Sex, in Aristophanes’ speech, comes into being because Zeus, taking pity on his poor, fractured Humpty Dumpties, adroitly repositioned their organs and made them capable of congress. Not that all sex acts result in a transcendental sense of unity, or heal our narcissistic wounds or knit together the ruptures of a fragmented world. But love can, and the all-embracing love that poets and pop lyricists sing does, echoing the ancient notion that lover and beloved are one soul in two bodies.
That Romantic Feeling
Romance may be only one imaginative elaboration of physical cravings, but it has been with us as long as stories have been told. And far from being the women-only terrain contemporary gender discourses assign it to, it has long also been male: from Sir Galahad to The Great Gatsby, men have wooed and pined, made over their lives, tempted death, to win a Guinevere or a radiant Daisy, designated as the missing half that will make them whole. What we think of as the self is goaded into being by love, which also promises the self’s realization.
One day during the Great War a young woman who has happened on a job as a librarian in Carstairs, a small Canadian town, receives a letter from a man she doesn’t know, but who identifies himself as Jack Agnew. He is a soldier at the Front. He tells her what books he read in her library, what a change for the better her arrival made to the place and how grateful he was to her. She can’t put a face to him, but she answers his letter. She is lonely.
In his next letter, he remembers how one day, having been caught in the rain, she took the pins out of her hair and brushed it out. She hadn’t seen him there, but when she did, they exchanged a smile.
The correspondence continues. She sends him a photograph of herself. Her interest in the war and her surroundings mounts. The world takes on a new depth. He asks her if she has a sweetheart. She hasn’t. He tells her he doesn’t think they will ever meet again, but he loves her. He thinks of her up on a stool in the library reaching to put a book away and he comes to lift her down. She turns in his arms, and it is as if they have agreed on everything.
There is no further letter. When the war ends, she scans the papers daily to see if he appears on a list of the dead, and finally sees his name on a list of those coming home. In a frenzy and despite the raging flu of 1918, she keeps the library open, she searches for him, is ill herself and still waits. Then one day, she reads a wedding announcement in the paper. Jack has indeed come back, but he has married someone else, a girl he was engaged to before he went overseas. She learns this from a scrappy note he leaves for her in the library. She has still never seen him. She gives herself to a passing salesman.
Time passes. Jack is sensationally mown down, decapitated, like some latter-day John the Baptist, in an industrial accident in the town’s main factory. Arthur, its owner, who has had to deal with the head, the blood and the human fall-out, brings Jack’s surreptitiously borrowed books back to the library. He takes to coming to the library. He sits there, a site of respite. When one autumn evening, as rain clouds gather and burst, the librarian with controlled, but visible, excitement asks him more about Jack’s accident and tells him the way he dealt with it was remarkable, to his own surprise the factory owner, a restrained man of dark-suited dignity, finds himself proposing to her. The feelings love stirs can be contagious.
More time passes, together with another war. Arthur, with whom the librarian has led a good life, is dead and she now has a son at university. She has come to a distant town to see a heart specialist. She hasn’t been well, but the doctor makes light of her ills. She wanders through town and comes across a rally in honour of the Tolpuddle Martyrs: at the doctor’s an announcement, bearing the words ‘local martyrs honoured’, had already sent her pulse racing. Now sitting in the park, waiting for the ceremony in which a certain Jack Agnew is to speak, she feels a sickening agitation. She leaves. She wanders in a disoriented way searching for the station where a bus will take her home. She is hot, disturbed. She finds refuge in a squalid café, sips a Coke, and when she opens her eyes Jack Agnew, the man she never met, but instantly knows, the man who met a lurid end, is before her. He is older, but authoritative, attractive, something of a working-class hero. ‘Love never dies,’ he says to her, and though she protests inwardly, she is giddy with an amorous flare-up of the cells, a surge of old intentions.
‘Carried Away’ is one of Alice Munro’s remarkable stories. With deft strokes, it distils the essence of a lifetime, which here is the quintessence of romantic love. Wooed by letters and language, those forms which seem to leap directly to women’s hearts–even today, when they may take the form of texting–Munro’s small-town heroine falls in love with a man she has never seen, but who fires her imagination. Jack’s revelation of his watchful attentiveness and the specialness she has acquired in his mind–both sensuous and idealized by her association with the books he loves–give a new significance to her life. The first also has an immediate carnal effect. Though Louisa has her own share of contemporary scepticism, though ‘she would have said love was all hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that’, at the prospect she still feels ‘a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant prostration’.
