(Carson McCullers made uneven bangs cool, which I appreciate especially after my most recent haircut.)
On my trip to Bellingham, I started reading Carson McCullers. She is best known for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (which I haven't read), but in one of the many used bookstores, I found the slimmest, trimmest paperback copy of her book The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories. Now, I think "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" may be one of the best short story titles I've ever heard. And in it, McCullers says this:
"First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons--but the fact that it is a joint experience between two persons does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only the stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is the knowledge that makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself: he must create for himself a whole new inward world--a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring--this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
"Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only the strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else--but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
"It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved hates and fears the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."
Now. What do you think of this? Emily Dickinson said, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." I guess when I read this passage, I felt physically as if the top of my head were taken off. Not because it says something that I didn't already know on some deep, inarticulate, emotional level, but because McCullers was so able to order and articulate it. I think that's what a good writer does--shows the nature of our lives and impulses to us--like a big, eloquent mirror. Reading McCullers is like staring into a big, highly verbal mirror.
As the poison lilies in the swamp,
Kendall
"Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself."
ReplyDeleteMcCullers seems to believe that two lovers can never come to understand their love for one another? Come to the same mutual love?
Not that I necessarily disagree with that entirely, but I would think that given enough experience, two people (a lover+beloved couple) could come to understand each others love and even reciprocate the same feelings.
Granted love means something different from person to person. I tend to believe anything is possible though.
As far as being loved versus loving, I tend to think of both as equally fulfilling. Don't we all want acknowledgment in life? Someone to validate us? Help us validate ourselves? We tend to get selfish with this though eh? Only allowing those we deem "good enough" to love us? I don't know.
Leslie Fielder's take on The Ballad of the Sad Cafe:
"The impossibility of reciprocal love, the sadness of a world in which growing up means only learning that isolation is the lot of everyone."
Seems rather brutal. A safe bet though? Better off settling on loneliness than holding out for someone? I don't know if I could truly ever believe that.
In any case, the writing is rather poetic.
Perhaps something you could try bringing to Always Sunny? :D
PS - I wasn't actually kissing Orin's shoulder.
Conner:
ReplyDeleteHi! Who is Leslie Fielder? My thoughts on your thoughtful response:
1. It's called "the BALLAD of the SAD cafe" so it's safe to assume that the message is going to be bleak. But I, like you, believe that anything--even whole, reciprocated love--is possible. We must have hope!
2. If I showed this passage to my students, I'd encourage them to note the use of "qualifiers" because McCullers does say "most of us" and "intolerable to many." It's minor, but those qualifiers are where we have a little room to breathe and believe.
3. Most art is about love failing. Or, working for a while and then failing. Or working right now, but the artist is already worried about it failing. Usually, songs, poems and stories are not simply about happy, equal love. And art is an ongoing effort to represent life. Even in couples that reciprocate mutual love, there is often a subtle oscillation where the two take turns being the "lover" and the "beloved." A wise friend of mine said that one person always wants the other person more, but the roles switch between the two. For whatever reason, we like the sense of chasing after something (having something we desire enough to chase after it) more than we like to feel that we are being chased. It probably goes back to our very earliest evolutionary phase. Like when we were monkeys.
4. Thank you for commenting! This kind of discussion is my very favorite thing, and I don't get to do much of it now that I'm not in school. I love it, but you should be warned: it's a little like feeding the bears.
Kendall