ELLIPSIS

Maybe site specific love has to do with the different implications of the noun: SPELL?

spell 1 |spɛl| |spɛl|
noun
a form of words used as a magical charm or incantation.
• a state of enchantment caused by such a form of words : the magician may cast a spell on himself.
• an ability to control or influence people as though one had magical power over them : she is afraid that you are waking from her spell.
PHRASES
cast a spell on it’s as if this town cast a spell on me.
under a spell not fully in control of one’s thoughts and actions, as though in a state of enchantment.
under someone’s spell so devoted to someone that they seem to have magic power over one.

ORIGIN Old English spel(l) [narration,] of Germanic origin.

spell 3 |spɛl| |spɛl|
noun
a short period : I want to get away from racing for a spell.
• a period spent in an activity : a spell of greenhouse work.
• a period of a specified kind of weather : an early cold spell in autumn.
• a period of suffering from a specified kind of illness : she plunges off a yacht and suffers a spell of amnesia.

ORIGIN late 16th cent.: variant of dialect spele [take the place of,] of unknown origin. The early sense of the noun was [shift of relief workers.]

Sentences underlined are those I find significant for site specific love – in particular in the case of a person visiting a city (see the very thoughtprovoking and somehow (un)grounded (when I say ungrounded i mean grounded because love is conducted by a place/a ground and ungrounded because love flourishes anew by always visiting new cities, love is trembling and restless, existing in different spheres) quotation in Site specific love – prologue). Site specific love is then related to time (tempus (defined as a period)), geography (geographikos, earth + write/draw (a specific city)), specificity (specificus, species (this specific city and what it casts off)), magic (magikē (tekhnē) ‘(art of) a magus’ (the spell the city casts on one)), movement (movimentum (moving around this city)) and company or the idea of it (compaignon, ‘one who breaks bread with another,’ from Latin com- ‘together with’ + panis ‘bread.’ (the existence of a (possible) lover and of eating (with) this lover)).

(when using parantheses in the above I’m inspired by and indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida and Jalal Toufic (once again))

And then I’m asking myself, why is this interesting? Isn’t it just post-romantic thoughts of and for wealthy, rich first world people, who can travel/cross borders and have time to wonder in the cities of the world? people, who don’t have to marry for social reasons, security, tradition etc.? people, including myself, who trip on the idea of love? Where is the relation to reality? Where is reality? What is it? A dream? Of Love? But, doesn’t everybody share this dream? So, maybe it’s interesting. But then, where did the place go? And who is then, at the end of the day, in love? Those under a spell? Those not fully in control of their thoughts and actions, as though in a state of enchantment? Those who suffers a spell of amnesia? Who knows. The city does. It holds them, the loving couples, at night, in parks, at cafés, in pubs, at funfairs, and in embrace while a narration is taking place.

The epilogue for site specific love got lost in a f(l)ight between Beirut, Copenhagen and London.

Is love site specific?

Reflections on Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras.

As a work of art can be site specific, my question is; can love be site specific? Is love bound to a place and if yes, how is it bound to that place?
The proposition came during a skype-chat with my fellow writer Mirene Arsanios. We were discussing private matters as this more general question appeared. We wanted to write on it, it was a simple, but exiting thought.

Thinking of site specificity, I’ll begin by situtating myself socio-geografically. I’m living for a short period in Beirut. It’s a period, which by accident/chance is the worst time of the country since the Israeli invasion, summer 2006 – some even say since the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990. The return of the civil war is a regular fear. A fear, which is hanging in the air as thick as the thunder I can hear right now through my trembling windows.
Being attached by a kind of love to another city, I’m experiencing love in Beirut from a distance. Love (and the need for love) is here on many levels. Love as possession, obsession, security, escapism, exitement, romantic ideas, idealisation and as a dream. It is a particular experience bound to people meeting other people, the history of places and to personal itineraries. This is how love always works, but when places have an extraordinary history, something happens to the way in which people enact love. This is maybe why watching Hiroshima, Mon Amour in Beirut added new levels of understanding to the film, even though I’ve watched it several times.

”How could i know this town was tailor-made for love?
How could i know you fit my body as a glove?
I like you.
How unlikely.
I like you.
How slow all of a sudden.
How sweet.
You cannot know.
You’re destroying me.
You’re good for me.
You’re destroying me. You’re good for me.
I have time.
Please devour me.
Deform me to the point of ugliness.
Why not you in this city and in this night?
So like other cities and other nights you can hardly tell the difference?
I beg of you.”

An arbitrary meeting is the ground for Hiroshima, Mon Amour. A nameless French actress is in Hiroshima to act in a movie about peace. As a loner, she sits in a café and it is here, she meets the Japanese gentleman, with whom she enters into a short love affair lasting a little more than 24 hours.
In the quotation above the French actress says the city of Hiroshima is so like other cities. This is in the beginning of the film. She doesn’t know Hiroshima will bring back memories of her youth. It does. During World War 2 she was in a love relation with a German soldier, who got shot the day of liberation just before they were about to flee the country together. For a day and a night she hugged his dying body as it slowly became cold underneath her.

