Quiz: What Is Love?
Anahid Nersessian
The following quiz is meant to be both funny and provocative. Each question invited seminar participants to reframe their erotic attitudes through another person’s language, by choosing or otherwise responding to a quotation from a poetic or theoretical text as if it were an expression or encapsulation of the participant’s own beliefs. The quiz is, in part, a satire, a playful caricature of those various online questionnaires that invite you to determine (for example) your attachment style, a sort of drive-thru version of therapy you can do between answering emails. Rather than answer “never/ rarely/sometimes/always” to statements like “It takes me a while to build trust and share vulnerable things about myself,” participants would decide whether their own ideas about love were more like Karl Marx’s or Bernadette Mayer’s or Petrarch’s. Like love itself, the quiz tests how much we can bear to understand ourselves in a foreign idiom—to allow our “inside voices” to be scored by the music of the other.
PART I: MULTIPLE CHOICE
LOVE IS (SELECT ONE):
1. The commodity form of subjectivity.
2. A going out of our own nature, and an identifica- tion of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
3. A babe as you know and when you
Put your startling hand on my cunt or arm or head
Or better both your hands to hold in them my own
I’m awed and we laugh with questions.
4. All of the above (briefly explain your answer).
PART II: TRUE OR FALSE
1. The time to labour, for every animal
that inhabits earth, is when it is still day,
except for those to whom the sun is hateful:
but then when heaven sets fire to its stars,
some turn for home and some nestle in the woods
to find some rest before the dawn. (T OR F?)
2. That Freud that you enjoy reading doesn’t
clarify what I desire. You came here,
and I repeat—Nothing binds you to me.
Yet you decide to stay. (T OR F?)
3. It may be
I’m not as strong as other women are,
Who, torn and crushed, are not undone from love.
It may be I am colder than the dead,
Who, being dead, love always. (T OR F?)
4. I live under heavy fear of being
Enlaced by a desire for
Someone I cannot have. But I
See roses
In ice-sheets on the roads
Clear weather
In a sky that’s overcast.
Birds sing from the snowdrifts. (T OR F?)
5. To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well. (T OR F?)
PART III: SELF-ASSESSMENT
1. Please write down or otherwise take note of the following:
→ List five people in your life with whom you experience the most conflict.
→ These should be people you know personally, not public figures you have never met.
2. Now, list five people in your life for whom you feel the greatest love.
3. Please make a new list of any names that appear on your first two lists.
(Citations: Part I: 1. Lauren Berlant, “Love, a Queer Feeling.” 2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry. 3. Bernadette Mayer, poem from Sonnets. Part II: 1. Petrarch, poem XXII from Il Canzoniere. 2. Pier Paolo Pasolini, poem 3 from Seven Poems for Ninetto. 3. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh. 4. Peire Vidal, “Estat ai Gran Sazo.” 5. Gwendolyn Brooks, “To Be in Love.”)