On the Impossibility of Love (Portion 4)

[Editor's note(s). At long last (we hope) - the final installment. For those of you Reading Backward, this essay begins at On the Impossibility of Love (Portion 1) and (but for the needed interruption yesterday afternoon), continues in - err, reverse order - or link by link.

A number of years have elapsed since Athena, I mean Wren, leaped from her own head fully formed (i.e., wrote the original draft of the essay). She may indeed wake up tomorrow morning (or the morning after) and stumble to the computer (which she turns on then heads to the kitchen to fix - err, prepare? that highly esteemed (at least by the woman who drinks it) cup of coffee with cream & brown sugar) and devise a final final commentary to the matter.

Which will necessitate a Portion Five.

That being as yet the future, however, we must wait & see.]

I should absent us from her notes on the subject after this. Because one inevitably wearies of even the – err, best subject(s).

Only touched the beginning of her reflections on love – and you see, all I have shared is the one element of it: him.

But other essays await and her journals are in my firm possession.

Busy woman that my friend is, reading her journal at any time is arduous; she is a fairly close friend and I know there was much afoot at that time in her life that required detailing.

Even though, the more pressing the details of her life became, the less one heard of them and the more of him.

Is love, then, sanctuary?

As life becomes difficult, love seems the greater haven? (And would it be the less of what it is were that so?)

Too, much of the particulars of her love have more to do with other facets than the mystery of what is between a man and a woman – though that is much of what has not yet been shared. In some sense, then, this is as though one is reading a story and abruptly, the author decides, enough said – or worse, did say all and somehow – natural disaster, whim of fate, whatever – the essential part of the story disappears and (life being what it is) is never recovered.

Much has to be left out.

Writers these days, as we all know, either tell too much (Life as Violin) - or tell too little.

Leaving you to figure out what happened on your own.

But This Writer (at the present moment Mere Essayist) is about to leave you with our Sparrow...repeating herself, for the very reliving of it:

And I just want to state it again, if only it could be a secret between us—just this—the playing at being aware then the questioning that awareness – but nothing ever revealed, nothing ever spoken, nothing ever certain. Our secret.

But I play with fire.

[And yes, poet that our Sparrow is, that worked its way into a poem. How many times she reworked, discarded, hid - and that one time only she dared let anyone read it - we won't say.

His commentary (a mere friend) was, it is too intense.

Mais oui! Is not intensity her Chosen Artform: to reduce an experience to its Most Excrutiating Existence - to present a moment undiluted...

But such moments. Perhaps men (err, the male of the species) are less comfortable with these pristine moments. Came a time when Sparrow at least began to suspect so.

Perhaps Manuscripts in the Raw (wherein we Read the Writer Rather than the Poem) diminish that necessity to private 'merging with the material' that is so - umm, necessary in any reading.

And perhaps (we will allow such) it was that the poem itself was...err, too intense. Whether future readers will ever have the chance to know is at present...unrevealed.]

We will leave her, in any case, to her fire. Aware, to be sure, of the irony in her 'play.' But barrelling along ahead regardless. Poor thing, if only one could live in fire.

If only in the being left, she could stay forever. But we are mere flesh, and mere flesh can be consumed. One becomes too hot. One moves away from the fire.

But in what direction does one move.

And in what dance.

I feel I have cheated you. But you have forgiven me; I know this because I, too, am a poet and poets know. So we move on. Wanted to tell you the things my friend thought about love – the lovelies she discovered. But all we covered was…him.

You know.

The man. The belovéd.

But what is love, save the belovéd. One could almost believe in love, if that were what love is. And it does seem we began there, n'est ce pas? Quoting the highly esteemed work on the matter?

Not the feeling we all float through - but rather - the person whom we love.

This essay is on the impossibility of love, though, isn’t it, and it is from my poor friend’s experience that I draw my final thoughts. Perhaps it could be said that no poet makes a good wife. I only mentioned, didn't I - woman of the world that I am - the husband she left behind.

He seemed, finally, not a part of the story. In the twilight of the last century, we learned to think lightly when marriages fail. Or (at least) to pretend to.

Long as it wasn’t our best friend. Long as we didn’t have to watch it happen around us. Long as it was on a screen somewhere or in the pages of a book.

But a “my turn” sensibility, poet or no, as we aged and saw castles tumble.

Wasn’t it deadness, really, long before she met the man she loved?

(And if it was, does that excuse anything? But this is not a moral treatise; it is merely an exploration on one topic. On with it, as they roar.)

Yet how much deadness can an individual withstand. Walk a mile in my deadness, as the old Indian used to say. Before you judge me. Because as my friend discovered—did I leave out all the good stuff that might have shown you what she knew—some things there are that are bigger than what we are made of.

And what do you do then.

Perhaps you shouldn’t ask whether poets make commendable lovers. The best love the kind that leaves a trifle yet before its time?

