Wednesday, May 4, 2011

a may love-spell


There’s something I want you to know. I can cast love-spells. It’s a power I have. Through this power, every ordinary personal grace is amplified to something extreme and angelic. Every coincidence and simple occurrence can seem like superlatively potent celestial bodies aligning unexpectedly above your head. The world takes on lustre and sheen; emotions are rose and violet hued. Cold and heat become parallel appendages to one perfect body of lust, and desire writes the subtext of every action, reaction, passion, and protocol. Have you ever felt your face cast beams as brilliant as the sun’s? Your throat emit lotus-petalled pitches? Your hands stroke as delicately as dove feathers? Your feet glide over earth as though it’s ether? Your heart sing like a drunken diva on her wedding day? Your loins deliquesce in very particular deliciousness? Well, then, my dear, you have fallen victim to a love-spell, but not to mine.  The thing about my love-spells is that they only work on myself.

ok, I’m high. I don’t get high too often because one hit of marijuana is usually sufficient to make me believe that I am Hunter S. Thompson, but I found a bag of pot in my library this afternoon, and I had already had a few glasses of wine since it’s Saturday, and I was feeling aimlessly profound, and I only slept three hours last night, so after having a good cry at about three o’clock this afternoon, I thought to myself, why not get a buzz on and try to make pot-holders? It may sound random, but I have a laundry basket of funky old fabric that’s been screaming for some attention, so it really was the obvious thing to do. Especially since my job search is so patently fruitless, and I’ve gotten as far as I can get by myself on “Fur Elise,” and I’m finally caught up on all my phone calls. One of my calls was to Beverly—if a person could exist with an external spine, that is what Beverly would be to me—and she reminded me how good I am at getting things done when there is something that needs doing. My problem now is that there’s nothing... particularly... so I was sitting tearstreaked amidst yards and yards of musty old fabric when I realized that this laundry basket also held a hank of old photos, my most precious ones, really, that I thought I’d lost ages ago. I had even suspected a certain SWF-type “friend” of stealing my photo album. What a funny, sad, happy, unsettling self-recognition; or, I believe the word for that feeling is “nostalgic.” And in one shot, there was Beverly and I, fifteen or sixteen years old, me in cat-eye glasses and rhinestone necklaces, Beverly in her “soybean power” t-shirt. This was . . . 1985? We look like we just smacked the world and then sincerely apologized. We were standing there in Genetics and Physiology class completely oblivious to whatever else was happening. We may have been high. With our magic we had obviously stopped time so while everyone else in the class was staring intently at pig fetuses, we smiled like Hollywood ingénues into someone’s inexplicable point-and-shoot. Before I had ever thought of love-spells. Before I had ever committed myself to anything.

Twenty-six years later, I’ve committed myself to a few things that have apparently run their course, and I find myself about as uncommitted as a middle-aged person can be in our culture, owning nothing, responsible for nothing, bearing expectations from no one. Unfortunately, I have no idea what to do with all this freedom. The intrigue of drunkenly constructing pot-holders isn’t equal to even one spring afternoon, I’ve discovered. It’s odd to have gotten so far in life and know so little. I blame it on nineteen years of marriage. Maybe, like another Wife, I should’ve learned more about love through marriage.

In felawshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe.
Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce,
For she koude of that art the olde daunce.

Any one of my Chaucer students could tell you, paraphrased, that means, “She was very socially competent, laughing and chatting, and she happened to know remedies for the sickness known as love, for the game of love was an art to her.”  Alysoun, that wonderful wife of Bath.  I like to name her—Chaucer does, so why not?—even if critics immemorial have known her as the Wife.  The Wife.  Like the Parson, the Shipman, the Doctor, the Miller—apparently being a wife in the Middle Ages was a profession. I guess I can relate. Until a few years ago I would have openly told you that my single greatest achievement was my marriage, not that I want to talk about that right now, but I do want to talk about being a wife because that is, in part, what I am, husbanded or husbandless. Even with boyfriends who forthrightly confess that we have no long-term future together, I am a wife. I don’t know how to be casual about love.

