Conversation between men and women has barely begun
Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity
Playing means giving oneself temporary freedom from duty and necessity, voluntarily taking risks and being excited because one does not know the outcome; ‘pretending’ is self-conscious delight in alternative possibilities, and appreciation of the fact that no victory is final. Is it an accident that the verb to win derives from the Indo-European root wen, to desire, and the verb to lose from the root los, to set free? Can playing at winning and losing be an apprenticeship in freedom? The Spanish to win, ganar, derives from the Gothic ganari, to covet, while perder (to lose) comes from the Latin perdere, which originally meant to give completely. The courtly lover who did not want to possess his ideal, who played to lose, discovered that whereas business and war were prosaically about possession, in love it was play that mattered most. Being willing to play is one of the conditions of creativity. Love, far from being a distraction from creativity, is a branch of it.
Ibid., p. 89
Zeldin’s thoughts about love and play can easily be seen as a way of thinking about writing, too. We give ourselves completely to it, we play to lose, we lose ourselves, we use ourselves and our time in our ardour to write, we ache sometimes when some other duty prevents us from performing this primary duty to ourselves:
You write: Three and a half weeks lost from writing …
I think of the word protection
who it is we try to protect and why
‘Coast to Coast’ in Adrienne Rich, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far
And at some time in our lives, we end up writing about love, because love is as inescapable as breathing. We breathe to live, and if we are to be fully alive, we have to love. If C. S. Lewis is right when he says that the aim of creation is to increase joy, then love is the power-house, the driving force behind that increase. We experience joy when we love and when we are loved, but love involves great risk, and unreturned or only partially returned love are only two of the risks we take when we begin to love:
What makes love unusual among the emotions is the human inability to do without it … Only love is both completely indispensable to the functioning of human society and a source of the fullest satisfaction known to human beings – despite the fact that loving or being loved often produces as much pain as it does pleasure. For love is always subject to frustration and rejection, and commonly bound together with such dangerous emotions as jealousy, hate, and fear. But this fact merely emphasizes that the beloved can be valued as having inherent worth even when giving pain and not simply when giving pleasure.
Robert Brown, Analyzing Love, pp. 126–7
I think that writers write about love out of its absence. When it is there, there is fullness. When it is gone, for a little while or for good, we conjure it back in our writing. This again is the magic of writing: nothing need ever be completely lost, because we give it back to ourselves when we find the words to say it.
But we are sometimes rendered speechless by all that’s gone before. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Isabel Allende’s Paula: what else is there to say? And as well as the real stuff there’s the garbage, pulp fiction fantasies that churn out the same old formulae that we all know don’t work. These can make us despair of anything new ever happening, because they seem designed to keep their readers in outworn ways of thinking and feeling, fearful of experimentation, using fiction as a compensation for what isn’t coming into being in their own lives, rather than as a guide and liberator, suggesting new possibilities, new combinations, new opportunities.
So what I want to do in this chapter is to take you on a Cook’s tour of some of the things I’ve read about love. My choice of reading is random and at times idiosyncratic – I’ve simply followed my nose – but I’m indebted for help with thinking about the texts to writing groups at the City Lit, who generously and bravely shared their insights with me and never shied away from any question, however personal. Always remember that conversation is one of the writer’s best tools. We learn by talking and listening. New possibilities of plot, character, internal and external weather emerge from talking to friends. When Ben Elton was questioned on how he could deliver such accurate comedy about women, he answered ‘I ask them things’.
My aim here is to show that people have written about love in many different ways, that people think of love according to how they live. What’s possible at one time is taboo at another. Love changes, grows or goes around according to people’s particular conditions of existence. Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People is a study of the Ik, a people so dispossessed of their land and means of livelihood that they seemed to have no love, either between adults or between adults and children. This too, devastating as it is, is possible. But circumstances of extreme hardship and cruelty usually contain some evidence of the persistence of love. It was there in the concentration camps, where sometimes people could still make the leap of putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and so offer compassion and comfort even when they were close to death themselves. The forms of love depend on where and when we find it.
