Except Thou Bless Me

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

JACOB'S LADDER ~ BY MARC CHAGALL
"And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth,
and the top of it reached to heaven:
and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it."
Genesis 28:12
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1963
by Marc Chagall, 1887 - 1985
And Jacob said to the angel,
"I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."
Genesis 32:26
Art
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.

Herman Melville, 1819 - 1891
American novelist, essayist, poet

I first became aware of Melville's mystical wrestling poem in the most interesting way: I saw it inscribed -- painted as a border -- around a prophetic looking, circular ceiling mural in the lobby of an apartment highrise in Chicago. I was in that vestibule a few times many years ago but am now not even entirely sure what building it was. How I would love to see it again! The question is, do I have the courage to approach the door-keeper and say, "Excuse me, I don't live here or know anyone who lives here, but could I please step inside and glance at your ceiling?!" A few friends have suggested that such a request might not be ill - received. Audacity -- reverence. Right? But where to start? I've actually thought of asking a realtor to help me, since agents probably have access to such buildings that are otherwise closed to the general public.

Could it be one of these?

Melville's poem and the following essay by Isak Dinesen are both inspired by the same reference from the Book of Genesis. Biblical scholar, Jonathan Kirsch says that "The same curious phenomenon of God as changeling is found throughout the Hebrew Bible: Is it God, or an angel, or merely a mortal man who wrestles with Jacob by night and is defeated by Jacob at sunrise" (53). This is about all that Kirsch has to say about Jacob's confrontation with the Angel; I was hoping he would explicate this particular story further, as he does with so many others in his fascinating book, The Harlot By the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. Perhaps he does so in one of his other books that I have not yet looked at.

Hopefully, I will find time to read more soon, for Kirsch has a way of retelling a story so that you cannot forget it, even if you want to! And I could not agree more when he says that "the King James Version is a fundamental work of Western literature . . . Some modern translators are much more forthcoming about the 'forbidden' elements of the Bible than the KJV . . . Still, the newer Bible translations that have replaced the stately old KJV have not matched its grandeur and resonance of language. The new translations are more accurate in their scholarship, more forthcoming in their exploration of history, linguistics,and theology, but something has been sacrificed in the process" (330 - 31).

Isak Dinesen applies Jacob's concept of blessing in a thoughtful and thought - provoking way. In this brief and poignant excerpt from Out of Africa, blessing is bestowed not only by gods and angels, but by the sky, the weather, the house, the good times and the bad, the friends and the memories. Dinesen insists that all of these must bless her before they go away:

"I Will Not Let Thee Go Except Thou Bless Me"
When in Africa in March the long rains begin after four months of hot, dry weather, the richness of growth and the freshness and fragrance everywhere are overwhelming.

But the farmer holds back his heart and dares not trust to the generosity of nature, he listens, dreading to hear a decrease in the roar of the failing rain. The water that the earth is now drinking in must bring the farm, with all the vegetable, animal and human life on it, through four rainless months to come.

It is a lovely sight when the roads of the farm have all been turned into streams of running water, and the farmer wades through the mud with a singing heart, out to the flowering and dripping coffee-fields. But it happens in the middle of the rainy season that in the evening the stars show themselves through the thinning clouds; then he stands outside his house and stares up, as if hanging on to the sky to milk down more rain. He cries to the sky: "Give me enough and more than enough. My heart is bared to thee now, and I will not let thee go except thou bless me. . . .

Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows around my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute, from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. . . . we were all of us merged into a unity . . . That bad time blessed us and went away.

The friends of the farm came to the house, and went away again. They were not the kind of people who stay for a long time in the same place. They were not the kind of people either who grow old, they died and never came back. But they had sat contented by the fire, and when the house, closing round them, said: "I will not let you go except you bless me," they laughed and blessed it, and it let them go. . . .
My life, I will not let you go except you bless me,
but then I will let you go." (285 - 87)

from Out of Africa
by Isak Dinesen, 1815 - 1962
Danish writer (in English), plantation owner (in Kenya)

***********************************Jacob's Battle with the Angel, 1893
by Maurice Denis, 1870 - 1843
For more on this topic,
see "The Story I Wrestle With"
by Alissa Goudswaard

