All of us, find it hard to escape the attraction of lyricism, the fairytale, minstrels that enchanted universe of goblins and fairies so redolent in our Harry Pottterish world. For we live in a world of wall to wall media with its techno-tele-discursivity, telling us how to think and x factor techno-tele-iconicity telling us who to adore. Most of us just grin and bear these pathological aspects of modernity.
Why not be stoic anyway? because overhead there is lowering sky called seductive capitalism with its massive investment in the escapism of ‘luv’, from pop songs to women’s magazines downwards. Yes charismatic capitalism with its proselytising zeal that induces desire, the kind of purchasing desire that once induced must be sated. Does this apply to love. Does the discourse on love go unrecognised. Is love domination accepted?
“Our antennas were trembling at that first meeting. We both just knew it. It wasn;t tht long afterwadsthat we were married. Has the woman just unknowingly just triggered her dispositions and entered marriage as calculated submission?
I was talking to friends and associates about how they first met and I though this could be turned into a game show by say, Simon Bowel, he could stage it in a Roman amphitheatre
”We had such similar tastes in everything.” I stayed schtum, but the view that marriage between people with the same social characteristics, is a form of inbreeding floated across my mental screen.
“I don’t know what it was about him, I think it was his bearing. You know, the way he carried himself.” So he had performed his manly role well. “I don’t know... with her...it was the way she walked, her gait, the tilt of her head - she had played her, coquettish, demure female part well. Hearing this just strengthened my view that identity is performance.
“Something told me to go to the cafe that night with my friend, and that’s where we met. The moment I looked at him. I knew, I can’t put it into words...” Don’t worry others will, with their incomparably lucid evocation from Mills and Boon to chic lit, stretching into an infinity where all the trees have been used up.
“It wasn’t long before I was thinking of...well marriage really...the white dress, the ceremony, the full works. Never thought that would happen to me. Perhaps it was just fate that I met him that night.” “Perhaps it was” I acquiescd. Yes, amor fati, that love of fate, with its baggage of acceptance of the determined or predetermined course. Haven’t we all fallen for that one.
If you feel all this has a comic pedantry, part of some medieval fabliaux, you are on the right track. As these friends continued to recount the tale of their romance and subsequent marriage, a ghostly bearded figure like Hamlet’s father fleeted across my mind and in sonorous Darwinian tones boomed, “All these meeting are driven by biology.” Jesus, I thought, I will have to get a move on myself if I want to have children.
But I kept on interviewing the couples. So these couples told how they were in love, as they understood it. As their relationships intensified, they began to view the other as quasi divine creatures. Now they were on the magical island of love where there is full reciprocity. Where you entrust yourself to the other, and authorise the atonement of yourself to the other, A work of mutual recognition takes place, which Jean Paul Satre said makes you feel, ‘justified in existing’.
And this island is on a wondrous archipelago where you are just accepted with all your negative particularities and at your most contingent. Here in this love bliss, a state of disinteredness, based on the happiness of giving happiness. It is and inexhaustible reason for wonder. On this island of pure love, couples give themselves to each other, thereby excluding themselves from common circulation. Yet pure love, like art for art’s sake, is a relatively recent historical invention.
Some of the men talked to me of their ‘stag nights’ with misty reminiscence. As the tales of this strange male phenomeonon unfolded each sounded more and more like a bunch of Norse men with horns getting pissed in Ramsgate after a rocky landing in their long boats. So I went to one, as another of my. “I ‘m nearing 30 now,” of my friends ‘bit the dust’.
“She brought him to his knees.” “He was putty in her hands.”
Over the beer in the pub, they shook their heads. Yes, he had succumbed, hadn’t he, to that fatal attraction. Their words, in that male way, rang out like verdicts. “You’ll be next.” They said to me accusingly. “What me, never.”
“It was the pillow talk, wasn’t it?” The lads taunted him, the hooked one, the soon to be married. Yes, the forces that are suspected of working in the darkness, of binding men, of entrapping. The vagina dentata had struck again for men enfold and women ensnare, they didn’t say. But as they went on, tacitly branded the woman as a decadent voluptuary for stealing one of their mates. For this was a ‘stag nigh’ and these were men, and they were acting out the permanent dispositions that being masculine triggers and awakens.
As they reflected further how he had fallen madly in love with her, their laddish reflections, with their fixations to immaturity just serving to reinforce the androcentric mythology. Yes that fatal attraction affecting the social order of male dominance, embedded in our psyches from Aphrodite to Eve had worked it’s magic again, making them forget the obligation linked to their social dignity as men.
As they continued to muse not allowing for an instant, that they as men are invariably in a state of subterranean tension, like an enclave of negation. You know the weight of it just being men, and their anxiety about being men like some exotic peculiarities never spoken of and the resulting uncertainty leading to frantic circular investment in just achieving the target of being, well you know, a ‘man’.