But let’s begin with an attempt at definition. What is love? Where did it come from? An account I enjoy immensely is Plato’s (but remember you will find others. Fish around for those that suit your own purposes). In his Symposium, Plato writes about Socrates (who was condemned to death by the Athenian state in 399 BC for asking too many questions) and his visit to Diotima, the wise woman of Mantineia, to find out about the nature of love. This is what she told him about the birth of love:
On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, came about the doors to beg. Now Plenty, who was the worse for nectar (there was no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep; and Poverty, considering her own straitened circumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived Love, who partly because he is a lover of the beautiful, and also because he was born on her birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and the good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen on the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal or immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father’s nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge … for wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a Lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish. Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit Love. The error in your conception of him was very natural, and as I imagine from what you say, has arisen out of a confusion of love and the beloved, which made you think that love was all beautiful, and delicate, and perfect, and blessed; but the principle of love is of another nature, and is such as I have described.
Plato, Symposium, pp. 257–9
Think what fun it might be to write your own version of this story. Imagine the scene: some princess-type is throwing a birthday party for herself. Some of the beautiful people are there, and one of the cutest is this man Paulus with fine teeth who’s made it in the city. Veuve Cliquot flows. Around midnight the princess’s scrawny cousin, Beany, slopes in. She’s given the best years of her life to social work, been made redundant, and is not in good shape. What’s more, her biological clock is doing its stuff and she’s had it with looking out for other people. She wants a little something for herself. When she takes her jacket to the bedroom she finds Paulus snoozing away on the soft, expensive coats. She bends down and begins to stroke him.
Try it. What kind of baby would they have? What would Beany do? Would she tell Paulus she was pregnant, or hoard the little love all to herself? What part would Paulus play? Would he use some of the money he’s made in futures to bankroll his son’s education (or is Loveday a daughter?) or will the child have to watch out for himself, street-urchin-wise?
All the big ideas are in this one: sexual conflict, money, transgression, the bright hope for the future. You could make anything out of it, from a fable to a novel. Think about it. Try it.
Plato’s wise woman makes it clear that love is double-sided: fierce and tender, cruel and gentle, empty and beautiful. She argues that it is the beloved who is all-beautiful, not love itself. There is a story by Raymond Carver called ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ that has four people sitting round a table drinking gin, trying to work out whether the destructive impulse, when the lover tries to harm the beloved (in this story, out of jealousy) is also part of the feeling we call love. They don’t come to any conclusion about it, they just carry on drinking the gin until it is finished, but Mel, the particularly ‘peaceful’ one among them, who has argued all the way through that love is mild and not violent, admits at the end of the story that he’d like to murder his ex-wife (with a swarm of bees! She’s allergic to bees) because ‘she’s vicious’.
In Carver’s story, Mel, a doctor, is married to Terri. Before Terri was with Mel she was with Ed:
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said ‘He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying “I love you, I love you, you bitch.” He kept on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.’ Terri looked around the table. ‘What do you do with love like that?’
When Terri left, Ed took rat poison, but it didn’t kill him. He menaced Mel when he got together with Terri and threatened to kill him. Finally, he shot himself in the mouth, but that didn’t kill him either. Mel, who is a doctor, was at the hospital when he was brought in. Mel resumes the story:
‘The man lived for three days. His head swelled up to twice the size of a normal head. I’d never seen anything like it, and I hope I never do again. Terri wanted to go in and sit with him when she found out about it. We had a fight over it. I didn’t think she should see him like that. I didn’t think she should see him, and I still don’t.’
‘Who won the fight?’ Laura said.
‘I was in the room with him when he died,’ Terri said. ‘He never came up out of it. But I sat with him. He didn’t have anyone else.’
‘He was dangerous,’ Mel said. ‘If you call that love you can have it.’
‘It was love,’ Terri said. ‘Sure it’s abnormal in most people’s eyes. But he was willing to die for it. He did die for it.’
