ANNE CARSON
THE CALL OF EROS IS AT THE HEART OF THE HUMAN PERSON. Although each of us is fashioned in careful incompletion, we were created to long for each other. The secret of our completion can only be found in the other. Huge differences may separate us, yet they are exactly what draw us to each other. It is as though forged together we form one presence, for each of us has half of a language that the other seeks. When we approach each other and become one, a new fluency comes alive. A lost world retrieves itself when our words build a new circle. While the call to each other is exciting and intoxicating in its bond of attraction, it is exceptionally complex and tender and, handled indelicately, can bring incredible pain. We can awaken in each other possibilities beyond our wildest dreams. The conversation of togetherness is a primal and indeed perennial conversation. Despite the thousands of years of human interaction, it all begins anew, as if for the first time, when two people fall in love. The force of their encounter makes a real clearance; through the power of Eros they discover the beauty in each other. Stretching across the distance towards each other, they begin to awaken all the primal echoes where nothing can be presumed but almost everything can be expected.
Eros can be a hugely complex force that sometimes inclines towards gravity and darkness. Eros can pull life towards the edges and depths where death lurks. From ancient times a kinship has been acknowledged between Eros and Thanatos, the death instinct. Surfing the tides of Eros one comes to feel that the life-force of joy could surge through all limitations, even death; or indeed there is such a homecoming in Eros when one succumbs to its force and abandons self in the sweet dying of complete release.
T
HE
B
EAUTY OF
S
KIN
We are made immortal by this kiss, by the contemplation of beauty.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
THE INSTINCT, RHYTHM AND RADIANCE OF THE HUMAN BODY come alive vividly when we make love. We slip down into a more ancient penumbral rhythm where the wisdom of the body claims its own grace, ease and joy. The act of love is rich in symbolism and ambivalence. It arises on that temporary, total threshold between solitude and intimacy, skin and soul, feeling and thought, memory and future. When it is a real expression of love, it can become an act of great beauty which brings celebration, wonder, delight, closeness and shelter. The old notion of the soul being hidden somewhere deep within the body serves only to intensify the loneliness of the love act as the attempt of two solitudes to bridge their distance. However, when we understand that the body is in the soul, intimacy and union seem unavoidable because the soul as the radiance of the body is already entwined with the lover.
L
OVE
N
OTES
Your clear shoulder
When the clothes have gone
Seems so sure of us.
Gently, hands
Caress and kindle
The glow, the skin
Delights to know.
Your tongue,
A tiny peninsula
Curves, stretches
Longing to give way.
Currents swell, calm,
Flow blue flamed
And sea sweat
Beads flesh.
Scruples of hair
Linger across your eyes,
Order tossed to the wild.
Sounds entwine,
Say our names,
The cry becomes
A whisper to
Breathe clay open.
And the return
Is from a distant kingdom,
Where there were
Neither mirrors
Nor eyes.
One could write a philosophy of beauty using the family of concepts which includes glimpse, glance, touch, taste and whisper, all of which suggest a special style of attention which is patient and reverent, content with a suggestion or a clue and then willing through its own imagination to fill out the invitation of beauty. We know this in our own experience. When we become uncertain in love, we wonder if our partner loves us or not. We fear the well may have run dry and our insecurity deepens. The smallest whisper of love can restore confidence and sureness.
T
HE
B
EAUTY O
F L
OVE
:
E
VERY
R
ISK FOR
G
ROWTH
W
ILL
B
E
R
EWARDED
Since once (livelong the day) my prayer measured
A love along your face, I’ve raged and variously
Had all smiles and butchery daily acquainting
You of the springing bloodshot and the tear.
Since there (spun into a sudden place to discover)
We first lay down in the nightly body of the year,
Fast wakened up new midnights from our bed,
Moved off to other sweet opposites, I’ve bled
My look along your heart, my thorns about your head.
W.S. GRAHAM, ‘Two Love Poems’
