A KIND OF LOVING
Is it a biological urge to love? To mate and procreate? Love doesn’t make the world go round, it makes it go forward? Or is that biology? And love is what takes us out of this world altogether? The all too obvious missing-link to a happy no-ending? Transcending the will? Love comes like a chance in a million! Its’ magic is of the effortless… Not a force but a gift? To never feel it or acknowledge it is one interpretation of damnation? Without salvation? The essence of existence that links humanity to God, goodness and frees you from any Devilish pursuits? Beyond biology. The spark of kindness? That allows you to live and possibly suffer in peace? Organized religion but a febrile construct manufactured to encourage love? Though no more immune to corrupting infiltration than science, politics or art and entertainment, in a world apparently at war with love???
COMMUNION: I wonder if she needs to love / as much as I do? I ask her / Do you need to love / as much as I do? / She doesn’t know / anymore than I do…
“A KIND OF LOVING”: the title of a 1962 British film, I watched recently on YouTube. Set in an industrial town, possibly in northern England, working-class life as only the working-class would readily identify with. I readily did. And couldn’t help wondering had I seen that film in 1962 would it have changed my mind about what love really is?
*The photograph is not from the film but gleaned from a published collection of scenes from my own hometown, in particular a coal-mining village less than a mile from where I was raised. A cul-de-sac community, access over a railway-bridge, alongside the river, and beyond but woods and farmland, the pit-works at its’ heart and red-brick row-housing its’ meat and potatoes, where the regular working-folk live and breed and probably die. And, as this photo would suggest, experience a good-humored kind of loving…
She’s nineteen-years’ old, blonde and pretty. He’s twenty-one years old, dark-eyed sensitive and not unattractive. She catches his fancy. She responds. They shyly coax each other into a date. the tenderest of courtships, some kisses and un-heavy petting. She’s a virgin. Maybe he still is? She acknowledges his sexual frustration and begins to suspect her sexual reticence may not be too good for their relationship. She surrenders. But afterwards it dims at least his romantic glow. He begins to avoid her. She tells him she is pregnant. Reluctantly but without hesitation he dutifully accepts his marital fate. No church wedding for them. And with no savings in the bank, they must live in her mother’s house. Where her father is the film doesn’t explain. Her mother blames him for everything she has ever been disappointed in and doesn’t flinch from letting him know this. Her daughter has a miscarriage. After which his sexual consolations are put on hold. And with his mother-in-law’s relentless taunting, the situation becomes unbearable. One night he gets very drunk and after a blazing row with her mother, he packs a suitcase and walks off into the night. No idea where he is going. Sleeps on a railway-station bench. His stably married older sister is not as sympathetic as he’d hoped. His mother is not sympathetic at all. His father empathetic but in no doubt what his duty and responsibility is. He returns to his wife and they both decide to try and “make a go of it”. On one condition, he stipulates, they cannot live with her mother. They go house-hunting. But with little money in the bank, it is beggars-can’t-be-choosers-time. Which he is resigned to. She is much less resigned to it. But what can you do? They go to the park and try to re-kindle if not the romance, some kind of humored loving in their situation. A happy ending? Well, there are no guarantees in this black and white world…
In 1962 UK everything was in black and white. Only Hollywood and Disneyland was in color. As soon as everything went into color, it somehow lost its’ gritty naturalism. In the cinema we could always be in fairy-tale country. Once outside, at least in industrial northern England, everything returned to black and white with a tinge of gray areas. So much radiation too close-up is seductively unnatural. It can addictively blind you to your own mind. Natural radiance doesn’t bedazzle. It soothes the soul and eases the mind. Doesn’t stir up the passions. Doesn’t need make-up. no show-business. No glitz and glamor. No Saturday night rave-ups or Sunday morning hangovers. No stark contrasts. Nothing to prove. No pride, no shame, no guilt. No artifice necessary. A kindness of loving? Break it down into discriminatory parts at your peril. Which seems to be a fatal flaw in our human pilgrimage to some imagined Mecca. Temple of doom or salvation? Lost horizons of an innocence always just beyond us. So many so willing to contract the mark of the predator Beast? The plumed serpent swallowing its’ own tail in an endless recycling of success or failure, triumph or disaster at all costs. To devour for the sake of devouring. Enemy or ally a necessary condition for survival of the fittest. Not everyone is fit to live in an unnatural world.