Alysoun and I have much in common. We are both about forty years old, rosy-cheeked, and fond of traveling. We have both earned a decent living off the rag business. We like new shoes and are not shy to wear red stockings (mine are red lace).  We both prefer our own experience to authority when it comes to questions of how to be and how to live.  We each spin a good yarn (if I do say so myself), and we like fairy tales. As much as that fantastic stuff grabs us, though, our personal narratives wax longer than any fiction we spout, and we accord a high premium to sovereignty, wives though we be. Further, at this strange age—and at 40 you have to smile to realize that magazine articles about “older women” mean women a decade younger than you are—Alysoun and I both find ourselves in thrall to much, much younger men.  Her Ganykin hits her; my Nick, of course, does not.  Ganykin is a scholar entrenched in misogynist literature.  Once, casually, before I ever thought of him as a love-interest, I asked Nick a question I ask most men of my acquaintance at some point, “Are you a feminist?”  Men hate this question.  It confuses them today as much as it would’ve in the Middle Ages. Many cannot hide their resentment at being asked and quickly answer in the negative.  Others—the sensitive and overly educated, often—will register mumbled discomfort and say something like, “Well, uh, it’s uh, a complicated question, isn’t it?  I mean, uh, there are a lot of different kinds of feminists out there, so, uh...” By that point, they’ve lost me. Obviously I’m not asking if they’re man-hating, bra-burning butch dykes, of which type there are so very few, and the bra-burning thing is a complete myth—just because you don’t wear one doesn’t mean you’ve burned it, for fuck’s sake, and yet this is what springs to so many people’s minds at the utterance of “feminist.”  Elaborated, the question is, do you like women as much as you like men? Do you respect them as much? Do you think that women have as vital gifts to bring to the world as men, different though they may be?  After many years of asking this question, I finally received a reply that was unhesitatingly affirmative from a 21-year old death-ska singer with a mullet and a gigantic knife on his belt.  Nick looked me in the eye and said, “Definitely.” It was a good answer. I gave him extra credit.

So our taste in men may be one difference between me and Alysoun, and there are others. The thing that stands out most sharply to me is that

... she koude of that art the olde daunce.

Alysoun, having had five husbands, knows about love as a dance, a game, where you shimmy over to one and then moonwalk over to another. Alysoun is on her fifth husband—a professional wife. I’m a wife as much as she is, but not for quantity of husbands, just for quantity of time—half my life—with one. And in that half-life, I learned about a lot of things, but not about love as a game.  Love was real. Or maybe it was a game, but I played for higher stakes, a lifetime of commitment.

Recently at DiPoalo’s I waited on a couple celebrating their 68th wedding anniversary.  Almost seventy years of marriage.  She was gorgeous—a dove-white bob skimming killer cheekbones—and she had an appetite for laughter and martinis. He was more diminished by the years. Deaf. Unresponsive. Caved into a narrow gut unequal to even a small portion of his designer pasta. Her eyes sought me, and read me, and responded to me as a unique piece of her long experience. He wasn’t capable of that, but he was cute in a small, old, pathetic way. Still, if I were her, I would love him. Time has got to count for something, and even when it takes stuff away, it bestows, too. Maybe not in equal measure, but whatever. Or, as the kids say, whadevah.

I wonder what draws people together, what makes them love one another. Skimming the classifieds, it seems as though people are looking for someone who fits into their overall portfolio just so. “My partner must be attractive, athletic, and a good earner,” or “...sexy, physically fit, and well-employed” (not much variety in the classifieds, really). And maybe this works—just thinking up what you want and then advertising for it. Maybe after a phone conversation and a couple dinners, they actually fall in love. If I had placed an ad last October, though, I would’ve never thought to stipulate someone so much younger than I am—that just happened. I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life hanging around twenty-one year olds, and never thought of any one of them romantically. When I say never, there really isn’t a font big enough to stress how fully I mean that. Of course, I was in their company in the role of their professor, so that adds an extra layer of sobriety to my more characteristic “drunk-with-romance” personality, but that also further inclined them (some of them) to admire and court me a bit. I’ve received very sweet cards, gifts, and invitations over the years, but in my mind there was never any question of actually dating someone so young. When Nick asked me out to dinner, though, I didn’t even hesitate. It wasn’t his youth I was attracted to; it was his Nick-ness, the dissident, wry, respectful self-possession of a tender hooligan. I’d be so much happier if I’d met someone closer to my age with comparable Nick-ness because Nick, being the age he is, couldn’t possibly commit to me in any long-term way, a perfectly reasonable reality that nonetheless Chinese water-boards my future-driven, goal-oriented self. As lovers, as partners, we have no future, and the goal is to . . . enjoy it while it lasts? Yeah, I think so.

