By Eric Le Roy
REMEMBRANCE by Rainer Rilke
And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, the unique and uncommon,
the awakening of sleeping stones —
depths that would reveal you to yourself.
In the dusk you notice the book shelves
with their volumes in brown and gold;
and you think of places where you traveled,
of paintings, and shimmering gowns
worn by women found and lost.
And suddenly you know: that was it.
You rise, and before you stands
the shape of a vanished year,
its fears and hopes and prayer.
Content 18+ Love. Of all the things – call them what you will – that have steered me through the clashing periods of turbulence and serenity in my life: passion, low impulse control, fear, insecurity, durability, inspiration, faith, lack of faith, despair, ecstasy, etc. – none have swirled through my deepest waters, flown down the ravines, or scratched their way to the mountaintops of my existence more than than this primordial chameleon: part dragon, part octopus, part piranha, part wolf, part black bird, all combined in heart and cry of a mostly inarticulate dove.
Love.
Love is not always experienced coherently. But it is somewhere within our scope or tantalizingly just beyond it at all times, with its razor-eyed twin Hatred sharing its garden and its Gardiner with a long rake, known as Indifference. Love is the medicine that one looks for while wandering the streets of life, but which many of the pharmacies of the world do not keep on their shelves. The dumpsters do, of course, for love is often thrown away. Love is the electricity in human faces we see now and then along the thoroughfares – that keeps us going on rainy days and stormy nights. Without it, life stagnates, the mind sours, the face dries up, the room turns dark, the heart hardens into stone.
Love.
OK. What have I said above and to what level of value? I know for certain that many would call it a lot of pseudo-poetic bullshit. Am I right? New Age preaching? Smarmy cringeworthy platitudes? The product of couch potato meditation? If you think that, you are probably right to an extent because I don’t always feel much conviction or understanding when I try to define ‘love’. The only thing I have more ambiguous feelings about is when I try to imagine ‘God’. I get hot flashes, you see. Hot flashes from ‘heaven’. And then nothing happens.
The need, indeed the craving. to experience love on any level of giving and receiving remains a mere fantasy for most, one that the majority eventually develop cynicism toward, if not outright hostility. For example, I have heard many glamorous movie stars, particularly women, speak of the many lovers and husbands they had back in their gravy days – with the utmost disdain and weary sarcasm. Was it that finally they just got tired of having high hopes that each time found a different way of fizzling out?
They say that ‘the devil is in the details’. I wonder if it means the same as when I tell my writing students (after absorbing the punishment inflicted by bland cliches and parasite words such as ‘nice’, ‘interesting’, ‘amazing’ and even ‘beautiful’ – It was a beautiful day!) that the Truth is in the details. Am I saying that The Devil and the Truth are one and the same? Not really because I also think that in the astutely perceived and recorded details we also find our grey uncles and angelic mothers, our starving martyrs and bloated kings. And that’s how it works in relationships.
As we get to know each other, we strip away – or they are stripped away for us – our outer layers, those which are designed to impress the world and cushion us from exposing our inner urchins, tyrants, and…strangers. This can work both ways: sometimes we grow to admire and even ‘love’ people we hardly noticed at first; other times, the glorious introduction peters out into testy familiarity, and bitter rejection. I myself have often wondered – and even asked aloud: Why do we often end up hating the very thing we set out to love?
Romantic love is one of the worst offenders, I suppose, although nothing will smash love against the rocks harder than the Betrayal of Trust, especially if that Trust had been of a longstanding nature. I think that Trust thrown away is like a once living thing now placed in a coffin, and that coffin is made out of the fabric of our souls.
As for romance, I have read that it is overrated. Is it? Maybe one of those sophisticated impulses indulged on the higher slopes of Maslowe’s Hierarchy of Needs? Or maybe, as in the lyric of that song “The Rose” made famous by Bette Midler, only for “the lucky and the strong?” In the Days of Chivalry, a big deal was made of it. I have often wondered if those Knights in Shining Armour really believed in their tender verses and courtly graces, or were they mostly just a bunch of English Yobs who somehow happened upon a new way of getting pussy?
