A Natural History of Love (20 page)

My one and noble heart has witnesses
In all love’s countries, that will grope awake;
And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,
The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.

Passionate love means giving up the notion of free will and ceding one’s sunlit life to the powers of darkness. As de Rougemont reminds us, it means secretly cherishing hardship, welcoming death as a possibility, and mining pain and suffering for a special lode of deeply erotic satisfaction:

To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has been to suffer and to court suffering…. Passionate love, the longing for what sears and annihilates us in its triumph—there is the secret which Europe … has always repressed.

Despite its tragic, even lugubrious, plot, in which everything goes wrong, and the lovers die in misery, the Tristan myth has been wildly successful through the ages. The ancients, the nineteenth-century Romantics, and we at the turn of the twentieth century all swoon over the beautiful melodies created by their passion. We like unhappy stories. We find it organically right that the lovers die. Why are passion and death so closely connected? Because we become most alive, most aware, on the brink of death—and we find that erotic. “The approach of death acts as a goad to sensuality,” de Rougemont writes. “In the full sense of the verb, it aggravates desire.”

Few things are as heady as an ordeal survived. The mind paints the sensory memory with lavish details, caressing each obstacle, savoring the mix of panic, hope, and dread. In crisis, emotions don’t replace one another, but exist side by side like the notes in a musical chord.
Come alive!
the brain instructs the terror-stricken body. When the calculations of defeat suddenly begin presenting themselves one by one, as hard evidence, every jot and iota matters. The color of the heaving swells, the burn of the rope running through one’s fingers—any part of it may figure in survival’s final frantic arithmetic. Questing for detail, the mind shifts to a state of heightened sensitivity in which the air becomes savory and sound is a forest. It is a kind of rapture to feel so alive, regardless of what prompted the awakening.

Even afterward, having survived, the mind remembers the ordeal almost lovingly, with obsessive delicacy, relish, and pinpoint awareness. That theme of
here’s what it felt like when I nearly died
, restaged in slow, horrific detail, has fed many works of art, from the Tristan myth to
The Tempest
to
Moby-Dick
. There is something about the sea that lends itself especially well to such accounts, maybe because the sea’s dark coma reminds us so much of the unconscious mind, a shadow world where irrationality lurks and motives are hidden.

When Tristan was campaigning, something about all those years’ worth of vivid sensory memories, left behind on a distant island, as if they were dreams he knew he had had but couldn’t quite remember, disturbed him viscerally. The loss was too great. He became obsessed all over again with his love for Iseult. Can one excavate the past? Is it possible to become reacquainted with our forgotten selves? At what point should one allow them to be castaways? Never, if what we really seek is not a person but a state of the most intense excitement, receptivity, and awareness. Even if it means death. As poet Wallace Stevens writes, “The pensive man … He sees that eagle float/For which the entire Alps are a single nest.” Without hurdles, the mind doesn’t take wing, and there can be no flights of passion. One of the best avenues to passion is adultery, whose timeless appeal shines in the ancient myth of Tristan and Iseult and other tales of forbidden love. We know the delicious bonfire that a dangerous love affair can ignite, and we long for that steep arousal. When we hear the Tristan myth, we dream the lover’s dream, crave the lover’s fire. We long to be every player in that violently thrilling hunt—the tracker, the wild animal, and the hunter—because we know it would take a drama that electrifying to drive the partridges of passion up into the open air and set the pulse running and dodging like a rabbit. Then we could use ourselves in every pore and cell, feel breathtakingly alive, be rocketed right out of our skins and hurled into a state of supernatural glory, where we feel as lusty and powerful as gods.

MARCEL PROUST AND THE EROTICS OF WAITING

To wait. To feel her ribs pressing against the walls of the chest and a hollow ache, as of someone knocking, in the vault of the stomach. The minute hand of her watch seems frozen. All of life’s processes stop; there is no birdsong or car engine. The world grows slack. Silence reigns. Yet her pulse is leaping like a frightened stag. She sits at the window, searching every movement on the street below, atomizing each face for the resemblance of her beloved. A flash of light hair sends her into ripples of delight, then disappointment, as she realizes it belongs to a stranger. A moss-green raincoat turns the corner—at last!—but no, it is only a businessman stopping by the bakery on his way home from work. Time after time, her senses signal and then betray her. By midmorning, when her lover finally arrives, she is exhausted from the sheer strain of anticipation. An old Chinese proverb warns: you should not confuse the sound of your heartbeat for the hooves of approaching horses.

