Love in the Here and Now

Every year around Christmas, I like to get out James Joyce's story The Dead, and re-read it. The tale is set on a snowy night in Ireland, and much of it takes place during a Christmas dinner/dance, which of course is why it feels so appropriate for this time of year, and for a holiday tradition. So it's just a custom of mine. One I especially relish. It's such a beautiful, powerful story. About married love. About first love. About what true love really is. Not, of course that the story has any final answers for us! Only that it explores the questions in a most beautiful and compelling way. 

I hope that it's apparent in these posts on 9-volt nomad, that I'm a big fan of married love. I'm a fan of of love in general, and generally find there's not enough of it around, but I also think that married love needs more of a booster club these days than most people recognize. I know that may sound silly and bourgeois to some, and for some it may even seem distasteful. We're so much in the habit of wanting to believe that any lifestyle choice is equal to every other, that we're afraid to cheer for any given script. And especially any supposedly boring, traditional script. 

I really do think that more people ought to get married than seem to want to get married these days. Partly because again, I think love in general ought to be more highly rated than it is, but also because I think that getting married is just a good way to get yourself to grow up and be adult; to learn that you're not the center of the universe, and that sacrifice is a part of life, and that it really is a meaningful act--to regularly put another human being's interests before your own. And to work out compromises. And to listen to advice. And to have someone who knows you deeply, always available for counsel. And to be able to serve your partner as counsel too. 

Of course I'm not claiming that there aren't other ways of learning how to become an adult. But getting married and staying married is a time-tested and very effective path. Surely it's one of the most effective ways devised. Plus, at least if you're willing to work at it, being married is a good way to stay happy. You have company. You have a means of facing up to hardship. It's my conviction in fact that, as circumstances in general over the next couple of decades become more and more difficult (as they will), the economic and psychological advantages to marriage will become more and more obvious and compelling. It's paradoxical that so many these days say they want a career first, and then they'll think about love. But why not the other way around? Especially if two are usually more effective at providing economic security than one? And again, especially when the future looks more and more difficult?

Of course there are downsides to being married. One of the hardest parts has to be this: facing up to the certainty of death, and more specifically, facing up to the fact that--since the two of you are unlikely to die at the same time--one of you is going to have to do without the other for a time. Maybe for years and years. This is a really hard thing to think about. In fact it's so hard to think about that I find very little actually written about it. Very few poems or songs for instance that contemplate it directly, I mean ahead of the fact. Yes there are umpteen laments. But what about proleptic laments? Laments ahead of the fact? 

All of which is to say, here's one such poem, on that theme, which I intend to use in my next play, and which I think is appropriate to this blog, because part of what 9-volt is about is the art of doing without, and the need to contemplate doing without, and finding that state of being in which transcendence is possible.

I'm sorry the music for the song is not available yet. The tune is set. It's simply not recorded. But when the soundtrack does become available (and it will be lovely I promise) I'll certainly let you all know. Then you'll be able to read the words married to their tune. 

  
Here, Now

(A song from the play "Myles to Go")

I had a dream, what can it mean?
You were transformed into an angel:
Wings bright and strong, but somehow wrong;
They're far too heavy for your shoulders.
Glimpsed from below, a shooting star
Tumbles through the heavens.
Two feathers fall, and then that's all;
Waking up, I reach for you.

Some say that death, one final breath,
Could disestablish our communion.
It's just not true, a clearer view
Says grief's an art that takes its time.
Would Keats have dared to write an ode
Requiring such revision?
All we've arranged is sure to change,
Whether death takes me or you.

But who goes first, and who's immersed
In melancholy of division,
Oh let that be love's mystery
That's to be answered in its time!
No earnest heart would make its love
Contingent on the future;
Love gives its all, come flight or fall,
Hazarding the here and now. 

HB

Until Tuesday the 31st!