A Facebook correspondence with a new friend in India has set me thinking about the imagined nature of love, and more specifically its status as an elemental force, both primal and sublime: its lustre as the core of human experience.
To a Darwinian, none of this can be the case. I remember a biologist telling me how both worms and humans were essentially no more than digestive tubes: that the difference between us was that their bodies consisted of two layers, and ours of three.
Well, of course, people are more than tubes. But that lowly status marks the full extent of our evolutionary heritage, nonetheless. There is nothing divine about physical desire, which many of us survive (or have to survive) entirely without. No; I'm not going to start yapping about the latest irrelevance, oxytocin. But it concerns me that love is a tyranny that ends generally in disappointment. It leads us astray and almost never makes good what it promises. George Melly used to say that losing his libido was like "being unchained from a maniac." If you want to find what makes people different from worms, here is not the place to look - however much our forefathers might have glamorised it. True love in old age is doubtless a glorious thing, however rare; but more often sexual desire in an ageing body is a source of frustration and shame: if not in ourselves, then in those who judge us. Those are usually the same people who believe most avidly in the delusion of love as part of this fountain of youth, with its unspoken implication that anything about older people must be vaguely sordid.
Well, here's a poem I wrote a while ago on the subject as it afflicts that most wearisome of ages: middle age. Because the piece is a year or two old, it appears in my book DEAD PEOPLE ON HOLIDAY (ISBN 978-1-4500-3969-7)
MUD LOVE
Love should be like a hatchling butterfly:
Tearing free from worn-out skin,
Bursting with new blood its once-crushed wings, and
Ready to surpass the sky.
But middle age brings whiskery lust, for us
Or feathery, like dust - gristly with intimacies:
Mumbled in judicious teashop undertones, to a furtive
Crumpling of nylon macs, or pitched against a public
Squall of brats.
Either way: you know you ought not to be there,
Caught in the light. You ought to know better.
Shouldn’t be out, not at your age, where you can be seen and shamed.
Decrepitude is melancholy: warm, dark, moist -
Primal, I suppose; like your abode before you were even born.
What inner child survives, in me?
Ah, mine wouldn’t die.
Mine didn’t grow.
It reposes, clenched fist of a foetus that it is, gripping
My life’s misjudgements, binding them tight.
A lifetime’s chatter fills my ears.
My silence is big enough to swallow worlds.
Yet still I need to feel another’s hand.
Addled love is a clock cranked backwards.
A crab scuffling sideways
Writhing, worming pinkly on a skewer like a caterpillar:
Awaiting resurrection as a soft-boiled egg
To be absorbed into the dark belly of the earth.
One of the few consolations of age is that you lose the capacity, or the endurance, for overwhelming emotion. It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate. That the opposite of love is indifference. And after a certain point, all you can afford to do is to let things go, to write them off. I found some poems about wounded love which were incandescent with hatred. But first (and unpublished until now) is my own angle:
TO ABANDONED LOVERS
Beyond the horizon lies not mystery but indifference.
I knew you like a Christmas toy that had, without enchantment,
Been worked to bits.
I knew you like a Lost Property kiosk (where nothing was mine).
I knew you like an envelope whose letters had been entirely read -
Which had been made transparent by the rain
And whose contents, through damp, were beginning to burst slightly.
Stephen Jackson
9 January 2011
(In response to a poem, Lady of Miracles, by Nina Cassian. But there is another piece, entitled Advice to a Discarded Lover, by Fleur Adcock.)
LADY OF MIRACLES
Since you walked out on me
I’m getting lovelier by the hour.
I glow like a corpse in the dark.
No one sees how round and sharp
my eyes have grown
how my carcass looks like a glass urn,
how I hold up things in the rags of my hands,
the way I can stand though crippled by lust.
No, there’s just your cruelty circling
my head like a bright rotting halo.
Nina Cassian (Romania, born 1924)
Translated from the Romanian by Laura Schiff
ADVICE TO A DISCARDED LOVER
Think, now: if you have found a dead bird,
not only dead, not only fallen,
but full of maggots: what do you feel -
more pity or more revulsion?
Pity is for the moment of death,
and the moments after. It changes
when decay comes, with the creeping stench
and the wriggling, munching scavengers.
Returning later, though, you will see
a shape of clean bone, a few feathers,
an inoffensive symbol of what
once lived. Nothing to make you shudder.
It is clear then. But perhaps you find
the analogy I have chosen
for our dead affair rather gruesome -
too unpleasant a comparison.
It is not accidental. In you
I see maggots close to the surface.
You are eaten up by self-pity,
crawling with unlovable pathos.
If I were to touch you I should feel
against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.
Do not ask me for charity now:
go away until your bones are clean.
Fleur Adcock
IN PARIS WITH YOU
Don't talk to me of love. I've had an earful
And I get tearful when I've downed a drink or two.
I'm one of your talking wounded.
I'm a hostage. I'm maroonded.
But I'm in Paris with you.
Yes I'm angry at the way I've been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess I've been through.
I admit I'm on the rebound
And I don't care where are we bound.
I'm in Paris with you.
Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,
If we skip the Champs Elysées
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.
Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There's that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I'm in Paris with you.
Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris.
I'm in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I'm in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I'm in Paris with... all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I'm in Paris with you.
James Fenton
...Oh dear.
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