One of my favorite Iowa poets, Deb Marquart, published a small volume of poetry manymany years back, called Everything Is A Verb. The title stuck with me, and I have revisited many of the poems over and over as well. But that idea, that everything, everything, is a verb . . .
Mr. Rogers reminded us, years and years ago, that love is a verb. If you can’t believe Mr. Rogers, who can you believe? And he was absolutely right.
To love someone is to actively grow into harmony with them; actively struggle with your doubts, fears, and petty annoyances; to intentionally strive to be your best self for their sake. To love is to serve and accept acts of service. To give and to accept. To support and to be supported. Love isn’t a thing. It’s a verb.
I can’t be “in love” with someone, because love isn’t a place. It can be a state of being, but there again, being is a verb. To be. I can only love actively, because love is a verb.
Like, dislike, adore, abhor, and hate are all verbs, too.
The word behave, as Marquart points out in a poem of the same name, is two verbs:
. . . Lately I’ve been thinking
about the word, behave,
how it’s made entirely of verbs,
but it’s all about getting nowhere.
Being-have means being had,
means, having been, means,
being a has-been . . . *
To behave is to conform, to give in, to allow somebody else’s opinion more weight than your own. To choose the quiet verbs, sitting, waiting, following, agreeing. Being good according to someone else’s definition. Living within expectations, but not one iota more. Dreaming and never doing. Don’t rock the damn boat. Don’t scare the horses. Behave.
Is that really any way to live? I have to agree with Marquart. When women behave they are allowing themselves to be boxed in to make the world more comfortable for the frightfully insecure white men who are desperately clinging to power. Being had by them, in the most unsavory ways. Well, you know how we feel about that. I don’t think I even need to say the word.
Is it even possible to love and behave at the same time? If you are shrinking yourself, dimming yourself in order to conform to societal expectations, or to a specific person’s expectations, you are not being you. You are being had. You are allowing someone to exert power over you, surrendering your free will and all your power in the process. Can you even love yourself under those circumstances? I tried and failed until something really big woke me up, but that’s . . . not why you called . . .
Before you can love anybody else, you have to love you. You have to love you so you know when somebody else is actually loving you and when they are just trying to possess you, or biding their time with you, or playing you for a sucker. Real love exists, it’s a real thing, and there are people lucky enough to find it. But you have to love you before it will ever reveal itself. And that can be a daily grind, absolutely. Real love is not for the faint-hearted.
The other thing it’s damn near impossible to do when you are being have is create from an authentic and true place. I wrote 200 songs from a place of being had, and though some of them were solid, too many were painfully angsty and pissed off about the wrong things. I don’t listen to those records or play those songs, but for a handful of exceptions, anymore. Ever. Now that I have freed myself from being had and have stepped into being, I am able to focus on much more important subject matter, because I have the energy to be pissed off about the right things, like climate change, inequality, racism, corruption and greed. And those songs are, believe it or not, way more fun to write.
You have to be really living the Verb life to love those who seem most unlovable.
There are politicians we love to hate. Guess what? Nope. You gotta love ’em. There are family members who deserve to be fed into tree shredders, but do we get to hate ’em? Not even. The Military Industrial Complex? Well, nothing to love or hate there, really, it’s just an institution. The people behind it? Radicalized paranoid (mostly) men terrified by their own shadows? They need to be loved almost as much as that poor excuse for a human currently occupying the White House [Ed. note: as of 2019]. Yeah, gotta love him too. I do it by realizing that his father probably despised him and his mother looks like the coldest bitch ever born. That kid was probably so starved for affection that he is desperate to please any father figure he can find (Well helloooooo, Sailor. . . I mean Mr. Putin . . .).
This kind of love is particularly challenging and strenuously active, because overcoming revulsion in order to see the spark of humanity and divinity is the hardest work we’ll ever do. If you can love #moscowmitch, you have this love thing down. I’m not there yet.
So screw being have. “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” according to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. She’s not saying go out and commit crimes, stir up civil unrest and set stuff on fire. Well . . . No. Okay, no, she’s not. She means that it takes a woman who is fully herself to own her power, to right deep and savage wrongs, and to cause the men in power to become very uncomfortable, and hopefully very unemployed. We have some lovely misbehavers currently running for many political offices, and I hope you will support their campaigns, especially those who can really eff with the current power structure and shake shit up in all the right ways.
As for me, well, you know I aim to misbehave. Ever and always. Join me?
- Everything’s a Verb, Deb Marquart, New Rivers Press 1995
Thanks for the reminders……Peace!