Does my sudden burst into vulgarity shock you? If so, why? For, of all commodities, all forms of emotional currency – the dollars and cents in the stock market of our psyche – there is nothing more fiercely bartered in the sordid marketplace of life than that phony Rolex watch called ‘Love’ which the slimy huckster or illegal immigrant sells you with a grin as wide as the crack of Humpty-Dumpty’s ass. Then when you get home and realize that you have been had, you are furious, and one more little drop of your blood has been drained from your vision of human fidelity.
Maybe this is why love turns to hate. People simply feel cheated – not in the American way of demanding ‘happiness’ , which really means ‘instant gratification’ – but in a deeper sense. For many people, the search for love is the chosen pilgrimage into the dark forests or the clamorous cities that make up the stage scenery for the unfolding of life’s mumbling abstractions. Confusion is expected. Rejection tolerated (up to a point). Loneliness – part of the risk. But Nobody expects ultimate futility at the end of the quest – until they reach the end of the quest and find only futility. Then they get really pissed. They hate other people. They hate God. And mostly they hate themselves. All the 12-step programs in the world are composed of people who hate themselves.
So maybe we expect too much. Imagine the blind date your friends have arranged – some happy couple who want you to be happy too – as happy as they are or pretend to be. So they tell you that they have found someone they want you to meet. You agree and the date is set. As the weekdays count down to the Friday evening of the big event, your expectations, punctuated with increasingly vivid fantasies, begin to rise. Maybe this will be the one, the wandering pilgrim in your heart declares, even as in the next moment you say ‘Pooh Pooh.’ You want to believe, just as the people in that great poem by David Constantine “Watching for Dolphins” (quoted at the end) wanted to believe. Just as those of a religious bent who imagine they see a vision of the Virgin Mary in the clouds want to believe. Or those people who manufacture statues of Jesus that seem to weep and bleed want you to think that Christ is really oozing the red molasses just for the comfort of your soul. The ultimate need is manipulated by the ultimate in human cynicism. (Sometimes I think dogs and cats know more about love than people do.)
Anyway, it’s Friday night and you are dressed for the occasion. You keep telling yourself not to expect too much, but of course you do. Maybe this time YOU will be lucky at life.
And so they come onto the stage for your delight – and what usually happens? In some deep locker room of your heart, there is a gasp of disappointment. “Ahhhhh Shit!!!!” (Well, it’s not always like that.) The joke is that this person whom you have instantly downgraded from Princess to Scrubber probably feels the same way as you. “Ahhhhh Shit!!!”
Usually that failed first impression is the deal breaker. But suppose you go through with it, make the most of it and finally do fall in love with that person. What happened? Only a second or third choice on the escalator of life, this one becomes your reason for living. It happens. But it is more likely to happen if you didn’t expect all that much in the first place. If you had just kept an open mind. Here is a quote which I think describes this often fruitless ‘quest’”
“I’m just saying that I don’t want to go through any of this anymore. With anyone. I want to buy a cat, or lease one, or do whatever it is that lonely people do these days. Call it quits. And that’s what I don’t get, because no matter how much I tell myself it’s all useless and it’s all a waste of time and energy, there just doesn’t seem to be a way to stop myself from looking for the right person. You know? From looking at every face on every escalator that’s going up while I’m going down and wondering whether the right guy for me just went by… Why isn’t there a fuse box somewhere that I can go peer at with a flashlight until I find the fuse with ‘Heart’ written underneath it and then throw that switch and let the rest of them keep humming merrily along and just, I don’t know, opt out of the whole thing?”
― Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition
So we keep going. I personally tend to get attached to those who have stayed in my life for a while, long enough for loyalty and at least the perception of need to develop. Or should I say the necessity of finding human warmth? After all, we are social creatures, and what could be more social than sharing life, home, bed, and sofa with someone you actually like well enough to substitute the word love every now and then?