A teenage girl, sitting beside a telephone, her back stiff with worry, her fingers twisting a strand of hair, nervously waits. A Victorian girl, doing embroidery or crochet of the most laborious kind—intricate eyelets and laces on napkins, pillowcases, petticoats, doilies, afghans, and nightgowns—passively waits. In theory, she is assembling items for her “hope chest,” but the real purpose is to fill the vacant hours of adolescence with busy work while she waits for the real work of love to begin. A contemporary woman hanging out in singles bars, placing romantic personals in a newspaper, joining a dating service, or going to a church dance, actively waits. Waiting for love is something we all do, and badly. The essence of waiting is that it makes us suffer. But suffering, remember, is a prerequisite for passion. Waiting for “Mr. or Ms. Right,” the “one true love,” that “special someone,” the “significant other” to enter your life has always preoccupied people and inspired works of art. In Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations
, we find the pathetic, dried-up Miss Havisham sitting among cobwebs in a decaying bridal gown, still waiting for the groom who left her standing at the altar … decades before. In a fairy tale which has appealed for generations, Sleeping Beauty waits in suspense for a hundred years until the handsome Prince arrives with an invigorating kiss. Then, at last, she can wake, breathe deeply, and start to live a meaningful life.

In the past, it was usually women who were depicted waiting for love, and as Stephen Kern points out in
The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns
, “Victorian art reveals the limits of women’s preparation for anything but love.” It is obsessed with the “iconography of waiting,” such as:

the sleeping women depicted all over Victorian art—under trees, at the edge of lakes, and on hammocks, beds, sofas, benches and grass…. Endlessly waiting women in voluptuous preparations were depicted in Roman baths or Middle Eastern marriage markets, slave auctions, and harems.

For most of history, women have spent so much time under lock and key as chattels that they were unable to leave home and search for love as men could. The fair maiden had to wait for the knight in shining armor to ride by, be wowed by her, and start courting. In that sense, they were starlets sitting at the counter of a Hollywood drugstore, hoping and praying to be discovered by a handsome mogul. Girls used to wait to see whom their family would choose for them. These days, both men and women wait for “karma,” “fate,” “destiny,” or some other temporal god to send a likely partner their way. Not for Cupid’s arrows exactly, but for time’s. They still believe in a magic force that commands the saga of one’s life.

The essence of waiting is wishing the future to be the present. For a slender moment or string of moments, time does a shadow dance, and the anticipated future is roped by the imagination and dragged into the present as if it really were the here and now. The here and now is made to last beyond its mortal limits. What can be controlled this instant, and only for this instant, is magically generalized into a sea of instants in the uncharted world of the future. The thrill of waiting comes from the pretended breaking of irrevocable boundaries. It is like being privy to life after death. Some people fear a high-speed future racing toward them, beyond human control, a mindless missile full of explosives. Others anticipate but do not fear the future, assuming it will be filled with both good and bad surprises. Both types of people wait for love, one more feverishly than the other. Most often, waiting becomes a delicious prelude to love, as two people reunite in a flurry of reassurances and kisses.