‘I sure as hell wouldn’t call it love,’ Mel said. ‘I mean, no one knows what he did it for. I’ve seen a lot of suicides, and I couldn’t say anyone ever knew what they did it for.’
Mel put his hands behind his neck and tilted his chair back. ‘I’m not interested in that kind of love,’ he said. ‘If that’s love, you can have it.’
Raymond Carver, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’
Well, is that love? Can cruelty, destructiveness and self-destructiveness ever be described as love? And how do we classify cruelty? Sexual love involves the physical penetration of one person by another. Is that cruel? Sexual love may also involve sadistic or masochistic fantasies. Are two people still loving each other when involved in imaginary scenarios of dominance and submission? The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said that when a man and woman have a baby, the baby is evidence that the sadism of each partner has not destroyed the other, because there is a baby, who proves that their love is sound, nourishing and positive. The baby is proof that the couple have not broken each other, and that there is something healthy at the heart of their love-making. Is love always hovering between hurt and healing, holding its own pain and its own soothing, often tipping the scales down so far on the side of destruction, that no reparation is possible? Oscar Wilde said ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ (The Ballad of Reading Gaol, I, vii). Is that true, in your own experience?
I want you to imagine this going both ways now. First, something going wrong with a connection between two people. In their book Conscious Loving , Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks describe the way that holes tend to open up between people who have started to love each other:
As a result of the closeness you experience in the romance phase, unpleasant parts of your personality will begin to emerge. You learned certain problem feelings and patterns in earlier close relationships, and the closeness you are experiencing now is bringing them to the surface. This is inevitable: you have no choice. Meanwhile, the unpleasant parts of your partner are beginning to emerge. Later a choice point occurs, which will determine the destiny of the relationship.
They go on to list issues of trust, authority, self-esteem, long-repressed feelings and sexuality as areas of vulnerability when two people are attempting to make and keep a connection. Any one of these could create wonderful tension in a story. Try one that begins with two people having supper. A song of Morrissey’s is playing. The words coming through are
You’re the one for me, Fatty,
You’re the one I really, really love
Morrissey, ‘You’re the one for me, Fatty’, Your Arsenal
and one of the two people is singing along to it, looking at the other ironically, even mockingly. The other person gets up and leaves the table. What happens next? Make this a short story, only two or three pages, which invites the reader to enter into the feelings of the person whose self-esteem and trust in the other have been punctured. Show the hole opening up. Leave it ragged and still open at the end.
Now try it the other way round. Something has happened to break the calm and trust between two people. One of them decides to heal the break. In wanting to put it right, he or she thinks back to when something similar happened in the past, when they themselves were hurt and betrayed. What did they long for, to mend it, then? Could they find that gesture and use it to approach the other? Make this one happen very slowly. Take us slowly back into the lover’s memory as they search for and discover the key that might open the door. Then let the gesture of reparation occur tentatively and delicately, with the lover aware that he or she is touching a raw, wounded place, which nevertheless needs to be touched to prevent the growth of hard, resistant scar tissue.
There is a strong tradition within many cultures which holds that the sufferings of love have a refining, perfecting effect on the lover, and that the soul should embrace such suffering in order to achieve wholeness. A beautiful exploration of this theme is the story of Yusuf and Zulaykha, told in sura 12 of the Qur’an and elaborated upon by Jami, the Sufi writer and mystic. Yusuf is the Joseph of the Old Testament. He is the Lord’s best beloved, the perfect man. Zulaykha falls in love with him after seeing him in a dream, seated upon a throne in a garden. ‘One look at the man was enough to pierce Zulaykha’s heart, sending a sharp pain through her body. Yet, it was as if she enjoyed the pain, for she could not take her eyes off the man.’ By mistake, thinking she is marrying Yusuf, she marries the grand vizier of Egypt, and Yusuf, sold into slavery by his brothers, arrives in that country and is bought by Zulaykha and her husband. Zulaykha is desperate to be with Yusuf, but he repels all her advances. ‘If, in fact, you feel as you claim,’ he says to her, ‘you should know that one whose heart is given to a friend thinks no longer of herself but loses herself in the wish of the friend. Her happiness lies in doing whatever the friend desires – and my wish and desire is to be a servant to you and your husband.’