The word commitment can be so uncomfortable that most people’s faces wrench in odd ways as they say it. Some worry that commitment to one thing necessitates the ruling out of everything else. It’s limiting, restrictive, binding. It takes sovereignty away and leaves you prone to a set of rules and authority you never wished for.  I’m not just talking about commitment to an intimate relationship here, but now that I’m thinking about it, it occurs to me that I could be having a very different kind of mid-life crisis right now. Instead of being childless, single, and underemployed, I could be manacled to the inescapable demands of spouse, children, and a job, the bloom of these roses having faded a bit, leaving me with the distinct self-impression of an exhausted, puny rodent on a treadmill. I could be enduring the crisis of having too much versus the crisis of not having enough. Instead of drowning in a sea of possibility, I could be suffocating under a fuck-ton of responsibility. If all your waking hours are dedicated to making money and spending time caring in a variety of ways for children and a partner when all you really want to do is drive your car for hours and hours until you get to some beach which you’ll stroll in the moonlight quaffing a bottle of something wincingly strong and thinking about who you really are and what you really want from life, your sense of commitment might be tested. Responsibility can sound like a cartoon dirge, and meanwhile the siren song of ever-present, ever-hopeful special beauty never fully vanishes from our ears:

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of--was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung...

Robert Frost (no relation to Jack Frost, who bit our asses all this long winter...) has used the word sweet three times so far in this poem—he’s talking about something delicious, but not nourishing. We can live off perfumed air, and kisses, and the mere promise of beauty for a time, but not for a lifetime, I don’t think. Still, even when we know how unsustaining these things ultimately are, their enticements don’t just cease. Stung by a rose-petal! The rose may wither and reek and lose all its beauty, but its venom remains in your system forever, reminding you in all your quotidian hours of your own elusive, special, beautiful destiny. There’s been a lot of talk about finding your path—what’s right for you—your deepest desire—blah blah fucking blah, as my cousin Cheri says. From where I’m sitting right now, these are the kinds of questions that really reduce you to a rodent on a treadmill, running fruitlessly toward something so flickering and evanescent it probably doesn’t exist at all. I don’t mean to be discouraging here, or maybe I do, but what if—with the marriage and kids and job and bills and house and stuff—all those commitments—what if that is  the path? What if that is your deep, hidden desire, to love and care for and be with those people and do whatever it takes to maintain your life together and make them happy? The rest of Frost’s poem, “To Earthward”:

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.      

I’ve loved this poem for years, and have understood it intellectually, but not resonantly. How can joys be incomplete without things like “pain and weariness and fault”? Don’t those things undermine the very quiddity of joy, reversing it to sorrow? I know the feeling he talks about, when you’re sitting on the ground, maybe listening to music, maybe drinking wine and talking to friends, and you’re so absorbed with whatever it is that when you raise the hand you’ve been leaning on, you realize your weight has streaked it with grass-marks and cramped it terribly. It hurts, and why would you long for that feeling against your whole body? How does one go from craving sweets to needing salt? From wanting joy to appreciating pain?

I give much credit to beauty for making life worth living, but even beauty requires commitment, and once you’ve committed, beauty becomes something else entirely. It has to—how could it not? Your commitment has energy, power, magic. With it you cast a spell and everything is transformed. And eventually, there must come a moment when you are so committed to life that you accept, even long for, every single aspect of it—all of it—even death, which is never the opposite of life, but is so interwoven into the fabric of life that it is absolutely impossible to ever separate them. Any commitment made is underlyingly a commitment to life, and ultimately we cannot break with that commitment or change our minds because the path we’ve placed ourselves on, no matter how splintered and proliferated we make it, leads to the same inevitable destination—the end of life. The dance of life and the dance of death are the same. The rose stings and the sweetness of love leaves you tear-stained and hungry. You can pretend you’re not committed, but you’re fooling yourself. The only question that remains is what are you going to commit yourself to?

I’ve been very keen on house-cleaning lately, uncharacteristically. It’s something in my life I can control. This afternoon, two harsh bowls and half a box of wine have altered my attitude about that. Control—agh! Cleanliness—fuck it. My living room is a shambles of fabric bolts and bits, old photos, disintegrating letters, unraveled spools of thread, sewing machine manuals, unopened bills—I suppose I’ll have to clean it up tomorrow.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

but unlike Macbeth, on one of those tomorrows I’m going to locate something else to commit myself to. Something meaningful; something grand. Probably not pot-holders.

3 comments:

  1. such a good blog for me to read on mother's day. what i would loved to have done today is get in my car and drive and drive and drive until i was at the ocean...

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  2. ... or get drunk and high with you and make pot-holders.

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  3. my sewing machine is out and i've got half a box of wine left, chava. name the date!

    ReplyDelete