Oh, but poets must remain alone, you see—not always, but forever.

Forever.

Sounds like a word you might hear in the circles love frequents; it is one you should want to hear, n’est ce pas.

For what is love, if it is not forever.

It is not love.

Do we hear that often, I thought I was in love? Perhaps it should be said then that love requires forever – and if it is not forever…Fidelity, then, love’s higher aim….

Ah yes. Can we discuss such after where we have been.

Long time, forever is, in any case: time slowed, you know, late last century; the great clock wound down and the little man isn’t there anymore to wind it up again.

Love requires separation. In the one sense, love mandates leaving the larger community of many to be sequestered as one. What is it to be one; how can what is disparate and forever separate—the archetypes (for I know them, too) of male and female—cornerstones of the universe as it is constructed; how can they be one?

Mystery of love, they say. The greater mystery, then, that even in the being one, they must remain separate; must remain individual; a new math; one plus one equaling two equaling one.

But that, the ideal. In our play of it, isn’t love, finally, what my friend saw in her dawn; only some greater mirror through which we—in the delight of another—view only ourselves. A stage to dance upon, that we may be the more cosseted and admired.

Most of us never able to grow to what love requires to be love?

Even in the notion that it is a force from a design larger than ourselves – the line crossed, the door closed, no return exit—love as kismet – love as something we could not have chosen – something that, patterned out like love from a higher calling, chooses us—love is still the stuff of those mightier than mere man.

Is love as we know it real. What is the “chemistry” that draws us. I don’t know the answers. You see, I know the End of my friend’s story. Sometimes I think it is All I Know.

But I’m not telling.

She still believes in love. Though I for one cannot imagine why. But I am a poet, too, and it seems poets believe in everything – and nothing.

Oops, time’s up. As all good girls know, Cinderella is always felled by midnight. Hey, you didn’t know this was a faery tale? But I thought we established that at the first. I don’t believe in love. The most romantic of us never do. Doesn’t that make love the stuff of faery tales?

My friend spoke in the beginning of the will vs. reality—that the will possessed the power to maul the lesser entity—to pummel it into whatever shape it might desire.

Isn’t the shape of a thing its substance.

But you know it’s not, don’t you.

So maybe you’re ready for something more than faery tales.

The larger battle, you know, is the will versus love.

But that is the stuff of another essay.

I did not get so far as even the entry portal to my friend’s journey. Left out all the stuff that Resident Essayist tends to read instead of what is - err, real...You see, I'm not so sure, even after all my reading, what love is.

Can something carried around in the mind like dream be 'real?'

Unconsummated, unspoken - only that place where the eyes meet, then dart away, then meet again...as it were, look back to find the other has trespassed as well...can that be love?

If it stretches out over months, years - then more years - is it love then?

If it sickens one for its very strength and unendedness - yet never played out in real time, never tested...two dreamers dreaming...but neither moving past dream...is it love then.

But perhaps those are not the sort of answers a mere essayist can give. I did not get so far as proving (or disproving) love exists. How could I dare query whether it existed for her - or for them? I only got so far as to know – for you do know, now, don’t you know? – that love is made of the same things the universe is constructed of and it is too mighty for any of us to maul or think to force or shape into being.

Or pull from it what we might think our desire, our play-pretty.

One could almost believe in love…

But a frightening sort of pulling, love. That mere man could suppose to dally in it…Yet one hears the poet calling in her night, I think. Isn’t that her voice? Some tiny thing - yet pure as a wee bell - pure and fragile and transparent as a small thing made of clearest glass: Love, come. Oh, love, come.

Foolishness, to be sure. Such a small thing, that poet. You could almost crush her like a gnat flying in your face and it’d be done before you knew it. I guess it is, in love, that there is a necessity to hold back parts of yourself and it is that, finally, which remains the antithesis of love, even as the substance of those who - err, love...

And did she ever discover it...

But you will not know, will you.

Because I am not telling the end of the story...

[Editor's note(s). "Walk a mile in my moccasins" is the old Indian (err, Native American) proverb referenced above.

(Sheesh. These days~! Can't assume anyone is on the same page now, can we....

Which, to be sure, necessitates that the Good Editor notate that Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom (the necessary thing), sprang from her father's head fully-formed. Various myths about her exist - daughter of the sea...one can suppose that, through the centuries, all the goddesses (back to archetype & Ideal) became intermixed & confused with each other...but it is also true that the originals fell to the same...

Whether or no the Greeks actually believed in their creations - or found them to merely represent the above (archetype & Ideal) - is Another Item Not Explored Herein.

And for those of you who might be interested in that pull between the thinking life & feeling life (head vs. heart?) as it plays out in Extremely Intelligent Women (or Creative Women) (or Just Plain Thinking Women), we can recommend James Brabazon's biography, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY 1981.

It may well indeed be one or the other...]