Loving is not owning, as my best friend always says. But my best friend also says things like: “Relationships are usually like floaters, it doesn’t get any better than that.” And: “If I mix a pound of blueberries and a pound of shit together, I’ll have two pounds of shit afterwards.”
All true, but to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when Tom Waits counters. But what does ‘own’ even mean? I know who Tom Waits is. I know love is hard to define. But possession?
I own quite a few things. I own a big old red couch; I own a closet with clothes in it; a razor; three or four half-dead plants; a string of lights. I own shoes and a phone and a bank account. I love all these things. I own a heart and a brain, but that’s where things get vague. My heart and my brain are mine, but they’re mostly a part of me, and if I sold them, I’d be dead and own nothing, not even a red couch.
And that would be a great pity, because I love the red couch very much. You also have to notice that our friend Tom speaks in the past tense – “all you’ve loved”. Now, people generally assume that you have lost the things you loved – in the past – but no longer actively love. When Tom says otherwise, of course, he’s talking about memories: he says the only possessions you have are the memories of the things and people and events you loved.
If you want to be accurate, that would mean I wouldn’t own my red couch until I no longer had it.
Maybe Tom hasn’t thought hard enough about the whole issue.
Or maybe we lack context. Let’s look at the context.
The line comes from the song ‘Take It With Me’. He hasn’t had champagne in a long time, Tom sings, and he’s by the sea. No, not even just by the sea, by the ocean. Tom is on the move.
The ocean is blue, he sings, and he’ll take it with him when he goes. You have to imagine it. He wants to take the whole Atlantic with him, with its 350 million cubic metres of water, with its islands and coasts, with its walruses, manatees and rays and all the natural pollution and the, there they are again, the floaters, the dead pirates and soldiers and deep-sea divers. Not a small sea he wants to take, or a pond, but the whole ocean right away.
Does the ocean actually love all the people who have loved it over the centuries? Or is the whole thing a one-sided story? People always swipe right, and the ocean always swipes left? People sing about the ocean, but the ocean never sings about people? Is this what people’s romantic obsession with the ocean is based on – that it is a forever unrequited passion? That the ocean, like the weather, can never, well, be owned? All you’ve loved is all you own.
If the ocean were at least full of champagne!
Supposedly, after all, the last words of the Russian poet Chekhov were, “I’m dying! It’s been a long time since I drank champagne.” He was dying of tuberculosis, and it was then customary for the doctor to give you champagne to drink once they’d confirmed the disease was fatal.
If the ocean were full of champagne, I could sit on my couch (which I love but don’t own – or the other way around) on its shores and drink champagne until I forget everything. When the last memory faded, if Tom is to be believed, I would then not only love nothing, but own nothing. I would look out at the tingling ocean with empty eyes – legs drawn up, whiskers in the wind, a glass in each hand, a sphinx with no riddles and no answers.
Unless, of course, Tom Waits had taken it with him.
As featured in SLEEK 72 – LOVE. Available in print and digital here.
Juliane Liebert was born and raised in Halle an der Saale, but will in all likelihood die in Berlin, circa 2056. Juliane studies at Berlin’s University of Arts. She doesn’t like to watch movies and doesn’t like to go to the beach. She believes in zodiac signs, sushi and synthpop. She prays before eating.