The Search For Real Love - Confounded By The Hopelessly Fabulist Romanticism Of A Medieval Dreamer

The poet Petrarch (1304-1374) is credited with the creation or at least discovery of romantic love.  Petrarch was an Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Until he was smitten by ‘Laura’, the woman of his 366 sonnets, he contented himself with academic treatises on political philosophy, moral theory, and social order. After spotting her in the Church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon, however, he was never the same.

There is little definite information in Petrarch's work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing. Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact. According to his "Secretum", she refused him for the very proper reason that she was already married to another man. 

Petrarch wrote: "In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death… extinguished the cooling flames.

 

Petrarch was consumed by love for ‘Laura’ but guilt and the ponderous weight of his former priesthood and the mores of the times – not to mention that ‘Laura’ was married – prevented consummation. He wanted her and at the same time was repulsed by his immoral desires. “He channeled his feelings into love poems… and wrote prose that showed his contempt for men who pursue women”.

Petrarch’s sonnets all idealize ‘Laura’.  In his verse she became a perfect but untouchable woman – a saint, the perfection of female beauty, and a goddess.  In the following sonnet, Petrarch expresses his ineffable, unattainable love for her and the permanent grief caused by her death.  His was idealistic, unrequited love; and his poems expressed the persistent romantic notion of compulsive, but often unattainable desire.

Henrietta Parsons knew all about Petrarch, his love poems, his late adolescence, and his codifying the love ballads of 11th century troubadours into a genre. Petrarch didn't exactly invent romantic love - the conditions in the early Renaissance, knights, fair maidens, courtship, and the emergence of the sybaritic court, were right; and the songs of the iterant musicians limning the beauty of sexual intimacy were just the thing to set the poet dreaming. 

Romantic love needed a beginning.  Before the idea emerged, marriages were arranged, brides and grooms were chosen for their reproductive and economic potential, for their social status, and their well-being.  Marriage was a contract to assure viability in hard times and not something vulnerable to the vicissitudes of subjective choice.

Kings were no different.  Henry VIII was not interested in love and romance but a woman who would give him a male heir. Other kings, courtiers, and varied royalty were no different.  Marriage was an official affair with invariable parameters set long ago.  Emperors, sultans, shahs, and shoguns were governed by the same rules of practicality.  No one, high- or low-born could afford the vagaries and uncertainties of romantic love. 

Be that as it may, Henrietta was lonely, unloved, and forgotten.  Well past the days of her youth and entering an age of dubious sexual interest and decreasing fertility, she despaired.  She had dressed too often in the sequins, ribbons, and frills of a princess to dismiss the idea of a Prince Charming.  She had read too much romantic fiction to see love in the most unexpected places in the most unsuspecting circumstances.

The battlefield, however, was littered with bad marriages and contentious divorces.  Over half the marriages in the United States ended in dissolution - and those were first marriages.  The rate for successive ones was almost as high. Women and men who thought they had learned from the first debacle had not.  The configuration of sexual desire - to whom we are attracted - is set early on, some calculus of father-love, mother-jealousy, natural sensitivity, reserve, or hostility.  So it is not surprising that women fall into the same disastrous marriage pit again and again. 

Yet Henrietta, despite her romantic fantasies, was a very disciplined and determined woman. The had been imbued with the concept of romantic love - that is, that it does exist far beyond the poetic dreams of a Renaissance journeyman.  There is something almost spiritual in the union of two perfectly matched people.  

D.H. Lawrence came close to expressing the idea of this iconic union, but stopped at the physical.  Coming together, mutual orgasm between one who dominated and one who willingly submitted opened psychic doors and allowed the release of untapped energies and passions. 

Love was absent in this calculus as it was in Tantrism, the precursor of Lawrentian spiritual epiphany; or the philosophy of ying and yang and the necessary complementarity of the sexes.  Henrietta wanted both Tantric expression and Petrarchan romance to complete her puzzle. 

Whistlin' Dixie, of course.  Such perfection occurred only on drugstore shelves - magazines and dime-store novels filled with promise, romance, and emotional completion. Everywhere else in real life, such intimacy, romantic desire, and blissful fulfillment was absent. 

