBB: 23:16 | –set of characteristics. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:18 | That’s one way to look at it, Travis. And then the much, much harder, the theoretical version of it is that he conjured this person up and she came. |
| C.T. WEBB: 23:28 | Yeah, except I don’t actually– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:32 | Well, we can’t measure it, all of that. So the reason why I say that is because I was thinking about my last partner, who there were several templates before he showed up. There was like, “Oh, I kind of get it.” So when he actually showed up in the outline of what I was looking for, and I didn’t say, “This person has to be this tall and this shade of brown,” and all of that. No. He was thoughtful, engaging, playful, very, very, very just like, “Yeah. This is the kind of person I want to get to know.” Three or four men before him had fragments of it as much as [that?], but then the fully embodied person showed up and I went, “Oh, Okay. Okay. I get it now.” And it was someone else that brought it to my attention, a mutual friend of ours, Seph. [Harup?], brought it up, and then I was like, “Oh, this makes sense to me.” Just one way to look at it. That’s all I’m saying. |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:31 | But did you also then conjure the dissolution of that relationship? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 24:36 | Here’s the thing, I don’t think relationships are supposed to be forever. I don’t know if you get– |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:41 | Nothing is forever, but– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 24:43 | Right. Nothing is forever, but I don’t feel like it was a failure, and I feel like this is as far as it could go. And mind you, this is a decade afterwards, right, because, of course, you know the hindsight is 20/20. But even then, both of us knew this is as far as it could go, and we’re friends today because we did the work and [inaudible] certain kinds of people. So I remember thinking that there were a number of relationships I’ve had with other gay men. They ended up being better friends. They could never be partners, but we tried it anyway. Either it was the sex or it was the relationship with the sex and then it was like, ” No, we’re just friends.” |
| C.T. WEBB: 25:31 | Okay. So we’re coming up on time, but I want to close with– maybe we’ve moved since you both try to keep us grounded to very particular things. I’m going to close with a question, and the maybe we can pick it up from there. Do you both think that you are difficult to be involved with romantically [laughter]? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 25:53 | I want to hear [crosstalk]. |
| S. RODNEY: 25:53 | Wow. Wow. |
| C.T. WEBB: 25:56 | I’m very willing to answer that question about myself as well, so– |
| S. RODNEY: 25:59 | Wow. Way to put a brother on the spot, man. Goddamn [laughter]. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:06 | I mean, we all have our [inaudible]. Yeah. Go ahead. All right. |
| C.T. WEBB: 26:08 | Okay. So thanks very much for the conversation, gentlemen, and we’ll pick it up next week. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:14 | Okay. Sounds good. [music] |
References
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