"If our two loves be so alike
that none doe slacken, none can die"
- John Donne
In my beginning is my end. A few days ago I ran into an old friend, with whom I had fallen out badly a few years before. A girl was involved in our falling out, but so was much else. We had competed, in a manner of speaking, for her. Like we apes, we animals are supposed to do. David Attenborough will tell you that for nothing. And so, like sounding wales or clattering antlered elks, or preening, inflated birds of paradise, we competed. And lo, our competition drove her away, to somewhere where the people were less assholeish. And it drove us apart from each other. We had been inseperable, we went way back. But there were mutterings of underhand goings on, of pressure behind the scenes, of jealousy and recrimination, of deceit and dishonesty, of drink and drugs. You know, the usual. So we all went our seperate ways. Well, sort of.
He and I met again last week. It was sunny still, not like the cold spring in which we made our final break from each other. By a hilarious and ironic twist of fate, we had both just been ejected from relationships we cared intensely for, for reasons which we could understand, but not comprehend (to understand something is to see its outline, its form, to stand under it and perceive it from without, whereas to comprehend something is to assimilate it, to absorb it into yourself wholesale). His had been two years, and mine five months, and his end had been absolute whereas mine had seen flickers since the end... But nonetheless we felt ourselves bound in a kind of shared bumout. Rightly, I think. And so, after drinking all evening and standing around an unexpected bonfire in the middle of a dark plain on the edge of the old city, the dreaming city, that never wakes, after walking home, via the all night garage with its security glass and cigarettes, we sat side by side on the sofa and talked about love.
Only really about heterosexual love, as this was what our experience, and to be honest our concerns, were limited to. Although now I remember we did kiss once, during the three way times. But that was a long time ago. And to be honest it was all part of the competition. What is the male equivalent of a lipstick lesbian?
So we talked, and drank wine left open too long. And the idea was suggested arose that men, when they fall in love, tend to do so over a period, gradually, but that eventually their succumbing is absolute and irrevocable. They are hopelessly lost. When it happens, it happens for real and for good. Women, on the other hand (it was suggested) tend to fall suddenly and violently in love, and this initial depth and pulling onward of the other party gradually loosens and the love begins to drain out of them, until one day it is as if they wake up and think "What on earth am I doing with this person?". I had just read a lot of DH Lawrence - call it a parting gift from the lady - and had read about the wild fluctuations of the inner life, and how ecstasy and boredom can coexist in an instant, and the man oblivious all the while. The woman hungering for some nameless, mysterious union with the whole of existence, and the man blindly, stubbornly trying to get her to say 'Yes' to his tedious proposal.
(interestingly compare the above two patterns to the patterns often found in male and female orgasms, done properly. The man's long slow rise, then hanging on - or holding off - as long as he can, then the climax and he is, for the time at least, done for. The woman's rising faster, and maybe running through several rises and falls before she has suddenly had enough. What does this mean? What does anything mean?)
My friend asserted that in this game called love, it is the woman, always, who does the choosing. And she goes through life trying out a succession of men, but each time she determines after a certain point that she can do better, and is only passing time with this man, and she moves on. Until one day she settles. No one knows why, and the man she may be with when she decides to settle may be by no means the fittest, strongest, smartest, tenderest or the fullest of mystery. He was simply sitting in the chair when the music stopped. I cautioned him that this was a very cynical, perhaps defeatist view, and he assented. I also said I thought many men did the same thing. He reminded me that generalising can lead to valuable insights provided one does not take ones generalisations for fact. I could not fault his point.
It has sometimes been concluded that our generation(s), caught in the dying days of the (let us generalise) judaeo-christian ideal of marriage and monogamy, once guaranteed by God, but now being downrated faster than a Greek bond. This has been done to death, but nonetheless we, as we have grown up, have been forced to learn to live in this brave new world of chopping and changing, hiring and firing your life partner every few months or years, always on the search for the best deal. Compare The Market Dot Com. And yet we have done so with the shibboleth of Marriage always at our backs, on our backs, conditioning our expectations of monogamy, faithfulness, unconditionality, mutual duty, all those things that have (perhaps) slowly ebbed away from us as we try to love one another, but grow slowly, silently apart. Why, we ask, isn't love the way we had been led to expect it would be?
Of course, in the old days it was the same story, or perhaps a worse one, with a different name. People still grew apart, or came to hate one another, or chose badly, but they were trapped in loveless, contrived or sham marriages while they pursued their way through the treetops in search of other lovers, pastures always greener, the juicier forbidden fruit. And for some even this was not possible. The monument of Marriage was also a Prison. And of course somewhere (literary archaeologists vary in their assertions of when and where this occurred, like the location of Troy which may not even have existed) some asshole invented (!) Romantic Love, and set us all after it as after a hare, believing that it would bring us fulfilment, meaning, maybe even happiness. Or that it was an end in itself.
This conception of Love as a literary/social superstructure built upon a foundation of animal Lust strikes me as simplistic, but nonetheless there is an element of truth to it. For the animal is always there. We are not 'in' our bodies. We 'are' our bodies. When we reason, we are emotional. We do both and neither well when we are in and out of love. Who has ever reasoned so coldly as when in the grip of some passion and trying in spite of all the world to work something through clearly? And what kinds of conclusions do we come to in such circumstances? Why, the conclusions of passion. Myself I come up with nonsense resolutions and decisions when I am in that kind of state. Any division of the emotional or personal or bodily from the intellectual or the rational or the businesslike is a nonsense. Any division of the Self into mind, body, spirit, social being or any other is a nonsense upon metaphysical stilts. Whatever we are, we are not an IKEA kit of attributes or parts which are slotted together. We begin as a single cell, union of two cells. Beyond that initial spark, blueprint, tiny roadmap, we basically are what we eat.
And there, in our beginning, in the moment of conception, is our end, or our ends, which is to conceive afresh, whether in love or lust, or this thing we experience which is at once both and neither. Anyone foolish enough to doubt Freud's assertion that sex underlies everything would do well to be mindful about where exactly they came from. And indeed, if future reproductive technologies wreak such changes on the parent-child bond as recent contraceptive technologies have on the relationships between men and women, then we shall have an interesting world indeed. Whether we defeat death may not be half so interesting, or significant, as whether we defeat Birth. In my beginning is my end.
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