And this anonymous quotation:"The outcome of this first test, then, is a sense of bitter thinking. Wounded in its first upsurge, in its very essence, the heart bleeds and appears torn for ever. And yet you live and you have to love in order to continue living; you love with apprehension, with defiance, and little by little, looking around you, you realize that life is not as sad as you had judged it to be. A steadier heart accepts the obstacles, the sorrows, the disgusts even; sure of itself, it anticipates them, fights them, and sometimes changes them into blessings. Having learned resignation, it enjoys the happy days more fully, expects them with greater ardor, prolongs them with greater care. Finally it reaches the point of telling itself . . . Allow your heart to beat, allow yourself to be loved, allow fate to take its course. There are lovely days on this earth." (emphasis added)

That bad time blessed us and went away.
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JACOB'S LADDER BY CHAGALL
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Surface Dwellers

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSMy Rooms at the Beau Rivage, 1918
by Henri Matisse, 1869 - 1954

"I have often asked myself the reason for the sadness
In a world where tears are just a lullaby . . . "
~ Carole King ~
The following poem has been in my notebook of favorites for thirty years now, since my Arkansas days, back when Bill Clinton was governor. I like the combination of grief and evolutionary biology, the mystery of salt water without and within, the existential quest for meaning -- "Not that we know what we're doing here." Yet, despite our sad lack of comprehension -- "We try to do what's right":

Living on the Surface
The dolphin
walked upon the land a little while
and crawled back to the sea
saying something thereby
about all that we live with.

Some of us
have followed him from time to time.
Most of us stay.
Not that we know what we're doing here.

We do it anyway
lugging a small part of the sea around.
It leaks out our eyes.

We swim inside ourselves
but we walk on the land.

What's wrong, we say, what's wrong?

Think how sadness soaks into
the beds we lie on.

Jesus, we've only just got here.
We try to do what's right
but what do we know?

by American poet Miller Williams (1930 - 2015)
Professor of English and Foreign Languages
and Director of the University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville

Naturalist Annie Dillard draws a similar conclusion in her essay "Teaching a Stone to Talk":

“The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift among each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried” (89, emphasis added).

When I read "The Death of the Everglades" in Looking for America by nuclear historian Richard Rhodes, I was immediately reminded of Williams' poem. Rhodes writes that "Florida with its imperceptible seaweed tilt is deceptive, a beach itself dropping slowly into the water, a ramp on which the smallest creature may generation by generation crawl out onto the land. We came from the sea by degrees teaching our flesh to wrap the sea inside it. It courses through us every day of our lives . . . We never returned. The fish left the sea and returned, most of them. . . . The shark, with his bitter blood, never left the sea. He is old and well adapted" (56). Not like us: "we've only just got here."

With characteristic philosophic whimsy, StoryPeople artist and writer Brian Andreas captures the same sentiments. Why does the sea seem so familiar? Because all of our days we carry it around inside of us, like a story we used to know:

Place by the SeaHe kept a piece of algae behind his ear to remind him of his roots. A million years ago every place was a little place by the sea, he would say & my mind would go blank & I would swim through the day without a care in the world & it all seemed so familiar that I knew I would go back someday to my own little place by the sea.
Hidden OceanShe held her grief behind her eyes like an ocean & when she leaned forward into the day it spilled onto the floor & she wiped at it quickly
with her foot & pretended no one had seen.

WhalesI remember when the whales had wings, she said. Whatever happened?
I said. It got to be too noisy with all the airplanes & other stuff, so they flew into the ocean & never came back. Some days, she added, I think about going too.

As Williams points out, the dolphin did try living on the surface for awhile before he settled on the sea, and "Some of us / have followed him from time to time." But for the most part, we struggle along, living on the surface, trying to do what's right.

I am not as familiar with this next poem, which Miller Williams wrote for Bill Clinton, as I am with "Living on the Surface," but I include it here for historical context. I know that Williams has been friends with Clinton since the early 70's when Clinton was also teaching at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Following Robert Frost, who read "The Gift Outright" for John F. Kennedy in 1961, and fellow Arkansan Maya Angelou, who recited a poem for President Clinton in 1993, Williams was the third poet to recite his work at a presidential inauguration. Elizabeth Alexander, reading at the 2009 Inauguration of Barrack Obama was the fourth.

