Notes on Love and Death @ AMERICAN DIGEST

February 14, 2010

Notes on Love and Death

"What is it about? Like all Greek songs, about Love and Death." -- Melina Mercouri, Phaedra

"The Politics of life are easy. It's the Poetics that are tough."

I'm still working out what I meant when I wrote that. It'll take me life plus 99 years.

The Poetics of life are much more persistent in their knocking at the door of your inner self than the Politics. Politics have their seasons, but the Poetics are our constant companions, waking and sleeping, thinking and dreaming. In a very real sense, since they run deeper than the Politics, the Poetics are the Politics' power source. But what are the Poetics about? Simply put, they are "like all Greek songs, about love and death."

I've done a dance or two with death over the years. I've found that he's not very graceful and he always wants to lead.

Once, during a long-lost summer, I was the night driver for a hearse at a mortuary. In the wee small hours of the morning, I'd drive the on-duty mortician to pick up a man or a woman's or a child's body from wherever it had become just a body. In the hot California delta night I'd drive the mortician, both of us in Blues Brothers suits, to a hospital basement, a home bedroom, a city morgue, or, one time, to a shabby skid row hotel where the leaking wicker basket holding the suicide had to be held vertically in the creaking ancient elevator for all eight slow floors.

I've been alone in the waiting room with my mother when the surgeon, still drying his hands on a towel, walked through the door and said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Van der Leun, but we just couldn't stop the bleeding."

I've stood in a room high above Central Park West where the only sound was a death rattle in an old man's throat, and told the doctor on the telephone that there was really no reason to send the emergency resuscitation crew for the twelfth time in half as many months. I sat quietly holding the old man's hand for around thirty minutes until his breathing stopped. Then I left that room, told my in-laws he was dead, and watched them mask their expressions of relief.

I've found my name carved into the stone monument at Battery Park that lists those that died at sea during the Second World War. I've found the names of two men I went to high school with carved on the Vietnam wall in Washington.

If I'd managed to keep one address book for my contemporaries since graduating from high school, it would, as they say, be beginning to fill up with dead people and that rate would increase.

I've stood on the Promenade on the Heights and seen two towers fall and reduce thousands of people to ash and dust in what seemed like less time than it has taken you to read to this period.

I have sometimes, I confess, "been half in love with easeful death," but no one living escapes that siren call. The trick there is to lash yourself to the mast of the day, pray, and somehow, through the grace of God, just sail on by.

By now, like many others of my age, I've seen death personally and professionally, retail and wholesale. There really is, when you move with it, nothing to love about the dance of death. The only response is, as Prufrock knew, to see "the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short, I was afraid."

So I know something -- not a lot, but something -- about that old Greek theme of death and it scares me about as much as it should scare, I imagine, any man. What I know increasingly little about, and what really frightens me, is the other theme of the Greek songs, love. These days it seems that it will take more than a lifetime to figure love out.

Love frightens me because, unlike death, love cannot be understood. Love can only be given, gotten, taken or dropped. Like death, it would seem that, once discovered, there's no end to it -- or, to take Hemingway's point of view, no good end to it since one way or another death will trump love -- in this world at least.

Love is where the Poetics of life collide with the Politics. It's a collision where the possibility having to call in the MedEvac helicopter and the coroner is always present; where wreckage is assured and survival never promised. Falling in love is, as a comedian noted, like buying a puppy. You are purchasing a tragedy.

No, that's not quite right. Say rather you are purchasing a hybrid; a tragicomedy or a comic tragedy, since love always has, for those of us removed from its immediate drama, elements of the ridiculous, slices of the sublime, and not a few moments of boffo laughter at the shambling human animal.

Still, it would be nice if I could understand the nature of love and my absurd role in the love dramas of my life. If the joke, in the end, is on me it would be nice to be able to say that I "get it."

Nice but not, I think, necessary. Even if I never get it, I do know one thing for certain about love, "I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Posted by Vanderleun at February 14, 2010 11:09 PM

I think sometimes that it would be nice to love and be loved one more time in my life. I'm not at all sure most of the time that I'd be up to the challenge, however. I wonder if I have enough left to give or whether I can trust enough to accept what another offers. Love is risky and I've become more and more risk adverse. But, like you, even with the hurts and/or disappointments, I wouldn't have missed the love I've known. Love is empowering, there is no high like it. Where there is love, anything seems possible.

Witnessing death, OTOH, is debilitating. It shakes our faith. It reminds us of how insignificant we really are and how silly and useless all the trappings around us are. When you witness death, especially of a loved one, you realize how unimportant the unimportant things are. While participating in love expands us, witnessing death reduces us. Love makes the world around us a beautiful place, death reminds us of how ugly it can be.

Putting it succinctly, death sucks, love is to savor.

Posted by: Sara (Pal2Pal) at August 27, 2009 1:25 AM

Gerard, whatever your future may hold in terms of one-with-one love, love has not stopped using you. Your writings and photos bring so much wisdom and pleasure to us out here. And your friends and family surely will say you have love aplenty to grace their lives.

I must politely and partly disagree with Sara, and with Cilla. Death is a waypoint, but never an end. Neither is it the negation of what a person was in life. And while death can shake our faith, often what faith needs is a little shaking and refocusing.

True, death shows us how meaningless is the "stuff" with which we are surrounded. And that is perhaps the most important service death does the living. It reminds us to put away the fixations on things, the worries about money, the negative and harmful people, and give our lives to what matters...