The Andersons, the Parsons' next door neighbor fought like banshees.  They 'flayed each other to the marrow' as George says to Martha in Edward Albee's play about drunken sexual brutality, the insistent, cruelly present desire to resolve disputes and return to camaraderie if not love. Was this a condition of love, Henrietta wondered? Having to go through a gantlet of abuse, bloody antipathy, and hurtful spite?

William Eakins, the Parsons' neighbor on the other side of the house, was a serial adulterer, and when the Eakins' bedroom windows were open in the summer, Henrietta could hear Martha sobbing inconsolably, waiting for her aberrant husband to return. 

Irma Carlson committed suicide by asphyxiation in a closed garage because her husband tortured her.  He never resorted to physical violence, but he disassembled the poor woman emotionally piece by piece for years until the torment was intolerable. 

Heidi Ballard loved her husband dearly, but he was a vaporous, infinitely passionless man who married because it was what one did, a kind of social anchor to a regular, predictable life.  Why she fell for such an empty vessel was another story altogether, but the misery of unrequited love was first on the list. 

There is always romance at the beginning, something befuddled by sexual desire, notions of beauty, innocence, and charm; but after a few years of sharing the same bed, the same dinner table and the same television channels, the blush came quickly off the bloom of the rose. 

So, what's a woman like Henrietta to do?  A woman with not inconsiderable intelligence, sensibility, and emotion; a woman who desperately wants a life companion but is discouraged by the detritus around her; but a woman who still believes that some modicum of happiness can be found with another. 

Women will try anything to increase their chances.  What is the gender spectrum but an opening of many doors.  The combinations and permutations are limitless, and a woman should be able to find a partner among them.  Yet the whole idea of some randomly ascribed sexuality, some invented, self-serving psycho-social category defeated the whole purpose of romantic love. 

Lesbianism offered a convenient outlet; but in all recorded history, in all ancient and modern fiction, and in all potent sexual affairs, it was only the fireworks between men and women which lit the sky.  That was what Tantrism, Lawrence, and ying and yang were all about. Something preternatural and predetermined. 

It would be a fitting ending to the story of Henrietta Parsons if Mr. Right walked into her life, they fell in love, married, and lived happily ever after; but of course that only happens in romantic fiction.  These days you've got work at marriage to make a go of it, such are the competing demands of profession, individuality, and married life; and work does not a Garden of Eden make.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps the only writer who really understood the Henrietta Parsons of the world.  Jay Gatsby was a dreamer, perhaps the only man that Nick Carroway, the narrator and Gatsby's friend knew who had an undiminished idealism and romantic hopefulness. 

The Gatsby story ends tragically but the lesson is not lost.  There is hope for the romantically driven, motivated by something more profound than anything Petrarch could have imagined, something that one should hold on to and never give up. 

Perhaps Henrietta was a Jay Gatsby, at least one hopes so, although at the same time wishing that her end is more satisfying and satisfactory.  It probably will be, because for all her heady romanticism and almost impossible idealism, she was imperturbably wise. 

Genealogy, Who Cares? - Let Sleeping Dogs Lie And The Sorry, Pedestrian Truth Of The Past

Henry Louis Gates, academic clone of the Reverend Al Sharpton, black ambulance-chaser on the scene wherever blackness needs publicity, has made fame and fortune by digging into the genetic pasts of famous black people and revealing them on national television.   

The latest was when he confronted Angela Davis, Sixties radical, black supremacist, and Communist with the fact that one of her ancestors came over on the Mayflower. 

'It can't be', said Davis. 'It simply can't be'.  Heresy, apostasy, fake news, a scurrilous attempt to distract, demean, and disparage her blackness and her untiring labors for the black man. 

But of course it was true.  First of all thirty million people are descendants of the Mayflower colonists, not surprising as genetic inheritance becomes geometric. The 102 passengers on the ship quickly became 200 and then 2000 and before long in the tens of thousands.  

Death from infection, disease, and Indian scalping did nothing to stop the demographic tsunami. That number even beggars that of Genghis Khan who conquered the whole world and whose descendants are estimated to be only sixteen million.  Human beings are not exactly fruit flies, a generation of which is ten days, but our reproductive potential is still impressive. 