When the landlord called time, afterwards, in that British way, there wasn’t a public toilet to be found, so it was down the alley to urinate against the wall. And this with much hearty laugher ended in a contest as to who could piss highest. It could have been a potency contest for 12 year olds. Alex won, but then he’s a fire man/fighter.
Then it was my turn, theres isn’t the space to tell you the whys and wherefores. But I do remember standing by her at the ceremony. How I had worked on my body in the gym, and she had worked too, to make herself trim and neat. Men do such gym things to make themselves bigger, women to make themselves smaller. .
Then the ceremony, we all need ceremony. I think of it now. The priest in his cassock, she in her silk dress that piece of clothing that like the priest’s cassock that neither prescribes or proscribes. And her minimal maquilage that denoted what? Allure. The cosmesis of it all, me in my first suit for yonks, which made me feel as if just I just had plastic surgery. What did the suit denote anyway, honour?
We took our vows in language effectively vowing to resolve our differences in non-coercive and non manipulative ways. And how would we manage to do that? Well we would use those twin transcending towers; we would be both rational and yes, reasonable. I mean if you want to achieve a consensual action you use the bargaining tools available to rational and thinking people
We vowed this both publicly and privately in the belief that these stubborn notions of rationality and reason would impose order on our chaotic manifold of impulses. Of course it is a given that in employing these two stale and obstinate notions they must be recognised de facto and unquestioning, for they are like objectivity, trans discursive and trans subjective. Now I think, how impotent and arbitrary is utopian thinking.
I remember those communicative signs, the ‘gifts and then there were the speeches.
Heavily male. Where innuendo snuck in, eh, tastefully of course.
Men with their speeches as if by their words they were magically been handed the skeptron, that Greek staff of bygone ages. And that by their just standing to speak there was some Godly call to order. There should be a sacralising separation, or so they thought. For men were about to speak, and they did so, by believing that they were drawing on external sources, words. But it was words that were drawing them in the linguistic sphere and just releasing the springs and pulleys that constitute male dispositions. Meanwhile, as I recall, the women watched, feminine, demure,coquettish.
I recall the mute suffering on the face of my Mediterranean mum giving her son away. There she was employing the means of the weak, the tearful outburst, as she squeezed the life out of a tiny laced white handkerchief. As people comforted her with mollifying words, or overly personal addresses of “Darling; or “Dear” or chucked her cheek, she was accepting of this sympa behaviour exemplify her marked propensity for self denigration.
Then there was the father-in-law, an Edwardian gentleman straight out of the pages of Virginia Woolf. I recalled how on the lawn afterwards he narrowed his eyes and looked to the horizon as if to say
‘You will understand one day.” The gloating of prophylactic prediction all over him. Yes, for this man who had deserted just about everybody, including three wives, all this was a kind of ludic illusion. He was at pains that you would remember his ‘ I told you so’ shots off the bow, while the retrospective triumph would be his. This man was always full of the pleasure of disillusioning. As if fitting to his male statutory loftiness he was an anthropologist but a pessimistic one. This man, for sure, would die standing, preferably by a crag of rock where in the future people would come to reflect by the cairn of rocks that was his monument to steadfast maleness. Or so he believed. He was a man alright, but prehistoric. His demeanour full of that totalising critique, like those experts hauled onto television couches, the intellectual theocracy giving out their critiques that reduce most to utter despair and defeatism. These latte literati, are an exploitative class of mediation and meaning who are unregulated, unmediated,
Then there was the Honeymoon in Venice, where we wandered past ‘Harry's Bar' and laughed uproariously. So here we were on our Honemoon in Venice, being in love was like a truce; love as the suspension of power relations, a deadly break in the natural order. A miraculous truce has taken place, where the dominant (male) seems dominated. And as if by magic male violence and coarseness has been stilled; civilized by stripping social relations of their brutality. We were in love, the state where couples lose themselves in each other in suspension of object and subject. It is a state where there is no temptation to dominate for one is blissfully beyond the alternatives of egoism and altruism and in this complicitious stage there is little need for the distortion of compromise.
But can the enchanted island of love endlessly threatened by the return of egoistic calculation be snatched from the icy waters of calculation, violence and self-interest. Years later I would recall those marriage vows - as if rationality and reason were free from illusion and self-deception, not as a pile of debris growing skywards.
Is love then, domination accepted, unrecognised. Has the woman entered marriage as calculated submission. Is her behaviour the complicity of the dominated? Was being in love the suspension of the dominant symbolic violence, or did it then become the extreme, the most subtle, the most invisible form of violence?
*(If you like this kind of thinking - then read
Pierre Bourdieu, I could not have written this without him).
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