Munro’s astute depiction of her heroine’s ‘flagrant prostration’ evokes the traditional psychosexual posture of women in relation to love. It is incited from without, provoked by the attention of another. It excites an initial submission.
Women’s age-old susceptibility to talkative seducers, to the forceful rakes and Casanovas of story, may in part be due to the way women’s desire is only consciously stirred through the desire of another. Until that imaginative process is set in train, she remains secret, even to herself. If to some this may reek of male mumbo-jumbo, it’s interesting to note that women researchers studying female sexual arousal in laboratory conditions have also found a distinct split between women’s conscious or reported desire and their bodily state of arousal, a split not found in men. As one of the researchers, Meredith Chivers, stated, ‘I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element.’
In Munro’s story, it is the desire the letters from Jack set in motion, the intimate link they establish, compounded with the proximity of death which turns this ordinary man into a hero, that seals a transforming tie. Life, for Louisa, is raised beyond its daily banality. Even though, or perhaps because, Jack disappoints her and she suffers, the bond is not broken. It lasts beyond his sensational death, sparks her marriage, and at her own end, is reignited in her imagination. Her love adds a singular, one might say, a civilizing dimension to a life that might otherwise feel petty and banal.
The goods passion can foster are laid out early, if rarely, in Western history. In Phaedrus Plato engages in a discussion of passionate love, quite unlike that described in The Symposium. In the latter the aspiring intellect alone is drawn, through the pursuit of beauty, to the higher philosophical plane that Diotima, his ‘instructress in the art of love’, defines as love’s goal. In Phaedrus, Eros is in full unruly play amongst humans–those souls who have lost their wings. Yet the sensual receptivity passion provokes results in a complex aspiration that leads to the good life.
When one who is fresh from the mystery… beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god; and but for being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity. Next, with the passing of the shudder, a strange sweating and fever seizes him: for by reason of the stream of beauty entering in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby the soul’s plumage is fostered; and with that warmth the roots could grow.
Wonder and passion allow the soul to take wing and be moved through devotion to greater understanding. Enmeshed in emotions of tenderness and awe, the person in love is inspired. He recognizes from the other’s approval that certain acts are
good. Our once higher state may be a distant memory, Plato seems to be saying, but passionate love for one who bears in beauty, wisdom and goodness a likeness to that original perfection allows us to grow closer to our once winged state.
In our sophisticated times, we tend to maintain an ironic distance from both this Platonic version of love and its romantic successor which bound passion, pain and loss into one. Munro’s own irony in ‘Carried Away’ is gentle. If her Madame Bovary of Carstairs is in some sense a martyr to her epistolary love for a man she has never met in the flesh, it nonetheless permits her to lead a full life and one which gains an added dimension from his existence. Through this love her inner life grows deeper, her powers of imagination more acute.
Crazy about You
Propelling us out of our ordinary everydayness, falling in love at whatever age shares not a little with a falling into madness. Passion is a fevered state, a divine delirium, as Plato called it, and it can mimic pathology. It acts upon the body engendering bliss or pain. Reason, which splits and divides, cannot capture its transports: nor, ultimately, can language, itself a commentary on experience–which may be why we resort to (or shun) the simple enunciative force of ‘I love you’, those words which link inside and outside, I with you, in a performance of love.
Passion makes us oblivious to the world and to responsibility. We are out of control. Our thoughts and our pulse race. Our consciousness is altered. All that matters is our desire and the other who is its object. Opposites are collapsed. Abjectly vulnerable to the other, we are also exalted–omnipotent. We take risks. We transgress. The sense of danger is part of the very charge of the erotic. Judgement vanishes. In its place comes a skewed sense not only of the configuration of the real, but also of the real of the other who floods our imagination. We idealize madly: all the best in the world rests in the object of our love. ‘You’re the top!’ Cole Porter’s lyrics sing–the Coliseum, the Louvre Museum, the tower of Pisa, the smile on the Mona Lisa–in short, everything that’s best.
And with the slightest twist, all the worst rests with him or her, too. Love metamorphoses into hate at the flicker of suspicion.
Our love fills our thoughts: they scurry round in obsessive circles–Will she? Won’t he? How? When? In the same way as for people suffering from paranoia, the lover’s world is charged with new meaning, magical: there are signs of our love everywhere, in the stars, in the weather, in the smile or scowl of a random passer-by. Everything signals ecstasy or rejection. If we try to focus on anything outside our love, random daydreams, hopes or fears invade. Blissful dreams of oneness run into terrors of rejection. Thoughts are uncontrollable, just as that initial act of falling was involuntary.