1997 Inaugural Poem by Miller Williams:

Of History and Hope
We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands -- oh, rarely in a row --
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become --
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit -- it isn't there yet --
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

[© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company]

And one last connection:
try listening to this beautiful cover of
"Gentle on my Mind,"
sung by the daughter of Miller Williams,
country rock singer and songwriter,
Lucinda Williams.

Rooms by the Sea, 1951by Edward Hopper, 1882–1967
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The Syntax of Love

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"your homecoming will be my homecoming --
my selves go with you . . .
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning
feeling their stars have risen through your skies"
E. E. Cummings
The following four poems have come into my life over the years -- "since feeling is first" in high school, "Permanently" in college, "The Cool Web" in grad school; and most recently "Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her," when my son Ben called it to my attention a few months ago. I used to enjoy pairing up Cummings and Koch, or Koch and Graves for my students to analyze in their Comparison and Contrast essays. These poems are connected by the certainty that love cannot be diagrammed like a sentence or broken down into component parts. Sentence structure . . . word order . . . never mind!

In "since feeling is first," E. E. Cummings advises against paying too much "attention / to the syntax of things . . . for life's not a paragraph." When it comes to life and love, there isn't always a thesis statement or five points of logical development. Cummings concludes with a couple of negative metaphors: life, whatever it may resemble, is not a paragraph; death is not parenthesis -- it can neither be contained nor bracketed off from the whole:

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

E. E. Cummings, 1894 - 1962
Popular, unconventional American poet

"lady i swear by all flowers"
As in "since feeling is first," the setting for "Permanently" is also Spring -- fresh flowers, grassy lawns, carefree antics. Kenneth Koch's playful personification makes this one of my favorite poems ever. The impressionable Nouns, the busy Verbs, the dark beautiful Adjectives, and a few lonely Conjunctions ("And! But!") are outside enjoying the fine weather:

Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing -- for example,

"Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by,
I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face
until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."

Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"

Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on
the window sill has changed color recently to a light
yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which
exists nearby."

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat --
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

by Kenneth Koch, 1925 - 2002 [pronounced "coke"]
American poet, playwright, professor

"Will you please close the window, Andrew?"Still Life #30 (Museum of Modern Art)
by Tom Wesselmann, 1931 - 2004
American collage artist, painter, sculptor

[Something about this picture reminds me of Koch's poem.
I think it must be the window and the green grass, where
perhaps the Sentences and Nouns are lying silently. And
I suspect that the pot of flowers on the window sill might
be on the verge of changing color due to some kind of
factory or other, not far off there in the distance.]
In "Permanently," it seems unlikely that the enchantment of a single kiss will ever succumb to "the destruction of language," whereas for Robert Graves in "The Cool Web," such dispossession takes on the proportion of a serious threat. He describes a harsh world made palatable by a different kind of enchantment: the cool web of language. We need speech to take the edge off, to tame reality with a spell -- the magic of the ABCs!

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how the day is hot,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose;
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear;
We grow sea - green at last and coldly die
in brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self - possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

by Robert Graves, 1895 - 1985
English poet, novelist, scholar, translator, writer of antiquity

"We spell away the overhanging night"
In "Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her," Christopher Brennan writes of another web, the "mesh" of our mortality that governs our experience of love. Unlike Graves, Brennan is not convinced that "all our tale [is] told in speech." For him, knowledge is not all; questioning doesn't always make us wise. His view, that the way to understand love's secret is to gaze into another's eyes, is consistent with Cummings conclusion that "kisses are a better fate / than wisdom . . . the best gesture of my brain is less than / your eyelids' flutter."

Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her

If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.

Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.

For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?

Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why"
I love you now until I die.
For I must love because I live
And life in me is what you give.

Christopher Brennan, 1870 - 1932
Australian poet, scholar, librarian

If. Why.

And! But!

Don't cry!

These four poems are perfect for the early days of Spring. The images are so vivid: fluttering flowers and eyelashes, "the green, effective earth," the roses and the sky, hearts of flesh sweetly bleeding. Language, life and love, inextricably woven into a cool, enchanting web that can never be undone.