Second, Angela Davis is not as black as the ace of spades and even a casual look in the mirror would tell her that she had more than a drop of white blood.  Miscegenation was common in the days of slavery, most plantation owners had their way with chattel and it wasn't long before the pure Mandinka stock of the first African slaves had been mixed with white blood. 

Third, the preference in the black community for lighter-skinned mates is well-known - the more white blood the better. 

Yet Angela, playing for the camera, looked nonplussed and shocked.  Gates, delighted in his gotcha moment, smiled.  'There, there, my dear', he said. 'We're all in the same boat'. 

The Gates show is serial soap opera, with each black participant on tenterhooks to find out how black he really is, only to find out that he has been mongrelized long ago.  It was not enough to want to be white, to bed white, to envy white.  Once the onion had been peeled back and white was found at the core, whiteness was complete. 

Ordinary black people have not followed suit.  For two hundred years in America they were segregated and whether pure black, quadroon, octoroon, or just a bit off-white, they were mishandled, misused, and mistreated by the white man.  The last thing they needed to know was their white ancestry - who had done what with their mommas in the woodshed - and even before that which African tribe they had come from. 

Those tribes were complicit in the slave trade.  It was Mandinka slavers who sold their stable to the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the English.  Where was the value in confirming that?

White people, however, are spitting into cups at record rates and sending it off to be genetically tested.  The curiosity of 'who am I?' has become epidemic. 

The reasons for researching ancestry are many.  Take Bob Muzelle, a civil rights activist who made his reputation on the Freedom Rides to Selma and Montgomery and who marched across the Pettus bridge with Martin and Ralph.  Bob had so identified with black people his whole life - rode with them, ate with them, partied with them, and went to their weddings and funerals, that he considered himself one of them.  

Perhaps given this instinctive, almost preternatural preference for black folk, he thought he might have black blood in his veins.  He might be a descendant of Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson's black mistress, or any one of the offspring of Southern grandees and their slaves.  His family was originally from Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and the opportunities for mixed race affairs were many.

If he found out that he did indeed have at least some black blood, his reputation in the black community and in the white progressive one in which he was a notable member, would be further burnished. 

Of course Bob, so one-sided and deliberate was he in his search for black membership, that he never considered the alternative - that he was descended from slave owners, a far more likely possibility. He waited patiently for the DNA results, confident that what he had long assumed would be confirmed. 

Things don't always turn out the way we hope, and when Bob's genetic results came in, they confirmed the worst of all scenarios.  On both sides of the family he was descended not just from slaveowners, but the largest, most vilified, cruel, and most dastardly of any in the South.

DNA testing can only show general associations, but with only a very little research into public and family records, ancestry can be made far more precise.  There was no doubt that he was white and in a direct genetic line to two prominent Southern plantation-owning families.

Not only was he white, but pure, unalloyed white. The properties owned by the families were the largest in the county, and thanks to their thousands of slaves, they moved comfortably to the Mississippi Delta to grow cotton once the tobacco lands of the Virginias had been depleted. There they ruled the roost just like they had in Virginia. 

To tell or not to tell was Bob's dilemma.  Revealing his tainted, slave-owning ancestry would be tantamount to expulsion from the black community; but concealing it would be dishonest and a secret hard to keep. 

On the other hand, being a close relative of one of the most notorious slavers in the South and freely admitting it and stating his renewed commitment to the black cause might be just the thing to give him a particular and unique cachet. 

'Let it be, Bob', said his wife, Cara, a far more down-to-earth, practical woman who to be honest had only put up with her husband's racial fol-de-rol for decades and at best hoped that his grandee past might put an end to his black wannabe-ism.  She, also descended from well-to-do Southern families, had always assumed both family slave holding and sexual liaisons and took it all as a matter of course.  History was what it is, unchangeable, irremediable, and inalienable.  Besides, who cares?

Bob however went into a funk, a dark depression, a miserable period in which he questioned his very worth.  What had all the stinking bus rides, the nasty hotel rooms, and the gross Southern food meant?

