It is the place where your most personal, timid being emerges, blossoms, and is recognized by the one other human who sees in you what you long to see in yourself.
It makes you vulnerable. It scares the fuck out of you.
And even with all these tender feelings to protect, it makes you want to proclaim to anyone you can buttonhole that, at long last, after being widowed at 19 plus all the (decades of) striving, suffering/expiating (cf. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying) not to mention personals ads gone astray, disastrous blind dates with MDSOs (who knew?), ill-conceived love affairs with men half your age, and chance meetings with chess champion-terrorists on the Costa Del Sol, all of which seemed innocuous enough at the time but some of which nearly got you killed, you have figured it out. You want to tell the world that Love--in all its long-touted fullness and absolution--is real because it's happened to you. You want to holler about it as if you were some 16th century town crier: "TEN O'CLOCK! and all's especially well because guess what, all ye dames and damsels, gentlemen and yeomen, LOVE IS REAL!"
Maybe, in some form, the God-is-Love thing is true. Because when you look into that man's or that woman's eyes, really deeply into them the way Rhett and Scarlett are doing here, you recognize every truth you know, all the force life has, all the positive meaning to which experience ever can lead. You understand what that person means, and you understand what you mean.
But forget trying to show this meaning to anyone else! Nobody but you is ever going to see it. Forget it! To everyone else on the planet, your guy is just another guy, your girl is just another girl.
(Doc Rock Shakespeare Warning: Run away now if that name strikes fear in your heart!)
Far as I know, nobody communicates this incommunicable feeling better than Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra. Play starts out with legendarily gorgeous Cleopatra rhapsodizing on Antony's charms, on how he is just the best, the most, the wildest, the most powerful, the biggest . . . etc. He is Ecstasy on the hoof, this guy. We believe her because she is the Queen of Egypt, she is a fox, and we know she's going to kill herself by attaching a snake to her breast for love of this . . . uh, man.
She goes on proclaiming her lover's attributes for at least an act and a half, maybe two. (I am not referencing my Riverside, here.) By the time Mark Antony actually shows up, we are all in a lather several times over, to meet this paragon of masculine perfection.
"SO," the professor asks us, "when Mark Antony shows up, what do you think of him?"
Silence in the seminar room.
The echoing kind of silence. Goes on for a while. Unusual among this many (15) gradualstudents. We know something's wrong, but we can't admit it, and we don't know what to call it, so we just sit mum.
Finally, some fearless, forthright individual says, "Antony's . . . aw, jeez . . . y'know? He shows up, he says some stuff, but shit, man, he's no big deal. He's like, um, the guy from the gas company who comes around once a month to check the meters. He's totally unimpressive. His lines are mediocre. Nothing happens. Who cares?"
"Cleopatra," the professor answers.
So we all have to sit with this and think about it. And what we arrive at is that she is the Queen of Egypt and we aren't. She worships this man, and we don't. We arrive at the conclusion that she knows something about love that we don't, but boy damn do we wish we did.
And then when we find it, we can't share it--the Good News--with anyone other than the person who called it out of us. Which is, of course, as it should be
Ain't it the truth? What you said. All of it.
Posted by: Karen | January 23, 2005 at 06:28 AM