It is only a woman that can make a man become the parody of himself.
--French Proverb, the Rev. T.F. Thistleton-Dyer
. . . I cannot step out of my home without asking myself whether I’m only going out in the hope of seeing her, here on the street, and knowing that if I do or do not see her, I’ll be looking for her anyway, and judging and chiding myself for it. Let me tell you a little about what I know of me and this fervent furtive infatuation.
Conditioned by love songs to be the perfect American romantic id, in addition to being the paranoid monomaniac ego of me, I am attuned to poignant phrases pertaining to the street where she lives, or some synonymous heterologue, distinct as a singular wandering star in the collective romantic meme-pool of popular music, an ersatz zodiac of coupling if not graveyard of the language and dreams of modernity.
This has been powerful imagery for me since before she moved onto my street.
There ought to be a lot of love songs dealing with this theme, but I can only think of two, and another scenario, to which I add this, my words and tone, my own inept tune.
Yonder window, wherever it is, irresistibly attracts the romantic speaker’s attention, displacing the governor of the dome of the sky, the prime indicator of direction and time throughout human history. That window becomes the East, and Juliet is the sun. Wither she goest, so the speaker’s heliotropic heart and attention, perpetually dawning.
So long as set among Renaissance Verona’s poxy houses, street addresses, windows make sense. In the oral histories of Pyramis and Thisbe, in that mythic age, there may have been no relevant residential roads. Ovid wrote they whispered their love through a hole in a stone wall, planning their sylvan tryst. Before that, before Ovid’s stylus and before even walls, they talked through textiles and animal skins, and, earlier, met tentatively in the forest, rebel emissaries of enemy clans, star-crossed lovers, species traitors.
Before word, they celebrated identity of skin and bone in sweet feast and shame.
The most self-destructive thing I could do now would be to fantasize about her. Love is almost always the most self-destructive thing I can do, I madcap Adam. Love and obsessive, depressive thoughts of merit and sin, and how they do not differ; don’t they all fall from stars above?
Keep busy with other things, my friends, my bachelor compatriots, who have helped me portage my crushed vessel around the falls, or whose battered boats I have hauled, tell me without my even asking. At least, the one with the good advice does. The rest are merely men, with mere men’s mealy mores and conqueror’s counsel, simple seduction in their minds; yet, their hearts inflate and break too, just like anyone’s.
When we were young, a British folk singer, whose great creativity with love song diction indicates his immersion in the music, in the vocabulary—in the romantic confabulary—of the age, sang of some careless touch, which I still hold as memory, soft and sweet, while
I look up at her window, as I walk down her street,
But what is true is that ultimately the song is not about her, but about its author’s neurotic disappointment, and characteristic comportment in accord with the social construct of the balladeer looking for love in all the wrong places—a truism for anyone who has to talk about it. One such wrong place is in the control of another, the chattel right constructed on the presumption that love is a scarce resource, to be hoarded, which, in turn, is not true.
And by recognition of the ultimate inevitable alienating futility of such behavior.
Usually, I fought the shameful impulse, did not detour to pass her door, but fantasized about her all the more.
Else, I would camp even now in the doorway of that failed commercial lot on the corner across from her currently envied door. And stare and rock, mumble and handle my beads and sing adhans and her name until her father came out to ask me what it would take to make me leave (but he never would come out), or a marshal to serve her restraining order.
I didn’t become a stalker. I didn’t have to stalk her; we had classes together. I could count each day on waffling in the baffling wave of craving and cringing emotions that leaned—in their secure vault in the center of my heart, where I tried to keep them stowed until I could tether them in word—that bent, and strained toward her as though she were the moon, shifting my sense of personal gravity, inhibiting speech, making me all only eyes, more compelling than every oath of the TV screen, than steam screaming, nebulous and implacable as tides. Swear not by the inconstant moon.
A case probably can be made that I have followed her other times; been pulled by her, I would say, but I’m the lunatic. There were some streets in the midwest, the possibility of meetings abroad; close careful passage in Texas and the capital, at concerts and parties.
The poet, Attar, spun allegorical moths, and fire, to illustrate both mundane craving’s folly, and the purifying annihilation of the godhead; and the moth remains in the contemporary idiom another misplaced paragon of self-destructive attraction, conjoined, of course, with combustion, as, in modern parlance, of flight-to-light behavior, we say, Soandso is drawn to suchandsuch like moth to flame: ooh, fire. But, like those who curse more successful, living, lovers by invocation of that deceased archetypal couple, we err again, who call the moth exemplar of selfless desire.
