Louise Bourgeois, 10am is when you come to me, 2006

“In the tavern there are many wines.”

“Fermentation is one of the oldest symbols for human transformation. When grapes combine their juice and are closed up together for a time in a dark place, the results are spectacular. This is what lets two drunks meet so that they don’t know who is who. Pronouns no longer apply in the tavern’s mud-world of excited confusion and half-articulated wantings.”

-Rumi, selected poems

I am reading Rumi’s poetry, and thinking about fermentation and its relationship to human interaction. I am enveloped by the image of the tavern, and its intensely messy representation of a meeting ground for the confused; it’s a drunkenness in a heartbeat, pulsating a little too fast, a spiritual intoxication.

A tavern can be a church in different forms. I think of two people fermenting like grapes in an oak barrel. A process of transformation and eye contact, a sense of self unravelled and shared. There feels as though there is a sense of loss in fermentation, yet it bubbles into something divine. It reminds me of the art of flirting. When I am flirting, I am in the tavern; when I am in love, I am in the tavern.

Upon saying goodbye, and when I am unsure where I am, whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

I was speaking with a loved one about how they struggle to recognise when someone is flirting with them. I find this utterly ridiculous. Flirting is an art form. Out in the city and watching a gaggle of beautiful women swarm a man, begging for dregs of conversation. This is not flirting. Flirting is, in most ways, wilful ignorance; it is entirely observation. Rarely is it even about the spoken word.

Every time I have made the correct assumption that someone is interested in me, it is usually because I have noticed them performing the very specific act of meeting my eyes when someone else is speaking, searching for my reaction. You must be able to deny, you must dance with your eyes, you must be the only two people that exist in this room, even if you are both being spoken at by another.

Virginia Woolf wrote in ‘The Waves’- ‘I begin to long for some little language lovers use. Broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement”. Ironically, I think she articulated this perfectly. We do not need to speak in love because we can speak about anything. There is an intensity of language in physicality. There is fighting and forgiving, embracing and being inside of one another. I think these mumblings are my favourite side effect of love. Sleepy moans and groans that mean good morning, and you know it. Everyone must, at some point, learn to speak and understand the language of love, and embrace the silent linguistics of these “half articulated wantings”.

Rue Yi, Schmidt Wallets (2024) quote from Schmidt, J. O. (2016). The Sting of the Wild. Johns Hopkins University Press.

I am obsessed with lovers and the language of lovers that I am blessed to know and have known. I have only realised in recent weeks that when I talk about this, I do not mean affairs, but true all-knowing lovers.

I think of conversations after intimacy, stating whatever is on one’s mind, because it would be silly now to hide. You are naked next to me, and I am draped in your clothes, and we are lit only by the tips of cigarettes. I am plagued daily by thoughts of the performance of lovers. When I love you, I am constantly a peacock flaring its feathers. I think back longingly on being by the sea, and wanting to swim with someone so freely, so badly that it physically ached. How clothes and belongings form one nonsensical ball of identity on a bedroom floor. How the metal in my ears must have distracted others from the texture of my earlobes. How my friends and I are often described by the wideness of our smiles, or how our laughs are so loud they morph together to create an orchestra.

It is the whole of lucidity, the lack of pretence, the mundanity of it all! how love can start in ugliness and end in eternity.

I think, in some way, I will always be writing about love. Somehow, it will always keep seeping into the cracks and take on a new meaning each morning. I think of how freely we even celebrate the love of others as a society, for it is the only true salvation, and the only road to empathy I know.

-L

\