Death does not end all pain and is not forever, but moves us to unimaginable new kinds of pains and pleasures. Love may not end all pain, but it gives meaning to suffering. Love may not last forever, but it surely transcends death and makes itself known far in space and deep in time from where it originated. And love can be 'No Strings Attached.' Most parents and countless lovers know that.

St. Francis said that work is love, made visible. I believe that our world, the laws of physics and human nature, our strivings small and epic for what is true and right and good, the fact that we are born and must die; all are God's love made visible.

I am frightened of the evil men do, and repulsed by those who needlessly bring death to another person. But death itself does not frighten me, even though I have seen much of it. It comes from God's hand, and like all His other waypoints - coming of age, marriage, childbirth, parenting, loss and grief - I know I will not understand it until I have it done.

Death always comes to the party, and he will always want to lead. It is wisdom, not fear, that allows us to see that as a good and necessary thing; and at the proper time, to follow graciously.

Posted by: AskMom at August 27, 2009 9:47 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiJ-KMotjME

Plaisir d'Amour

Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment,
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.
J'ai tout quitté pour l'ingrate Sylvie.
Elle me quitte et prend un autre amant.
Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment,
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.
Tant que cette eau coulera doucement
Vers ce ruisseau qui borde la prairie,
Je t'aimerai, me répétait Sylvie,
L'eau coule encore, elle a changé pourtant.
Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment,
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.

The Joys of Love
The joys of love are but a moment long,
The heartache of love lasts for life.
I have left everything for ungrateful Sylvia,
But she left me and took another lover.
The joys of love are but a moment long,
The heartache of love lasts for life.
"As long as the water flows gently
To the stream that borders the meadow,
I will love you", repeated Sylvia to me.
The water still flows, yet she has changed.
The joys of love are but a moment long,
The heartache of love lasts for life.

Posted by: Jewel at February 15, 2010 10:35 AM

This reminds me of what Paul said regarding love.

1 Corinthians 13

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

And, so ...

At the end of life, three things remain: faith, hope and love. The reason love is the greatest is because it is the only thing that will extend beyond the grave. (Who needs faith after he sees God and who needs hope after he's obtained the prize?) God Himself is love and spiritual love is eternal.

If all our love is given to things carnal, we will certainly fear death and the end of all we love. God intends that we develop a love for things eternal in this life. If we accomplish that we have much to look forward at the end.

This is what my mind understands, but my spirit struggles mightily to fulfil.

Posted by: Eric at February 15, 2010 5:58 PM

Comments:

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. . . and Love is jealous as the grave.

When Love finds us, it devours us just as surely, unmasks our humanness just as completely, knows all our worst fears, and mocks us just as painfully. And yet, like Death, we are inexorably drawn to experience it.

Why more of us don't "rage against the dying of Love's light" is the greatest mystery.

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at August 27, 2009 3:54 AM

Death ends all pain. Love does not. Death is for an eternity. Love is not. Death does not come with any strings attached or expectations. . Love does.

Posted by: Cilla Mitchell at August 27, 2009 6:50 AM

A poetic follow-on to your opening paragraph:

In every government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

From Oliver Goldsmith's Traveller (1764)

Posted by: ELC at August 27, 2009 7:50 AM

I meant to include this in my comment last night and forgot. Your quote from "Phaedra" in the context of your post hit home. My first love, that love you never really get over or forget, gave me the "Phaedra" album as his first gift to me. I don't recall the why of that particular gift, but I do recall my Mother's reaction. I guess she thought it an odd gift to give to a teenage girl who up to that time spent most of her time listening to Elvis, Ricky Nelson, the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary.

Posted by: Sara (Pal2Pal) at August 27, 2009 12:49 PM

While there is still life, there is the possibility of love. First learn to know and love yourself, then you can freely love another human being.

If you cannot love yourself, then stick with loving the company of animals. Dogs and cats supply affection even to those who are so wounded that they are not able to form relationships with others.

Talent and intelligence do not equip one to love and be loved in return. Integrity does. You just have to discover how to repair it.

Posted by: David St Lawrence at August 28, 2009 3:26 AM

Au contraire, my friend - you 'get it'.

The man who does not abandon the dying - gets it.

The man who steadies another as they are bludgeoned by the horror of loss - gets it.

As for romantic love. It's enough that you've had it and long for it, that you have been and may again be lost and dazzled in another.

Melding with another soul is the ephemeral antidote to the terrible fact of our inevitable end.

What's to understand about love?

Simply that it shelters us from the fact of our essential loneliness.

What could be more desirable?

What is more worthy of stumbling about for, and rolling down hills of despair in hot pursuit?

Posted by: Cathy at February 15, 2010 9:03 AM

Gerard, I worked a couple of years as an EMT in a high-trauma, wrong side of the tracks big-city hospital. Or they may have worked me.

All I know is that until death takes me, I will love as.much as is humanly possible. Love is the most we can imperfectly do to keep death at bay, at least for a time.

You are loved by many, my friend.

Posted by: WWWebb at February 16, 2010 2:26 PM

love is like tripping out on drugs.
Under the influence you feel omnipotent and clairvoyant. Afterward... fill in the blank)

Other loves are easy, comfortable and forever.

Posted by: rjr at February 16, 2010 10:28 PM