For Marcel Proust, waiting had an erotics all its own, a delectation made all the sharper if the beloved never appeared. “The Midnight Sun,” his Parisian friends called him, because his hours were reversed: he slept by day and wrote or socialized by night. Chic, witty, wealthy, cheerful, dressed like a dandy, full of gossip, obsequious in the extreme, he moved among the highest echelons of Paris society, had crushes on older matrons, and wrote wonderful long letters to his friends; but he spent most of his life under covers in the cork-lined bedroom of his sumptuous apartment. He was frail and ill (he died of asthma at fifty-three), but he was also emotionally in retreat. Almost a hermit, he lived in a night land remote as deep space. It was there, in his palatial rut, propped up against exquisite pillows, eating mashed potatoes delivered from a favorite posh restaurant, that he created his masterpiece of embellished recollection,
Remembrance of Things Past,
^*
in which he tried to remember everyone he had known, every self he had been, every thing he had seen or done in his entire life. How can one convey the ampleness of being alive—all the people and emotions, animals, skies, sensations, and thoughts, as well as the subterranean life of the mind itself? His fictional frieze sprawls for three thousand pages, whole sections of which sing with the gorgeous music of the mind and heart, and are, appropriately, unforgettable. “He was a dream analyst,” Paul West writes in a homage to Proust, “a trance-conjurer, a scandal-savorer, a girl fondler, a boy cuddler, a matron stroker, a snob maven, a dealer in smart remarks, and a prodigious theorist of love, memory and imagination.”

Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871, at the climax of the Franco-Prussian War, a time of hideous deprivation, short rations, and disease. In desperation, the citizens of Paris ate dogs, cats, and rats to survive, and cholera epidemics blighted one neighborhood after another. Unable to get the nutrition she needed during pregnancy, his mother blamed herself for the child’s frail start in life. Soon she became pregnant again, and Marcel had a brother and a rival whom he resented and with whom he squabbled nonstop. But his mother coddled and fussed over him, lavishing special attention if he seemed ill, and each night reading grown-up books to him before he went to sleep, taking care to skip over the romantic passages. In time, he began to associate books with his mother, but he also learned that being ill extracted the most attention from her. It was as if, fearing that she had produced a diseased child, Jeanne-Clémence instinctively treated him as one, and her increased attentions as nurse-devotee led Marcel to act even more infirm. Mother and son formed this pact early on, and each identified powerfully with the other, excluding everyone else from their tight symbiotic circle. Nowadays we would perhaps describe Jeanne-Clémence as an “overprotective” mother, and wonder if Marcel’s asthma had psychological origins. Freud would most likely have suggested—as he did about Leonardo da Vinci—that Marcel’s evolving homosexuality had its origins in too close an identification with his mother, so that he ended up loving boys as she had loved him. In any case, Marcel was bedridden much of his childhood, often missing school, and it was his mother who nursed him during the time his father, a doctor, spent at the office. Throughout his life, Marcel and his mother exchanged frequent letters—even when they were living in the same house—and hers often end with ornate endearments of the sort shared by lovers. These were golden days of love and discovery for young Marcel, whom his mother teasingly called “my little wolf” because he devoured her care; it was a time when the sun always stood at noon, and he monopolized the love of the only perfect creature on earth.

The adult Proust didn’t search for childhood memories to mine. They came unbidden as manna, and he referred to them as “involuntary.” That is, they weren’t drafted for novelistic service, they just happened. But once they did appear, he turned each into a small forever, a mini-universe of inexhaustible study, a carousel of sensations. In
Swann’s Way
, to use the famous example, on a cold winter day, Marcel’s mother offers him some
petites madeleines
—scalloped-shaped little cakes—and tea. He soaks a morsel of cake in a spoonful of tea and raises it to his lips. When he tastes it a shudder runs through him, a gong sounds in his memory, and he is transported to his childhood visits with his aunt, who served him
petites madeleines
and lime-blossom tea. He retastes those plump little cakes, resmells those cups of fragrant tea. A dam has opened and a river of textures, atmospheres, sights, and sounds flows in. Blessed with a photographic memory and a passion for accurate detail, he is able to paint his sensations onto the reader’s mind so powerfully that each reader feels he has slipped into the room with Proust’s aunt and her maid, and become an intimate part of the scene, all alone, as if no one else on earth had ever read or imagined it. A voluptuous animist, Proust believed that memories hid like demons or sprites inside objects. One day you taste something special—or pass a tree, or see a bow tie—and the memory leaps out at you. When it does, it unlocks the door to all the memories surrounding it, and a sensory free-for-all ensues. The past is a lost city of Inca gold—complete with fabulous temples, quixotic rulers, mazy streets, and sacrifices—that can be discovered in all its grandeur.