If you don’t believe anything happens by chance, does that mean you have no choice? The best you can do is imagine that you do. You chose to be born into this world. And you have the free will to define your own part in it. Choose your weapons or choose your disarmedness. Even if you have to take it on the chin. fatally or foolishly? A fool for love or a sage for knowing you had no choice? It was written in the stars. That you would play a starring role in your own demise. No fool for hatred. It’s not good for your soul. Being well well-being. I believe in good and only evil made it seem bad. Your final no-choice in your matter. But a passing failure or triumph of your imagination? A kind of loving that meant no harm to anybody. Solving nothing that hadn’t already been resolved…Angry young men turning their anger inside-out, to prove there was not enough love in their life. Fame is the spur in your sock you can never shake free. Anonymity is the key to being left alone in peace. If you can find peace in being nobody, nobody will bother you. Or if they do, you must have been somebody after all. If you can find comfort in that, you will know your life was not lived in vain. Vanity, thy name is somebody else’s problem! I die as I lived, soully responsible for my own imagination.
I placed my coat for you to lie on / presuming we would lie together / there forever until morning / on the grass under that tree / I kissed your face you closed your eyes / not knowing what to say / and when we finally spoke of love / my handkerchief wiped our guilt away / long night our bodies cold my coat dew-sodden / the dawn broke gently behind that tree / you fixed your make-up to hide what was hidden /the secret of you and the stain of me / my arm around what was left of love / in the light of day we trembled homeward / you left me with a promise / I left you frozen solid…
I recognized everything in this movie. The characters, the situations, the brick row-housing, the kids playing in the street, the fathers in overalls trudging off to work, or relaxing later in shirtsleeves with pipe and newspaper, the perennially apron-pinnied housewife-mother about her daily chores or nattering with neighbors over clothes-line or cups of tea, the young daughters learning how to be women never unaware of their power over men and men’s power over them, to husband. These young men their future : birds of paradise or prey in their perms and party-frocks on Saturday nights, more modestly during the week, though never without make-up or some figure-hugging skirt and blouse, flirting with the cheeky young scamps with promiscuous dreams at work or in the pub, but reserving their favors for the far more stable and sensitive, or risk becoming a gossipers dream of having something truly tawdry to reveal…threatening any hope of husbandly security in the future… The young men with nothing on their mind but enduring a mindless job, getting drunk and laid on the weekend after watching their local soccer team probably get beaten again… They may be losers, but they are OUR losers! It is just the way it is. Try to change it at your own peril. Upward mobility but your dream of one day owning your own “detached” house, with at least two bedrooms, an inside toilet, a front and back garden…And a state-0f-the-art “Entertainment Centre”, so you could watch TV, play your records and listen to the radio at the same time, should you so choose… This was the world I was brought into. And I kind of loved it. At the same time, I was beginning to feel trapped by it.
A scholarship to university seemed to be my “get-out-of jail-free” card…Though at the same time it was casting me adrift into unfamiliar but no less systematics. Though one familiar lingered. My on-and-off girlfriend for the past four or five years. She’d visit me at university. We’d be all but inseparable on my parental visits. And on one of those visits, in a moment of pure hope I agreed that we should marry. She wasn’t pregnant, but I still thought it was the right thing to do. I bought her a pearl engagement ring. “Pearls for tears”, implied my mother at a familial dinner, to my new fiancee’s chagrin. Though maybe me mam was wiser than I’d ever given her credit for. Back in my newly adopted city, we would check out potential apartments. Her own parents seemed happy about setting a date. This was a time when having a university degree seemed to guarantee useful non-laboring employment. A teacher? A college professor? She herself had dropped out of college and was now a working-girl. Though I honestly can’t remember what she was working at. She seemed convinced she was employable in any city. I myself was becoming more and more unconvinced of my own employable non-laboring prospects. I was too young and raw to make lifetime commitments. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t stop ‘em thinking either that’s where they wanted to go, that’s where they needed to go, that’s where they didn’t want to go, but at least they’re making somebody else feel useful????
