Rebecca Mead, of the New Yorker, right about so many
things, is wrong about the importance of chatter in a relationship. She thinks it's fluff, weightless. Talk about "school districts or visits to the in-laws or the follies of the
Bush Administration" (8-11-03) couldn't possibly be what Milton was referring to when he made "a
meet and happy conversation" the "chiefest and noblest end of
marriage."
I didn't realize just how wrong she was until the
other day I ran into this poem, "The Guitarist Tunes Up," by Frances
Cornford.
With what attentive courtesy he bent
Over his instrument;
Not as a lordly conqueror who could
Command both wire and wood,
But as a man with a loved woman might
Inquiring with delight
What slight essential things she had to say
Before they started, he and she,
to play.
That one word "essential," after "slight." Essential
to their love, to the ecstasy they will play their way into, essential to their
relationship. There it is, the
whole refutation of Mead, a refuting the way poets refute, a brain-shaking
combination, with a power no academic's argument, whatever it's length, will
ever reach.
I would have heard "talk about the follies of the Bush administration" as fluff when I was a high-theorizing graduate
student. That was before I really
listened to King Lear. Stripped of the big kingship things, standing
with Cordelia as she asks to confront the sisters who will imprison them, he
stops her:
No, no, no, no! Come let's away to prison:
We two
alone will sing like birds i' th' cage....
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too —
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out —
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies, and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
There's
day-to-day life together! The
essential in the slight. In this
passage what invitations there are to superimpose the other — Lear
bending over Cordelia with "attentive courtesy," his pleasure in
their kind of play, their "singing i' th' cage" coming through as
well-tuned guitar music. In Cornford what invitations to
expansion. See, as Mead does, the
connection with Milton, and realize that marital back-and-forth is exactly what
Milton was talking about, and you can see the lovers' play going on, with
children, into larger play, with more variations, more personalities, more to
play with. A well-tuned family.
One can understand why 95% of our literature, and
maybe 99% of our movies, appeal to our interest in the exotic — what's outside
our daily experience. Getting
excited about what's inside, the
introtic, say, is so difficult.
You really have to crank up your imagination. All while resisting the exotic's force of attraction.
Are you in doubt about that force? Look at what Roget gives as synonyms
for "exotic": alluring, colorful, fascinating, enticing, unfamiliar, romantic,
glamorous. Even better look at the
antonyms: boring, uninteresting,
standard, usual, dull, common, familiar, normal, regular, ordinary. Think what it must take to overcome
that!
Exotic things are essential to
those whose imaginations are not yet strong enough to penetrate the fluff, to
get to what's in play, the love, and yes the conflict, the competition. Managed and played with. The love.
The disproportionate lure of the outside to youth is
understandable. There, and
possibly really there, is the New York stage, or an ambassadorship, or a Nobel
prize, or the Great American Novel.
You have to live a while, and not get a Nobel, to know what Lear is
talking about. Also now there are
new chemicals for our sensors, new kinks in the sex chain, all there for the
exciting exploration our affluence allows, all alluring, fascinating, unfamiliar,
and enticing, none standard, normal, regular, ordinary, or dull.
It's not a competition, though, where we can go all-out either
way. I favor the inside game but I
have to back the youth who might, just might, playing outside, write the Great
American Novel. On the other hand
there's what Lear opens up for us: the chance to become God's spies into the
mystery of things. That can't be
boring, uninteresting, standard, or dull.
Not if you're spying on human beings.
There's a problem with our word "exploration."
It nearly always means to us "movement
into the outside, the unfamiliar."
It seldom means "digging deeper into the inside, the
familiar." What the lover is
doing when he inquires into the slight essential things the loved woman has to
say. What parents in the
well-tuned family do, and the children learn to do. Attending to the slight things that reveal a spouse's
character, or a child's capacities.
There's no other word for that than "exploration," and no
other suggestion it can make than "exciting." Any dullness has to be in the observer.
Is that the inside game's highest promise, the
nobility, a chance to see into the mystery of things? A blaze of light, Truth on a mountaintop? I don't want to deny any possibility
that might give the inside game an advantage over the outside game, but I can't
claim it.
I can, though, give advice on a bet. If the winner is going to be the one on
top at the end put your money on the inside players. Shakespeare has given me a vision. I see Lear and Cordelia, inside those prison walls,
gabbing away, wearing out "packs and sects of great ones." I see our two, Cornford's two, bouncing their ball
back and forth, wearing out packs and sects of romantic questers. On and on. When those on the outside are worn out those imaginative ones on the inside will still be fresh.