So there is good reason that the ‘lunatic, the lover and the poet’, as Shakespeare put it in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are so often linked. The three are of ‘imagination all compact’, judicious Theseus tells us at the moment when the night of love’s unruly dream, lived out in the wildness of the forest and under the aegis of sprites and fairies, has given way to the daytime of reason and socially sanctioned nuptials.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
Under the sway of Eros–which, given its unreasonableness, might as well be kindled by Puck’s potion, so magical is its suddenness and force–queens fall in love with asses, see regal beauty in brutes and cede their once dearest wards. We are literally enchanted. Long-held attractions give way in the blink of an eye to others. Couples realign. Suffering is heedlessly engendered. Others wonder whether our ‘sanity’ is utterly gone.
In its choice of object, love seems to know little rhyme or reason: Cupid, son of Venus and Mars, wears a blindfold, after all, as he shoots his troublesome arrows. In the words of Carson McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café:
The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else–but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll.
From the outside, the choice of beloved may appear utterly crazy and indeed be so–like that snail in the New Yorker cartoon, who while gazing at a curvaceous snail-shaped tape dispenser declares to another snail, ‘I don’t care if she is a tape dispenser. I love her.’ For the lover, the beloved speaks to some intimate part of himself, has perhaps awakened some long-held need. The reel of that inner story is then projected on to the screen the beloved becomes. She may fill a deep unconscious lack in the lover. She may in the way she moves her head or in the wave of a hand evoke a preverbal childhood memory of a long-buried, excessive love. He may envy something she has or represents, or alternatively need to be rescued. She may feed some hungry part of himself. The scenarios are infinite and to others, even to himself, invisible.
Imagination nurtures the process. In love, we are all poets, for good or ill. We are also akin to psychotics. Psychosis is, after all, that aberrant condition of the mind or psyche in which contact with reality is lost and a delusional state prevails. Taken literally rather than metaphorically, John Donne’s poem ‘The Sun Rising’ aptly describes the lover’s delusional state:
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time…
She’s all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is.
Torn or separated from her beloved, the lover may, like a person in the grip of psychosis, hallucinate his presence, his words, his actions, for good or ill. Or the lover, in the grip of jealousy, love’s nether twin, may persecute the beloved, imagine betrayals, punish the real or hallucinated slight to his power with violence. Driven jealously mad, his reason unseated, Othello murders his beloved Desdemona, attempting to extinguish his jealousy and her being in one fell act. Or the lover may grow addicted to her jealousy and pain, and over and over seek others who will feed a core masochism, inflict humiliation and loss.
In The Act of Love, Howard Jacobson’s unflinching account of a character who becomes pain’s slave, the narrator, at the age of fifteen, suffers his first self-shattering betrayal. He reflects:
If you wanted to be in love–and I wanted nothing else–then you had to welcome into your soul love’s symptoms and concomitants: fear of betrayal which was no less potent than the fear of death, jealousy which ate into the very marrow of your bones, a feverish anticipation of loss which no amount of trust would ever assuage. Loss–loss waited upon gain as sure as day followed night… You loved to lose and the more you loved the more you lost. Fear and jealousy were not incidental to love, they were love.
The pain of lost love is as total, as self-obliterating an emotion as the initial ecstasy. In our own time, when we vest so much in the durability of love, see it as a path to self-realization, abandonment can engender a dissolution of the once merged self. Some passionately re-enact the loss over and over again, its low an emotion more intense than the initial high. Indeed, contemporary love lyrics–Bob Dylan’s, Leonard Cohen’s, Nick Cave’s–more often sing of sorrow and loss than of joy.
The influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan postulated that loss and the continuous inner sense of lack it sets up in us originate in the moments when the infant’s early state of symbiotic plenitude with mother and world–his primary narcissism–is ruptured by the intervention of the father, the symbolic law-giver, and in that sense the keeper of language itself, which makes us social beings. This is the moment when
the infant’s own separate ‘I am’ is constituted. In other words, the speaking subject comes into being with the loss of unity. To say ‘I am’ is already to say ‘I have lost.’ In successive loves, ever haunted by a sense of lack, the arrival of any third party reignites the first triadic structure, its threat and pain. Only death permits the final healing of that first split which is already in ourselves. So the romantic agony, the pendulum swing between longing and mourning, may be embedded in our very nature as speaking humans. Incapable of relocating that originary plenitude, we may seek it or its attendant loss, over and over again. Ecstatic love and loss may, it seems, be a fundamental couple, thrusting us into a bodily confusion which words alone cannot assuage. Thin-skinned, as vulnerable as babes, we’re prone to fall apart when we part.
Neil Gaiman’s Rose Walker in The Sandman says it all:
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 6