I never wanted to teach. Maybe George Bernard Shaw had planted that seed: “some people do and some people teach.” Did I learn that in school? My art teacher once ruefully confided to me how he wanted to be an artist, till family supporting took over his dreams. From the mouths of mentors?
I knew I couldn’t do it face to face back in the familial bosom, so I wrote her a letter. Not callously, but despicably cowardly. I jilted my fiancee, all but at the altar. I wanted no response. I’d sub-let a small apartment, off campus, told nobody the address, not even my parents. I wanted to vanish off the face of familiarity’s earth. Long enough to make it an irreconcilably done fact. I convinced myself I was doing us both a favor. Perhaps she’d experienced similar doubts and feelings. But she was still too closely wrapped-up in familial ordinance to make the first move? By now I knew I could never go “home” for more than an occasional parental visit. Many years later, on a visit to the UK from America, to perform at a theatre-festival, a woman in the audience turned out to be an old school classmate. We talked afterwards. She told me my ex-fiancee was happily married with a family. People just get on with their life. I felt genuinely gratified. It was a kind of loving. And I coukldn’t help hoping that every now and then she’d remember me fondly and thank me for keeping us both from impending disaster. Wishful thinking? Creative visualization? To help me feel not such a despicable coward? Unworthy of forgiveness?
I must admit a significant factor in my resolve to break it up was a literature-major colleague / companion who was going through her own identity crisis. She played guitar and sang folk-songs. Her favored outfits were pants and shapeless long overcoats. She didn’t give a damn about polite proprieties. had no suburban dreams. We could happily sleep together with no sexual tension. It really wasn’t about the sex. We’d hitch-hike together around the UK and abroad. In our graduation year we pretty much lived together in my cheap off-campus apartment, cheaply furnished by the Salvation Army. After graduation we went our own ways. No heartbreak. We’d keep in touch, with occasional visits. I have no memory of the word “love” ever entering our lexicon, only in folk-songs. The most vivid memory I have of our relationship is a late-night train-ride returning from seeing and hearing Robert Lowell read his poetry. She fell asleep on my shoulder, and it was one of the loveliest moments in my life…
How many kinds of loving do you need to experience, to know that love feels like your primal primary resource and impetus for not wanting to hate? For your own sake. It would take one hell of a boot-camp to remove that from your wish-list altogether. You would have to transform it into “camaraderie”. So you will always know whose side you’re on. And when love starts taking sides…, there’s an open backdoor for its’ opposite number to sneak in and grab you by the heart-strings and twist ‘em into a war-zone. The enemy, for God’s sake, go get ‘em, comrades! And let the Devil take the hindmost! Oscar Wilde was quoted as saying: “each man kills the thing he loves”. An enigmatic conundrum, that may only make sense in a war-zone? Love being so disarming it threatens to upend your very survival…But a forlorn hope of finding heaven here on earth? To die with hate in your heart may be one version of Hell? Demanding a resurrecting reincarnation, because you can’t just leave it like that! Or you’re back for revenge? You’;ve read the movie, you’ve seen the book, you must believe in fairy-tales by now. Maybe that’s a kind of loving? Enough to give you a happy ending?
I worked as a stock-boy once in that super supermarket Harrods in Knightsbridge, London. In the Stationery-Department. All our stationery team worked together, partied together and played sports together. No enemy in sight. For six months I really liked everybody and enjoyed myself. On Valentines Day I sent an anonymous card to my “floor-boss”, Jane. I liked her. She was fun. There was nothing sexual going on between us at all. As far as I knew. If she thought differently, she had us both fooled. I think she knew who’d written the card, but she didn’t say anything. And the radiant blush on her face when she was urged to read it out loud was a joy to be in the presence of. And if joy is not a kind of loving…???
IT MUST BE THOSE BANANAS I HAD FOR LUNCH: May I clutch your bottom / and clasp your breast to mine / must we march forever / in parallel lines? / I’ve known you now for several days / we’ve talked and wined and dined / you’ve told me how you feel the need / to first explore the mind / but now I can’t help thinking / the time has come at last / before your bottom slips away / I’d better grab it fast!
A few months later I met this American girl, vacationing in London, temping in the Stationery department. We had sex on the first date… But that’s another story, another kind of loving………………..
