|
I should say what I mean by love. Like all key words in my vocabulary, love puzzles me so much I can scarcely say whether I think it’s good or bad. It’s good (and bad) because passion-love, unlike esteem-love, is transformative, obsessional, impractical. It can’t be fitted in with a job, errands, homework. It pushes friendship aside and upstages family attachments. It crowds out every mild or disinterested pleasure; in fact it has little to do with pleasure of any sort except at the very beginning of its trajectory when the poor lover still imagines he might live happily ever after with the beloved.
Perhaps gay men of my generation were drawn to this peculiar, destructive kind of medieval love precisely because we had so little idea of what domestic happiness between two men would look like. Despair we understood. Desire (especially frustrated, rejected desire) we experienced every day. Regret over lost youth and compromised masculinity was something we’d imagined intensely. Butch-femme role-playing might have approximated traditional male-female interactions but we were too middle-class – too shy, I suppose – to try something so extravagant. No, marriage between two men was something as impractical as a male-male
pas de deux; there was no way to get it off the ground.
I suppose that’s why we were attracted to the arts as a career; they made a rags-to-riches scenario seem plausible. If we would become famous overnight, maybe by the same token we could become happy in love with another gritty-jawed, hairy-chested, erection-sporting member of the same sex. A beggar and thief like Jean Genet could become a world cultural figure just by writing about his suffering; that was the sort of magic we believed in. We were observers, not participants, given to meditation, not conflict. There was a certain plaintive note, dreamlike and muted, starlit and private, that was sounded by our favorite works of art – Loti’s novels of travel, Hawthorne’s
The Marble Faun, Vincent d’Indy’s Symphony on a Trench Mountain Air, Ravel’s
Mother Goose Suite, Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings, Kiyonaga’s prints of tall, pipe-smoking women, all the novels of Kawabata, Anatole France’s
The Red Lily. Years later, when I stayed for several months in Istanbul, I felt I was inhabiting this dream as I sipped tea in a pine forest or as I looked out toward Asia across the Sea of Maramara or when I visited cemeteries of the late Ottoman period and touched the veils carved in stone on the tombs of virgins who’d died young a century earlier. I suppose we were attracted to what was melancholy because even at the beginning of any of our love affairs we could already anticipate the sad ending.
-- Edmund White, My Lives
It is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
-- Agatha Christie
You say you have no faith? Love – and faith will come. You say you are sad? Love – and joy will come. You say you are alone? Love – and you will break out of your solitude. You say you are in hell? Love – and you will find yourself in heaven. Heaven is love.
-- Carlo Carretto
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. As surgeon, I had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh, I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. “Who are they,” I ask myself, “ he and this wry mouth who gaze and touch each other so generously?”
The woman speaks: “Will my mouth always be like this?”
“Yes,” I say. “It is because the nerve was cut.”
She nods, is silent. But the young man smiles.
“I like it,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”
All at once I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful of my presence, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I’m so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate hers, to show her that their kiss still works.
I remember that the gods appeared in ancient Greece as mortals, and I hold my breath and let the wonder in.
-- Dr. Richard Selzer
An honorable human relationship, that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word love, is a process of deepening the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
-- Adrienne Rich
It is ordinary to love the marvelous. It is marvelous to love the ordinary.
-- Donald Windham, Two People
|