Betty Putnam had hoped to find a direct ancestral link to the Duke of Northumberland, English royalty not too far removed from the throne of England.  She had watched every episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Downton Abbey, rooted for the aristocrats, her likely ancestors, masters of the realm, at the top of the social pyramid, and la creme de la creme of Anglo-American society. 

The Putnams already were known for their storied history - early American colonists in the Massachusetts Bay colony, associates of John Davenport who in search of a more disciplined Puritanism founded New Haven, and who were later successful shipbuilders and traders; but a touch of royalty would be the jewel in the crown. 

However things in Merry Old England were just as tricky as they were in America, and there were far more servants, peasants, and grooms than the intermarried royals, so it shouldn't have been a surprise when she found no direct link to the Duke of Northumberland or any royalty.  

She was unmistakably and irrevocably from peasant stock. The Putnams might have been ambitious international entrepreneurs, clerics, and adventurers, but they weren't royalty by any means.  Betty had to be content with recorded history and to forget the inconvenient truth of her genetic past.

 

The rest of the millions of Americans who want a glimpse into the distant past are happy enough confirming their Irishness or Italian ancestry. Some wanted to be sure they had no Jewish blood, although given the forced insularity of the Jews, ghettoes, shtetls, and the like - that was pretty much of a certainty.  

'I've got a drop of Scottish blood', said one patron at McSorley's bar, who bought a round of single malt for everyone; and that was about as far as most DNA searches went. A complete waste of time and money, a pastime, an incidental use of new technology, but meaning little or nothing. 

Yet Gates has made millions, far more than he made as a Princeton professor teaching Black Studies to black students, or later at diversity minded Harvard which hired him to do the same thing; and the DNA tracking companies are now on the stock exchange. An American success story among many, or looked at another way, a sucker born every minute. 

'If The Rule You Followed Led You To This, Of What Use Was The Rule?' - The Short, Unhappy Life Of Frances Macomber

The Anton Chigurh character in the film version of Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, asks a private detective he is about to kill, 'If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?'. The detective shakes his head and asks Chigurh if he knows how crazy he is. 

'You mean now?' replies Chigurh. 

'No' says Carson Wells, 'I mean the way you are'. 

Chigurh smiles, looks for a long minute at Wells, and then pulls the trigger. 

Forensic psychiatrists who watched the movie have observed that the Chigurh character was the most accurate depiction of a psychopath they had ever seen on screen or even in their practices. Chigurh, demented beyond description, without a shred of moral composure, a calm, determined, calculating indifferent killer is 'a frightening example of human nature gone completely awry'. 

The now famous line has gained popular currency, applied to lives far more mundane than that of Anton Chigurh.  It is the existential question asked by many older people nearing the end of their lives without particular regret but with a nostalgia for the road not taken.  What if? is the refrain often heard in game rooms of retirement communities. 

Frances Macomber, widowed for many years, childless, but with the professional freedom that barrenness afforded, had recently and reluctantly retired from her position at a Washington area university and accepted an emeritus position, was given a pleasant although not corner office and all the logistics support she required.  She was at work on her memoir - Diary Of A Reluctant Mind - a book which would chronicle her long career and offer insights about womanhood, feminism, the glass ceiling, and the compromises of marriage and professional responsibility. 

To be honest it was make-work - a project to keep the now elderly woman off the streets.  The subject had been beaten to death by legions of women who thought their lives particularly illuminating and whose university presses gave them a by and printed a limited number of copies at their own expense. 

Frances, however, took the work seriously, pounding out page after page of prose narrative.  She had, despite many years as Chair of the English Department never lost her prolixity and tendency to overwrite, and now, since there were no editors looking over her shoulder, the memoir became a kind of A Child's Garden of Verses with all the romanticism of lost youth but without Stevenson's poetic grace.

As she labored away at the book, she became increasingly disconsolate as she heard the happy chatter of young Assistant Professors in the hallways, knowing that she would never again be one of them; and slowly but surely doubts began creeping into her head.  Perhaps she really had nothing to say, nothing 'illuminating' or interesting. She had led a predictably comfortable life in academia, publishing now and again, teaching a desultory course or two, keeping office hours which had become little more than whining sessions for unprepared students.