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Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
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That Old Blue Willow Has Me in Its Spell

A BREAKFAST ROOM
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSThe Epicure

This painting appeared first in The Seven Ages of Childhood, 1909
by American author of verse and parodies
Carolyn Wells, 1862 - 1942
& American illustrator of magazines and children's books
Jessie Willcox Smith, 1863 - 1935
(later reprinted as a Vintage Green Tiger Press Postcard)

Blue Willow
My fate might not have been the dreamer's,
No time for prose and all for froth,
If the ware had not been old blue willow
From which I supped my daily broth!

A child, I lived the quaint tradition,
I was the Chinese maid, Kong Shee,
Flitting the bridge with Chang, the lover,
From the convent house by the willow tree.

I drained my mug at every serving
To rid it of its milky sea
And bring to light a gull still sailing
Above the swaying willow tree!

A whimsy thought but one for toying,
For who has power to estimate
The end of a young poetic fancy
When nurtured from a willow plate?

by Mildred D. Shacklett

Shacklett's poem can be found in the well - loved
anthology from my formative years:
The American Album of Poetry
compiled by American radio personality
Ted Malone, 1908 - 1989


Malone's book, filled with sentimental selections and companionable commentary, nurtured my poetic fancy as did the traditional Blue Willow bread and butter plates upon which my grandmother served us many a childhood breakfast of "dippy eggs and toast soldiers." When I got married, I also grew enamored of Wedgwood's pastel rendition of the pattern called "Chinese Legend," that Gerry and I discovered on one of our trips to England in the early 90s:


At the suggestion of my friend Ann de Forest, I recently read Rebecca Solnit's extended essay, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which carries a recurring theme of "The Blue of Distance." I guess it should not have come as a surprise to find Blue Willow amongst the ubiquitous images of blueness!

I was touched by the truth and beauty of Solnit's insight into our ageless attraction to "that blue - and - white stuff whose most familiar imagery is also a small tale of tragedy, the blue willow pattern of birds, trees, water, and separated lovers, like the items of a song you could drink from, teacups that would always be a cup of sorrow" (125).

Ah, a cup of sorrow.

****************

Some Nice Books for Children & Collectors
"She was seeing what no one else in that room could see. Leaning willows and running water. Blackbirds balancing precariously on slender reeds. The river. . . . Her eyes were fixed on the ragged line of blue - green foliage that marked the river. There the willows grew, and in amongst them would be shade and running water and an endless number of delights that Janey couldn't have listed but which she could feel very plainly in her bones. It was the same feeling she always had when looking at the willow plate. Something fine was about to happen" (66 - 68).
****************

"One morning Chang wrote, 'As the willow blossom falls onto the water, so my heart flies to you. Meet me on the banks of the river, as the tide turns under the moon.' When night came, the lovers finally met under the weeping willow, hidden from the Great Pagoda by an apple tree."

****************
"It was some time later, while the last leaves were still on the willow, turning yellow from cool evenings, that there was a cloudburst in the late afternoon. The merchant was at his scrolls, writing with black ink and an empty heart, when he heard the villagers cry out on the opposite shore of the river, and he went to the window.

"His heart leapt at the sight, for just above the foot bridge that led to his daughter's pavilion, there appeared a most wondrous rainbow of every color, and while the villagers watched, and while the merchant watched, two swallows fluttered above the willow tree and kissed, their wings making the sound of wind in bamboo."


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Wednesday, March 28th

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Detail from The Epicure

Love Is Not All

AN ENCHANTED GARDEN
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

APPLE BLOSSOMS ~ JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

"WE . . . HAVE BECOME EXTRAORDINARY: WE ARE NOT SIMPLY EATING; WE ARE PAUSING IN THE MARCH TO PERFORM AN ACT TOGETHER; WE ARE IN LOVE AND THE MEAL OFFERED AND RECEIVED IS A SACRAMENT WHICH SAYS: I KNOW YOU WILL DIE; I AM SHARING FOOD WITH YOU; IT IS ALL I CAN DO, AND IT IS EVERYTHING."