Lepidopterists sing a more subtle, but equally poignant—and equally fertile in the gentle husbandry of the devoted poet—ode on the motivations of the moth: It does not navigate by desire, is not so selfless as to seek that glorious pyre that has so tired the pen of analogy. Rather, when it navigates by desire, it is not drawn to light and fire, but flies perpendicular to the wind until it strikes a scented trail to follow upwind. Poets too, lepidopterists use lovely language—first anemotaxis then chemotaxis—to describe this movement in response to the stimula of, respectively, wind and the right pheromones.
But the nocturnal ones, when they’re not lookin’ for love in the manner described above, also navigate by the light of the moon, or did before the arc-sodium age illuminated the vast swathes of darkness between candles. This, that elite guild denote menotaxis: prior to our incandescent age, moths resolutely crossed those unlit tracts by maintaining a constant angle to the infinitely distant moon. But our closer, brighter lights overthrow the moon’s refined rays, highlighting the bug in the insect’s navigational matrix. Because the usurper stimulus is not infinitely distant, but near enough to change position relative to the moth’s motion, that intrepid pilot must constantly correct his course to keep the programmed angle, resulting in the fanatic spiral we have misconstrued for millennia.
The moth has no incredible devotion; just bad data, and poor role models:
But there was no release: Like the candy commercial says, with Naked Eyes’ emphatic echo, but about a unique and terribly important Tootsie Roll, everyone I look for is her; so far no one turns out to be. Crucial linguistic particles secure a certain primacy in this hypothesis. But then, is this love or insanity, or merely her ascendant at the degree of my intuitive, delusional first-house planet, melody and sweet refrain of my blues? No one turns out to be her—not even she could possibly be—and there is no promise of nepenthe for me. Or if there ever were such sweet release, I better get a guru to prune my errant chi for me.
Conditioned by love songs to be the perfect American romantic id, in addition to being the paranoid monomaniac ego of me, I am attuned to poignant phrases pertaining to the street where she lives, or some synonymous heterologue, distinct as a singular wandering star in the collective romantic meme-pool of popular music, an ersatz zodiac of coupling if not graveyard of the language and dreams of modernity.
This has been powerful imagery for me since before she moved onto my street.
There ought to be a lot of love songs dealing with this theme, but I can only think of two, and another scenario, to which I add this, my words and tone, my own inept tune.
But soft! What light in yonder window breaks? It is the East!Not even a love song, but some higher-art embodiment, in perhaps its most perfected form, this is certainly the archetype, the articulation of romantic love that has most imbued the cultural discourse; has so imbued this discourse, that Romeus and Juliet are commonly invoked as exemplary lovers, despite their tragic non-consummation. As if they’d got hitched, bought land, and made it fruitful across the long gloss of their bliss.
Yonder window, wherever it is, irresistibly attracts the romantic speaker’s attention, displacing the governor of the dome of the sky, the prime indicator of direction and time throughout human history. That window becomes the East, and Juliet is the sun. Wither she goest, so the speaker’s heliotropic heart and attention, perpetually dawning.
So long as set among Renaissance Verona’s poxy houses, street addresses, windows make sense. In the oral histories of Pyramis and Thisbe, in that mythic age, there may have been no relevant residential roads. Ovid wrote they whispered their love through a hole in a stone wall, planning their sylvan tryst. Before that, before Ovid’s stylus and before even walls, they talked through textiles and animal skins, and, earlier, met tentatively in the forest, rebel emissaries of enemy clans, star-crossed lovers, species traitors.
Before word, they celebrated identity of skin and bone in sweet feast and shame.
The most self-destructive thing I could do now would be to fantasize about her. Love is almost always the most self-destructive thing I can do, I madcap Adam. Love and obsessive, depressive thoughts of merit and sin, and how they do not differ; don’t they all fall from stars above?
Keep busy with other things, my friends, my bachelor compatriots, who have helped me portage my crushed vessel around the falls, or whose battered boats I have hauled, tell me without my even asking. At least, the one with the good advice does. The rest are merely men, with mere men’s mealy mores and conqueror’s counsel, simple seduction in their minds; yet, their hearts inflate and break too, just like anyone’s.
When we were young, a British folk singer, whose great creativity with love song diction indicates his immersion in the music, in the vocabulary—in the romantic confabulary—of the age, sang of some careless touch, which I still hold as memory, soft and sweet, while
I look up at her window, as I walk down her street,
But I never made the first team, I just made the first team laugh;Later, as the pitiable singer found out the meaning of unrequited, while she was giving herself for free at a party to which he was never invited, he learned to hide his humble hopes. It’s funny because it’s true.
and she never came to the phone, she was always in the bath.