The story is quite long. Zulaykha remains possessed by her love, falling deeper and deeper into anguish. Yusuf is thrown into prison and not released until he is thirty, when he interprets a dream that is tormenting the pharaoh, and is himself made a grand vizier. Zulaykha’s husband dies, and she spends the last of her silver paying for news of Yusuf. She becomes old, bent, with silver-white hair, eyes blinded by tears, and homeless. At last she shatters the idol she has prayed to for years and prays to God for forgiveness. ‘Let my heart be healed of the wounds of regret, and let me pick a flower from Yusuf’s garden. O Pure Being Who makes a king a lowly slave and crowns a slave with the royal crown …’.
Yusuf then passes by, sees her, and asks who she is. She describes what has befallen her because of her love for him, and he asks the Lord why he didn’t take her, why he allowed her to live in such suffering. The Lord replies:
We have not taken her, for she has within her a whole world of love for him whom We love. Since her love for you is unceasing, We too love her for your sake. Who gave you the permission to seek the death of a rose in Our garden and to wish for the destruction of the friend of Our friend? Since she is filled with tenderness for you, how could you think We would take her life? Her weeping eyes bear witness to her love. Though for a lifetime We have driven her to despair, now We will make her young again for you. She has given you her own precious soul; if We now bless her, let her be to you as your soul.
Then the Lord restores Zulaykha’s beauty and gives her eyes such a ray of truth that Yusuf is lost in them. They are united in marriage, have many children and become ‘as one’. When the Lord calls Yusuf to him, Zulaykha dies too. The story ends with the words ‘Lucky the lovers who, in dying, breathe their last with the aroma of Union in their nostrils.’
You will notice, even in this compressed version, how the story is the prototype for what we think of as the great love stories. The lover is transformed through love, endures terrible suffering and becomes worthy of the beloved when her life seems to be over. The key seems to be humiliation: Zulaykha bears humiliation for the sake of her love, again and again, all her life. It is only God’s pity which brings her humiliation to an end.
It is this humiliation I want you now to explore, this willing giving of the self into the keeping of the beloved, the other, who can protect or hurt it as they desire. Theodore Zeldin’s definition of ‘to lose’, ‘which originally meant to give completely’, might help here. You will find examples of this voluntary giving all around you, from your own experience and by observing others. The amazing thing about love is that it overturns our expectations about human selfishness. I found an instance of it at my younger daughter’s school. Her teacher took me aside and said ‘You know Sean is in love with Miriam?’ (They are nine.) I nodded, trying to look au fait. ‘Well’, she continued, ‘he made a statue of her and showed it to her. I expected her to be delighted, but she was furious and she beat him. And do you know, he took the blows, almost gladly. He didn’t fight back.’ So you see, it starts young, this glad bearing of the wounds of love.
There is an astonishing poem which takes this much further in Seamus Heaney’s collection The Spirit Level. Here it is:
St Kevin and the Blackbird
And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
his cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
*
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
In this poem, Kevin bears the physical hardship because he is within love, that sphere of beauty and danger that calls forth from us more than we imagine we’re capable of giving. Here, love not only takes Kevin beyond selfish desires, but beyond the self entirely, manifestly into the ‘network of eternal life’.
Try to imagine this terrain of ‘beyond’, where tremendous hardships, physical, emotional, spiritual, can be suffered either for the sake of the beloved or for love itself. Take your reader into the endurance. Let her feel the pain your lover is feeling.
Finally, remember that love is the engine that drives all your work. Sometimes it may seem to you that you are writing out of hate or revenge or ‘I’ll show them’, but this stretching out that we do with our hands into the world outside, and this nurturing of the world in our hands, is akin to what St Kevin is doing: waiting patiently, with all the strength in our minds and bodies, to bring new life into being, to create the conditions in which it can be born, and calmly, humbly, to be the midwife who helps it into the world. Writing is nothing more and nothing less than this.