If there's one thing good about growing old it is this: you are no longer the slave of sexual passions. This makes it possible to concentrate on other things which are decidedly more interesting than the old in/out, in/out. Still, those hormones never entirely subside and you never know when some female is going to come along to get them boiling again. Maybe not boiling, but at least asimmer, with unmistakeable signs of wanting to start bubbling. That's how old guys like me get into trouble.
Yesterday a young Korean girl sat down next to me at the coffee bar and when she tried to take a picture of herself I offered to do the honors. This led to further conversation. Now it seems Korean girls haven't been brainwashed into fearing old guys the way their North American sisters have and I was a bit surprised at how friendly she was. She was visiting friends in Victoria but had been studying English in vancouver for the past few months. Victoria does a roaring trade in ESL schools so young Orientals are quite commonly seen in the various caffeine joints and most of them are Korean. She mentioned that she was going on a bus tour to the Rockies and I said, better watch out for the bears. That was a word she had never heard before and when I tried to find a picture of one in my laptop she perched on the arm of my chair. That's when the heat came on. The pilot light hadn't gone out and enough fumes were available to ignite a small flame. Her hands were what did it, hands being for touching. Oh, nothing came of it. She was on her way to catch the ferry.
No, I'm not one of those honkies who idealize oriental women. The two years I spent as an American sailor in Japan cured me of those illusions. I rather disapprove of older white men who shop for wives in poor Asian countries. I know a few who have done it and I don't hold it against them but then I try not to think of reservations when I meet them. Once done you want it to succeed, of course. And knowing all this I would have happily made a fool out of myself yesterday if I had been given half a lightly larger window of opportunity.
A book I often go back to without ever quite figuring out what he's talking about is Robert Graves' "White Goddess." Ostensibly about the origin and meaning of archaic European alphabets, it's above all about poetry, the language of poetry, the craft of poetry, and what it's for. The White Goddess in her various manifestations is who the poet serves. Her service is far from gentle. Now from where exactly Graves derived his wild speculations I do not know. I think modern anthropologists and mythographers would question his sanity. But there is something irrevocably true about his ruminations, but it's poetic truth which differs from prosaic truth. In his words, a real poem that engages the worship and awareness of the godess will makethe whiskers on your face stand out enough to shave. I'm not acutely sensitive to poetry but when one catches me unawares (that seems the best way. When you sit down to study a poem its 'meaning' seems to evaporate) Afterwards, when the shock dies down a little and I try to analyze it, the music of the words obviously has a significance over and above the literal meaning of the words. Not that the poet is thereby absolved of the requirement that the words make sense. Quite the opposite. Through the music the words devlop an aura, a super meaning that isn't constrained by the linearity of normal language. Most of these thoughts I'm trying to express I got from The White Goddess.
Although he tried to backpedal from the implications of some of the ideas he wrote about, I carried some of his logic a little further. I can't say I can prove it, but let's say I have a working hypothesis about one essential element of poetry. Only men can be poets. A poem is an offering of love to a woman...not just to any woman but to the woman who the poet identifies as an embodiment of the Goddess. Only a man can love a woman in that way. And so, although a woman can write verse as well as any man, she cannot write a true poem...any more than a man can have a baby. And I don't think a man can write a poem without the stimulus of a beloved, just as Graves contends.
Graves envisioned a return to an imagined prepatriarchal era of European culture but I don't. I think there may well have been such a phase, but I don't think it was as idyllic as some of us believe. For a long time I have thought abortion, which has become acceptable since the advent of feminism, is a form of human sacrifice. On the other hand I think something is missing from Christian belief. The three aspects of the Goddess as Graves saw it was the Goddess as virgin, the Goddess as Mother, and the Goddess as bitch/slut and I think he wanted to say that modern patriarchal cultures have supressed knowledge of the third aspect at a heavy cost, and sometimes I think he's right. Poetic language is above all ecstatic and our Judeo/Chritian/ (and especially) Islamic religious legacy is revolted by the ecstatic. Maybe frightened is a better word. All I know is that these are deep waters.
The image I keep on my desktop most of the time is of Alice Faye. A very popular movie star of the '30's and'40's, she died about ten years ago and I only saw her for the first time when I bought a DVD of a musical, "Alexander's Ragtime Band." I can't look at this face without feeling like I'm falling into some deep chasm. A sweet ache comes over me. I want to touch her, kiss her. So what is it about this face, her face? Why not another face? Don't all faces have lips, eyes, nose, hair, skin? Why should it matter? But any man knows that he's attracted to some faces and not to others. Women, too, are drawn to certain faces and not to others. My Korean friend noticed the image right away. And she had some quality of her own, not only in her face but in her movements, her manner, unfathomable depths I wanted to explore. Sex? Is it only sex? The old in/out, in/out? If that was it why should the face matter at all. You've heard the age old coarse male joke, "They all look the same upside down." It's not true. The face matters, and for some reason the face is a signal of something else. Sometimes the signal is wrong. Sometimes a lovely young thing gets in my cab who looks absolutely adorable but as soon as she opens her mouth and spews the vulgarisms of the street she doesn't look so lovely any more. She reminds be of the dead dog I found under a hedge when I was a boy. He looked like he was asleep, but when I turned him over he was stiff and underneath he was swarming with maggots.
In another musical, "42nd Street," a song goes "I'm young and healthy and so are you." This could be a theme song for a Darwinist theory of human attraction. Utilitarian. The genetic imperative. There's something to it. Biologically we are animals and must reproduce. Youth and health are essentialfor 'reproductive success.' Until the last few generations in modern societies hard, demanding work was required for survival. But it isn't the sturdy ones we men go for, is it? I go for the delicate and demure every time. Like the little Korean girl.
No there's something else involved. It's almost like gravity. We do speak of magnetism but usually as a metaphor. But I think it's a fundamental law of the universe, maybe even more fundamental than gravity or space and time. That's one of the reasons I believe in god.
Here's a little poem of mine I wrote many years ago after meeting a beautiful young woman From Seattle at Second Beach in Vancouver. Since I can't get this blogger software to put the lines down as I want them I'll use slashes to denote line breaks.
I met lovely Linda so proud and so free,/
From soggy Seattle's steepy streets a refugee/
At English Bay- down by the edge of the sea./
We talked about something, everything, nothing,/
While the tide licked our feet- bare feet, felt neat, frothing./
I'll always remember the wealth of her hair, falling/
Over the glint of her eyes, green eyes, May eyes, searching./
I saw something sad there/
I wanted to kiss;/
After many a long year,/
When I strain to remember,/
It'll be something I'll miss.
No comments:
Post a Comment