But what is true is that ultimately the song is not about her, but about its author’s neurotic disappointment, and characteristic comportment in accord with the social construct of the balladeer looking for love in all the wrong places—a truism for anyone who has to talk about it. One such wrong place is in the control of another, the chattel right constructed on the presumption that love is a scarce resource, to be hoarded, which, in turn, is not true.
His dizzy flight turned to an ardent wooing of the light.Back then, I did sometimes pass the street where she lived, although it was usually two blocks out of my plausible way, at times when we had no plans to meet, for no reason more than my teen mobility and fascination with her. I didn’t become a stalker at that point, but the potential has ever been there, restrained, contained, by my own cognizance of it, and this whimsical urge that compels ritual words.
And by recognition of the ultimate inevitable alienating futility of such behavior.
Usually, I fought the shameful impulse, did not detour to pass her door, but fantasized about her all the more.
Else, I would camp even now in the doorway of that failed commercial lot on the corner across from her currently envied door. And stare and rock, mumble and handle my beads and sing adhans and her name until her father came out to ask me what it would take to make me leave (but he never would come out), or a marshal to serve her restraining order.
I didn’t become a stalker. I didn’t have to stalk her; we had classes together. I could count each day on waffling in the baffling wave of craving and cringing emotions that leaned—in their secure vault in the center of my heart, where I tried to keep them stowed until I could tether them in word—that bent, and strained toward her as though she were the moon, shifting my sense of personal gravity, inhibiting speech, making me all only eyes, more compelling than every oath of the TV screen, than steam screaming, nebulous and implacable as tides. Swear not by the inconstant moon.
A case probably can be made that I have followed her other times; been pulled by her, I would say, but I’m the lunatic. There were some streets in the midwest, the possibility of meetings abroad; close careful passage in Texas and the capital, at concerts and parties.
The poet, Attar, spun allegorical moths, and fire, to illustrate both mundane craving’s folly, and the purifying annihilation of the godhead; and the moth remains in the contemporary idiom another misplaced paragon of self-destructive attraction, conjoined, of course, with combustion, as, in modern parlance, of flight-to-light behavior, we say, Soandso is drawn to suchandsuch like moth to flame: ooh, fire. But, like those who curse more successful, living, lovers by invocation of that deceased archetypal couple, we err again, who call the moth exemplar of selfless desire.
Lepidopterists sing a more subtle, but equally poignant—and equally fertile in the gentle husbandry of the devoted poet—ode on the motivations of the moth: It does not navigate by desire, is not so selfless as to seek that glorious pyre that has so tired the pen of analogy. Rather, when it navigates by desire, it is not drawn to light and fire, but flies perpendicular to the wind until it strikes a scented trail to follow upwind. Poets too, lepidopterists use lovely language—first anemotaxis then chemotaxis—to describe this movement in response to the stimula of, respectively, wind and the right pheromones.
But the nocturnal ones, when they’re not lookin’ for love in the manner described above, also navigate by the light of the moon, or did before the arc-sodium age illuminated the vast swathes of darkness between candles. This, that elite guild denote menotaxis: prior to our incandescent age, moths resolutely crossed those unlit tracts by maintaining a constant angle to the infinitely distant moon. But our closer, brighter lights overthrow the moon’s refined rays, highlighting the bug in the insect’s navigational matrix. Because the usurper stimulus is not infinitely distant, but near enough to change position relative to the moth’s motion, that intrepid pilot must constantly correct his course to keep the programmed angle, resulting in the fanatic spiral we have misconstrued for millennia.
The moth has no incredible devotion; just bad data, and poor role models:
And when the mentor saw that sudden blaze,Since hello, I love you, the first time I looked into them there eyes, all those years ago, I had thrown words, and energy at her. I had tied myself to her with bands of fantasy and desire, and always their fearful shadow. The attrition of time, the cyclic expansion and constriction of the heart, through world, through word and act and art, continued, of course. That, and other ablutions, may have severed those actual energetic bonds, between the real astral she and the real astral me over time, releasing us from the web of my mania. Or releasing her, and leaving me with the fantasy, and the lesson: You’ve got to hide your love away, hide your humble hopes, now.
The moth’s form lost within the glowing rays,
He said: “He knows, he knows the truth we seek.”
But there was no release: Like the candy commercial says, with Naked Eyes’ emphatic echo, but about a unique and terribly important Tootsie Roll, everyone I look for is her; so far no one turns out to be. Crucial linguistic particles secure a certain primacy in this hypothesis. But then, is this love or insanity, or merely her ascendant at the degree of my intuitive, delusional first-house planet, melody and sweet refrain of my blues? No one turns out to be her—not even she could possibly be—and there is no promise of nepenthe for me. Or if there ever were such sweet release, I better get a guru to prune my errant chi for me.