”[I was] Young in Nevers. And also mad in Nevers”

She was abandoned that spring in 1945 in Nevers, France. She became mad and was forced to live in the basement of her parents house scratching her nails on the raw and humid walls not to feel the pain of her lost lover. Next spring she moves to Paris where she manages to start all over again. She gets a job, a husband and a family. And she lives alone with her memory.

”Listen to me. Like you, I know what it is to forget.
No, you don’t know what it is to forget.
Like you, I’m endowed with memory. I know what it is to forget.
No, you are not endowed with memory.
Like you, I too have struggled with all my might not to forget.
Like you, I forgot.
Like you, I longed for a memory beyond consolation, a memory of shadows and stone. For my part, I struggled everyday with all my might against the horror of no longer understanding the reason to remember.
Like you, I forgot.
Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?”

The presence of war, destruction and love in Hirsoshima brings about her memory and makes a reconcilation with the war in France possible. She painstakingly visits all the museums on the nuclear bombing and she wants to see everything. Still, her lover tells her; “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” This is before she tells him about her past; a trauma of war related to love. She almost becomes mad in Hiroshima as well, she takes the Japanese gentleman as the German love of her youth. She tells him her story, he, becomes polymorph existing of the two lovers of her life. Two bodies, but one love.

”I meet you.
I remember you.
This city was tailor-made for love.
You fit my body as a glove.
Who are you? You’re destroying me.
I was hungry. Hungry for infidelity, for adultery, for lies, and for death.
I always have been.
I had no doubt you’d cross my path one day.
I waited for you calmly, with boundless impatience.
Devour me.
Deform me to your likeness,
So that no one after you will ever again understand.
The reason for so much desire
We’ll be alone, my love.
Night will never end.
The day will never dawn again on anyone.
Never again.
At last.”

Here, in Hiroshima, she’s able to remember her past. A bridge is built between two cities and two periods in time. The ephemeral love has a long life cycle and is deeply rooted in memories of the past. She forgets in Paris. And remembers in Hiroshima. She reconciles with her past; she saw everything in Hiroshima. Because she saw him. Towards the end she gives the Japanese gentleman his name. It cannot but be bound to the city where a specific love took place.

Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hiroshima. That’s your name.
Yes, that’s my name.
And your name is Nevers.
Nevers in France.

________
Inspiration: Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima, Mon Amour and India Song. Jalal Toufic: Over-Sensitivity. Stephen Wright: “Toward Extraterritoriality: The Dilemmas of Situatedness.” Plus all the loving people in Beirut.
This is the first article made within the framework of The Love Libration Movement. Here, Mirene Arsanios and I will curate articles on each others blogs under the theme; love.

”I was in Auckland, New Zealand, two months ago, on my way to Christchurch for a teaching position interview. It was my first visit to that city. Again I was sensitized to the sensuality of women after a long hiatus of no longer feeling it in familiar cities. We go to foreign cities in search of sensuality and possibly love. And vice versa: we get in love in search of making the city in which we reside unfamiliar. All love affairs happen in foreign cities. Two weeks after returning to los Angeles, I was offered the position as Christhchurch. Two months later I had to decide whether to accept the offer or stay in Los Angeles, where I was starting to fall in love. The decision I have to make is presently between two foreign cities.
The architect of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters drives his two attractive women companions around Manhattan, showing them his favorite buildings in that city. Is he in love? No, the city regarding which he acts as a guide has not become tinged with foreignness. Does the city become foreign through the other love stories in the film? No. Has Woody Allen failed here in his depiction of love? Not if his main love in this film is for the city itself.
When single, one explores a city, its museums, cafes, and bookstores, with a future lover in mind as a companion. Having found her, for a while one takes her to some of these places. But then, soon enough, love gives rise to a tendency to seclusion with the beloved away from everything else. He could not stand the cat in her house; the world was still there through that pet. She ended up acquiescing and getting rid of it.
Since they both usually stay up late, they called each other around midnight, She did not ask him: ”Did you dream of me last night?” He did not, with the provocation of seduction, tell her: ”Tonight, you’ll dream of me,” but rather: ”Have pleasant dreams.” He was relieved when she answered, ”I don’t remember my dreams”: he would be spared being asked to listen to dreams and even to interpret them – he was ill-equipped to do that. Little did he know that he would soon have to start the interpretation of insomnia. It took him three hours to fall asleep following their fifteen-minute phone conversation. He had lost interest in anything else besides her, even sleeping – he thus became acutely aware that sleep is not a rest from activity, but one more activity. If waiting is a non-accidental topos of love, it is because love divests us from interest in all other possible activities and in all objects other than the beloved. After a long sleepless night next to her in slumber, he left her a brief note: ”You have beautiful eyes – even when closed.”
Index: Love: of the city, as an exploration of the city; as a seclusion from and dis-interest in the city.”

Undying Love, or Love Dies by Jalal Toufic. p. 2-3