Not surprisingly her long tenure in academia strengthened the early liberalism of her youth.  She had grown up in a modestly successful Ohio family whose members were solidly Democratic, swimming against the tide of rock-ribbed Republicanism of the state, and who suffered the opprobrium of colleagues, friends, and neighbors. 

They were old-line progressives, weaned on the heady laborism of LaFollette, Gompers, and Brandeis who argued for workers rights at a time when socialism still had a chance to prosper in America, and dinner table conversations were always about the dignity of the working man and the failure of the country to give him his due. 

 

She had tired of these mealtime commiserations, and had vowed that as soon as she could, she would leave the farm, liberalism, and reformist policy.  She went east to college, one of the famed Seven Sisters schools where she became friendly with the daughters of the rich and well-to-do.  If she had been immured within walls of liberalism back in Ohio, she had more than she could take of aristocratic indifference. 

She returned to the progressive fold and joined a movement which had changed since the days of labor, factories, and the depredations of robber barons, and had become the party of civil rights, diversity, and peace, all of which suited her.  While her relatives' holier-than-thou sanctimony had bored her to tears to the point that she completely empathized with Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan, she now found this new cant, dogma, and canon particularly relevant. 

 

She added social activism to her already significant workload at the university where she was making her way up the ranks, and became what she increasingly thought of as 'a modern woman'. 

Yet now bent over her manuscript and checking the clock as it approached time for 'Community Talks', the informal women's political discussion group she had organized and arranged, she felt a wave of anomie, a feeling of hopelessness and despair.  Of what earthly use was a hen party of disaffected old women banging on about Donald Trump and the ignoramuses in his thrall?  

And who on earth would want to read the reminiscences of a woman who had never been one of the best and the brightest, an academic who published regularly but whose readership was insignificant at best, and whose students, admitted under affirmative action and its post-Supreme Court shady covers, were as clueless and unprepared as Tibetan monkeys. 

Her old friend Margaret Tippet, like her a graduate of the women's Ivy League but who had labored thanklessly in the vineyards of second rate schools, said, 'Bake a cake', her own typical, ironic rejoinder to older women's depression. 

'Bake a cake indeed', replied Frances, glad to have a sympathetic ear but not ready for her friend's catty remarks.  After all, what had she done?  Nothing to speak of, hanging on to an even more questionable position at a third-rate school and a frequent speaker and smarmy gender-reveal political advocacy groups.  Neither woman had lived up to their promise or potential but neither was willing to accept it and move on to life's final phase. 

A phase which was frightening to say the very least, a vacuous void, an eternal emptiness, a horrifying nothingness.  Again the light switch along the emotional wall of old women flipped on.  Why had she so abruptly left the church, avowed atheism, and turned away from anything spiritual except hippy worship? If she only had had God in the wings, an unquestioning hand of mercy, she would not feel so lost and alone.  But deathbed conversions let alone while she was still alive and kicking were not her style.  She would have to go struggling into that long dark night like Ivan Ilyich without anyone with her. 

 

Frances had seen the No Country movie and like thousands of other viewers and was taken by the Chigurh line about rules and unexpected ends. And here she was, facing the barrel of his shotgun without a clue or answer in the world, and welcoming the annihilating blast. 

Suicide is the only unforgiveable sin, Scobie, the character in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter tells Mrs. Rolt, his lover; but he rejects his profound, obedient Catholicism and does just that. He is tired of pity, self-recrimination, and responsibility, and he must do the right thing. 

Frances was in no mood for self-abnegation.  Suicide was too final a solution for the ills of an ordinary woman, so suffer she must.

She soldiered on despite her dispiritedness - her memoir, her political chat group, Commentary, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and NPR. 

Nietzsche had said that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world was the expression of pure will, but here she sat with little will, no meaning, and no hope - a sorry, pathetic old woman who should have followed a different rule. 

 

But then again as philosopher psychopath Chigurh would have certainly said, 'The rule itself doesn't matter.  Any rule will do'.