Imagine that you could compress all the great moments of your life (and imagine further that you are my age, which is 75) into a single highlight film, something like the trailer to a much hyped movie: how long would this highlight film last? A couple of hours? 15 minutes? Five minutes? If so, what of the rest of those 74 years, 11 months and 6 days? Waiting at the traffic light? Sitting on the toilet? Working or sleeping? Maybe the great moments are merely transitory epiphanies indicative of something much grander and never to be fully understood. Maybe the kind of love many people search for is indeed in the details: the passing expression on a lost lover’s face, the enigma of that smile, the music of those eyes…which, even in that person – the architect of your feeling, and behind it the whole universe of your hope and belief– you never saw again? Or – 50 years later and still together and you never see that single look again, the one that has kept it going all these decades? Did that smile, that flash of the eyes really tell the truth? Or was it like a dancing flourish of chorus girls, or background voices on the radio as you try to nod off after another eventless day? So much of life is an attempt to defeat boredom. Waiting, waiting, waiting. The bus station and the town. The insanity of long quietude. When will something happen? When will something happen?
And then that’s it. All behind you, and all those seeming possibilities long gone or still waiting at the stations where the buses never come and never go. The small towns of your life that led to the big cities. All for nothing, it sometimes seems.
But was it? As I grow old, two things are happening to me which I would identify as love. The first is my family, my aging wife (though not as old as me), my old dogs (13 and 11), and our youthful, playful cats. In the evening, after my work, I join them in the front room and, as we sit there, I study them closely. I tell myself to frame the moments, in fact to make a prayer of each precious vision, because old age – during which time one runs out of lies – says to do so. Look at this while you can, pilgrim. And love. Love while you can.
The second powerful emotion – especially now that new love is not as likely to be found – and maybe not even desired as much as it once was – is remembered love. And a lot of that was based on people and ‘stuff’ I took for granted at the time. Only now, when I understand that all of those days and people are irretrievable do I love them and treasure them as they deserved. A tragedy that they all had to leave before I could really learn to love them.
I look closely at the little things now, those which my eyes, still hungry after all these years, can observe first hand and solidly, so much that they seem palpable. I sit at the edge of the woods with my slowly perishing old dogs and I watch the flocks of the evening veer away, sometimes turning, as though to tease us, and swooping near. Then, like the smiles of chorus girls, they disappear behind the dark curtains of some backstage place I will never really know or understand. After a while, I miss my wife, and we head home, the dogs and I, and maybe just once I turn again and gaze out at the sky where the wings have been.
Watching for Dolphins
In the summer months on every crossing to Piraeus
One noticed that certain passengers soon rose
From seats in the packed saloon and with serious
Looks and no acknowledgement of a common purpose
Passed forward through the small door into the bows
To watch for dolphins. One saw them lose
Every other wish. Even the lovers
Turned their desires on the sea, and a fat man
Hung with equipment to photograph the occasion
Stared like a saint, through sad bi-focals; others,
Hopeless themselves, looked to the children for they
Would see dolphins if anyone would. Day after day
Or on their last opportunity all gazed
Undecided whether a flat calm were favourable
Or a sea the sun and the wind between them raised
To a likeness of dolphins. Were gulls a sign, that fell
Screeching from the sky or over an unremarkable place
Sat in a silent school? Every face
After its character implored the sea.
All, unaccustomed, wanted epiphany,
Praying the sky would clang and the abused Aegean
Reverberate with cymbal, gong and drum.
We could not imagine more prayer, and had they then
On the waved, on the climax of our longing come
Smiling, snub nosed, domed like satyrs, oh
We should have laughed and lifted the children up
Stranger to stranger, pointing how with a leap
They left their element, three or four times, centred
On grace, and heavily and warm re-entered,
Looping the keel. We should have felt them go
Further and further into the deep parts. But soon
We were among the great tankers, under their chains
In black water. We had not seen the dolphins
But woke, blinking. Eyes cast down
With no admission of disappointment the company
Dispersed and prepared to land in the city.
