Donnerstag, Juli 10, 2008

Smiles of a Summer Night

-Why have I never been a young lover? Can you tell me that?

-My dear little girl… console yourself. There are only a few young lovers in the world. You could almost count them. Love has befallen them as a gift and a punishment.

-And the rest of us?

-The rest of us…

-What becomes of us?

-We invoke love, call it, beg for it, cry for it, try to mimic it… We think that we own it, we lie about it…

-But we don’t have it.

-No, my sugar pie. We are denied the love of loving. We don’t have the gift.

-Nor the punishment

-Nor the punishment.

Mittwoch, Juli 09, 2008

Embarrassing...

I'm embarrassed by how much That 70s Show continues to affect me. No, I'm afraid this isn't a joke. I suppose it means so much to me because I never fell out of love with young love, so the wounds never totally healed. This show brings up feelings that I never feel otherwise, feelings of loss. That I lost something that wasn't real turns out to be irrelevant.

Let me say first that I'm basically content with the kind of love I now enjoy with my wife and kids. And I fully understand that once young love is lost it is completely irretrievable, as irretrievable as youth itself.



But I don't like to say it is lost as naivete or innocence is lost. I don't believe young lovers are all wrong. I think they are placing a bet with horrible, horrible odds, convinced that it's a sure thing because they have a pure faith in what they share with their lover. But I don't see what's inherently impossible about young love surviving, and with it a young lover's belief in the power of love to make order and sense of life and the universe.

For me young love was a vision and a remapping of the world. It was the birth of my soul and, for all it may have been the beginning of some illusions, it was the death of many more. For a time I thought love itself - not the security of a caring relationship, though that seemed part and parcel - love itself was the most important thing in life. The only important thing. I don't believe it any more, but thinking that way certainly helped shake out a lot of bad ideas about what might be important.

But at the same time as this ideal was flashing into existence, its most sordid refutation was waiting to pounce in the form of betrayal, lies and humiliation. My tastes of young love unsullied were bitterly short. It will take me much longer to view the Eric and Donna story arc in That 70s Show than it took me to travel from the first birth of love to its first horrible insult. Perhaps it is partly the speed of it all when I watch the show in the marathon DVD format that pricks my memory so painfully, recalling in my gut the wild, head-on plunges into heartbreak.

I'm afraid there's much, much more I could write. It's a bit crazy, I think, not just embarrassing but crazy how real the show seems to me, how desperate I was, for instance, to see Eric and Donna get back together in the finale of the series. It really meant something to me and impacted my state of mind for several days. I lost track at some point uncertain of the fact that the two characters are not two people, that they have only a fictive reality. I thought it seriously important that the two "live happily ever after," when I know they do not live, cannot therefore be happy, and do not exist even fictionally in any "after."

I know becoming absorbed by fictional characters is not unusual or dangerous per se, but this was more than the usual because, as I said, it was summoning up all sorts of feelings and memories I don't regularly confront. And it's rather humbling and a bit depressing to realize that the past I'm thinking of, now a dozen years past, will always be right there under my skin. If it's this fresh and real now, it will be this fresh and real when I'm an old man. Sometimes I imagine I shed possible lives as I move forward through life and choose my path. But at times like this it seems more like I am carrying all the castings in a rucksack.