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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Wednesday, January 11, 2012

entry arrow5:54 AM | Love and Writing

“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that is precisely there where you [my beloved] are not—this is the beginning of writing.”

~ ROLAND BARTHES, A Lover’s Discourse


I once dedicated an entire book to declare my love for a boy. Even if he didn't love me back. That much I know, at least now. But oh the pleasures of that heartbreak—and the exquisite knowledge that this book was a singular expression of a distinct passion I would always remember. It didn't matter that he did not love me back, at least not in the way I wanted him to. He led me to words, and somehow that was enough.

I borrow freely from the dictates of Henry Miller, too: that to get over a beloved, one must turn him or her into literature. If I think hard about it, “love me, love me, love me” seems to me the biggest engine of my own writing. And so something like this from Barthes, the guru of pleasure and the text and the beloved, comes to me like a sobering reminder about the sweet and tender futility of it all. But one’s denial of that—well, it keeps me going still in writing.

I write to declare my love.

Love is all.

If I don’t write, I don’t exist.

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[2] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich




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