~ ANDRE DUBUS ~

The Enchanted Garden *". . . a rose can only smell so achingly sweet
to those who know that someday they will die to that smell,
to it and to every other joy and sorrow." ~ Kathryn Harrison
My last post, "Love You Can't Imagine" ~ in celebration of Valentine's Day (click or scroll down) ~ drew to a close before I was able to incorporate all of the great selections that I was hoping to connect. So I have assembled today's post out of that remaindered material, including a couple of somber sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a few sobering thoughts from Anne Lamott. As my father used to say when we had inadvertently left something behind -- a garment for dry cleaning, an overdue library book, a stack of newspapers on trash day -- "Well it's alright to save some over for seed." Over for seed. We weren't even farmers, but how I grew to love my dad's rustic way of saying, "I meant to do that!"

Another little intentional error ~ as in, "I meant to do that" ~ was saving this post, scheduled for the 28th, until today, Wednesday, February 29th! Since the opportunities for celebrating Leap Day are relatively rare and complicated, it would be a shame to let the chance pass by unobserved. Many of the customs and traditions of this every - four - yearly occasion are romantic in nature, providing a most fitting coda to Valentine's Day.

You might recall that, previously, I included Kathryn Harrison's observation, from her article "Connubial Abyss", that love must necessarily acknowledge the reality of death and loss: "Marriage is made, from the start, between two people who are willing to contemplate death together -- to have and to hold, until death do them part. Such contemplation is possible only for those who understand and embrace the boundaries of a life, both temporal and existential."

In her book Grace Eventually, Anne Lamott writes of her struggle to embrace these same boundaries, to come to grips with the sad inevitability "that every person you've loved will die -- many badly, and too young . . . the unbearable truth that all the people you love most will die, maybe in painful circumstances." Thinking of her son, she is filled with anguish but also acceptance: "I knew deep down that life can be a wretched business, and no one, not even Sam, gets out alive" (59, 162, 193).

A Tale from the Decameron ** painting here & above by English Pre-Raphaelite,
John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917)
[See also: "To See A Fine Picture"]
Like Harrison and Lamott, Edna St. Vincent Millay blends romance and cynicism. She knows what love is and what it isn't. "It is not meat nor drink," but it is enough to hold death at arm's length. It is the memory of sharing with another, a memory worth more to the poet than food or peace:

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by pain and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
~ from Fatal Interview

Detail from Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, 1445 - 1510
As in Botticelli's allegory of spring, Love is often painted blind. In the following sonnet, however, it is the lover deprived of love who travels blindly. Rather than a plump little blind - folded cupid, Love is described by Millay as "the eyes of day," "charity," "a lamp," a candle with a wick. The narrator testifies that she would never be the one to put out the eyes of Love or abandon him along the roadside. She is too well aware that human endeavor is dependent upon the light of love, that even "the torn ray / Of the least kind" is better than no love at all.

The poet is the champion of love, "however brief," however distressed, ill - timed, or "ill - trimmed." Without the light of love, it is the Poet, not Love, who is rendered blind, scuffling "in utter dark" tapping the way before her . . .

When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting,
That this was love? When did I ever, I say,
With iron thumb put out the eyes of day
In this cold world where charity lies bleating
Under a thorn, and none to give him greeting,
And all that lights endeavor on its way
Is the teased lamp of loving, the torn ray
Of the least kind, the most clandestine meeting?

As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy,
Upon the name of love however brief,
For want of whose ill-trimmed, aspiring wick
More days than one I have gone forward slowly
In utter dark, scuffling the drifted leaf,
Tapping the road before me with a stick.
~ from Huntsman, What Quarry?

Cupid & Psycheby Antonio Canova, 1757 - 1822

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind."
~A Midsummer Night's Dream~
Act I, scene i
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Wednesday, March 14th {or thereabouts}

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"Love You Can't Imagine"

WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSSurreal Valentine by William Rowe

“To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
~ Emily Dickinson ~

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The following long beautiful passage has already appeared on both my book blog and my daily blog, yet it's only right that I include it again, here and now ~ on Valentine's Day! ~ since the title of this post is borrowed from Henley's short story: "Love You Can't Imagine." Even if you have read it before, it is well worth reading one more time:

"Sandra's love for Kelly is not the sort you hear about in songs on the jukebox. It's not desperate or crazy. They met three years ago and it was one year before they made love. Kelly said he wanted to get to know her first and Sandra thought that was a novel idea. When she remembers that year going by, she imagines ranging in the high country on a long hike, when it's tough-going at first and you don't know what to expect. Maybe you slip and fall when the trail crosses a creek bed, maybe the first lake is small, disappointing, but you push yourself, you glory in the little things along the way, the shooting stars and glacier lilies, the marmot whistling, and before long, just as you are simply traveling, putting one boot in front of the other, for the bliss of it, you come upon grand peaks and a string of alpine lakes so rare and peaceful that you imagine no one else has ever been there before you. It's where you belong. That's what being with Kelly is like. Easy, once you reach cruising altitude. Paradise, kind of. And ordinary. Common pleasures renew them. Razzing one another; watching a video in their bathrobes; dividing a foxglove in the fall; lying awake in one another's arms at midnight, waiting for Desiree [Sandra's teenage daughter] to come in from some breakneck double date. Love you can't imagine when you're young, when you think that love is you winning him over, a treadmill of pursuit and chicanery."

from the story "Love You Can't Imagine"
in Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories
by Patricia Henley
Twenty years have passed since my first reading of "Love You Can't Imagine," and in that time I have collected a number of poems and passages that capture for me the concept of a "love you can't imagine."

First of all, these quaint lines from Doctor Zhivago describe a simple quest for companionship and sustenance, no frills, no chicanery:

Now my ideal is the housewife
My greatest wish, a quiet life
And a big bowl of cabbage soup

by Boris Pasternak
Incredibly straightforward, yet undeniably romantic, that "big bowl of cabbage soup," no matter how homely, is the perfect metaphor for "love you can't imagine." The same metaphor appears in this next tenderly crafted poem about making soup as an act of love. Like Sandra and Kelly, this couple is renewed by the ordinary, common pleasures -- "day after day." Their love is deep, soft, and wise, despite the somewhat incongruous reference to "decay." Like William Blake's contraries of Innocence and Experience or Heaven and Hell, Baker gives us decay and wisdom; weeping and song:

The Couple
Day after day their deep love softly decays.
This makes them wise. It makes them want to sing.
Sometimes, over cups in the kitchen or stirring
a warm soup in the dark, they feel such tenderness
as to turn quietly weeping for each other's arms.
Weeping. Song. They are so much alike after all.

in After the Reunion: Poems
by David Baker
Reading Couple by Renoir
Novelist Kathryn Harrison explores in more detail the sacred connection between decay and a love that is strong enough to "contemplate death":

" . . . the point Shakespeare makes in one after another love sonnet is that a rose can only smell so achingly sweet to those who know that someday they will die to that smell, to it and to every other joy and sorrow. . . . Marriage is made, from the start, between two people who are willing to contemplate death together--to have and to hold, until death do them part. Such contemplation is possible only for those who understand and embrace the boundaries of a life, both temporal and existential."
from the article "Connubial Abyss"
by Kathryn Harrrison
Andre Dubus explores the idea of this connection even further in this long and sadly tender passage about sacraments and sustenance:

" . . . one of my favorite scenes in the movie [Bergman's The Seventh Seal] is the knight sitting on the earth with the young couple and their child, and the woman offers him a bowl of berries; he reaches out with both hands and receives the bowl from her, and eats; and the scene is invested with his awareness that his time is confused and lonely and fearful and short, but for these moments, with these people, with this gift of food, he has been given an eternal touch: eternal because, although death will destroy him, it cannot obliterate the act between him and the woman. She has given him the food. He has taken it. In the face of time, the act is completed. Death cannot touch it now, can only finally stop the hearts that were united in it.

Apple Blossoms by John Everett Millais
"Yet still I believe in love's possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. . . . I take our plates; spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

"As lovers we must have these sacraments, these actions which restore our focus, and therefore ourselves. For our lives are hurried and much too distracted . . . We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn't need words, and act which dramatizes for us what we are together. The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved. They are all parts of that loveliest of all sacraments between man and woman, that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: we are, we are, we are . . . "

from the essay "On Charon's Wharf," in Broken Vessels
by Andre Dubus
Girl Reading by Picasso
And finally, from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, the endearing image of reading in bed. What better way to end the day, after preparing and sharing a big bowl of cabbage soup:

"Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?"
[See my book blog for more Calvino]

~ HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! ~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, February 28, 2012

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