Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Ovid and the law of gravid-y


"The night is slipping by -- unbolt the door!"


--Ovid, Amores


So doth the poet plead to the guard behind the bedroom door of a girl he desires. Presumably, she desires him too, and would admit him but slumbers unaware.


The guard is implacable. He will not be as the "old lamplighter" from an old song I know, who'd "pass a couple in the park and dim the light and leave it dark, remembering the days when he was young." He is no friend to impulsive passion.


Ovid to such a man is a wheedling would-be thief, a fox craving entry to the coop to satiate his animal greed. He cannot sympathize, so he will not yield.


Can we presume to condemn one or the other? Pass judgment on the chaotic ocean wave or the rock cliffs against which it beats?


What if all Ovids won entry? What if all door guards prevailed?


Desire, suppressed, burns in every human breast. I pass a hundred lovely souls, who please my senses, in just a few moments amongst a crowd, but I walk on in silence. Do they also desire me?


In the decades since my own youthful awakening, had I indulged every such impulse, with, of course, the unlikely consent of each fair damsel, a million passionate unions might have been consumated, ten thousand children might today carry my genes.


I met a man the other day, an old man, long devoted to one woman, as our society expects a man to be. He'd written of her, had been devoted to her and only her. Then she passed away. And upon my meeting him in person for the first time, I was genuinely startled to also meet his new wife, to whom he is now devoted. If by some spell, this man lived a million years, might he respectably take a thousand wives in turn, love a thousand women, one at a time, with each being his one and only for that certain indefinite period of time? Or what if a woman were touched by such a spell? Could she love a thousand men, each honestly and completely with every measure of devotion?


What if I were to be reborn a billion times, becoming the soul mate in turn of every woman who ever lived, even the most wicked of women, even the ones judged most plain and unattractive by society? From the Hebrides to the Sahara, Alaska to Patagonia, Tokyo to Turkey? Could I discover the core of beauty in even the most sallow and ill-favoured, the germ of goodness even in a Herodias or a Lady MacBeth?

6 comments:

Eastcoastdweller said...

In other words, we cage the fire, we bank it up, and we cherish the illusion that our beloved burns only for us, could burn only for us, that he or she only has eyes for us, that we two invented love, that love began when we met and it dies when our beloved dies.

Lance Abel said...

Goodness can be found in any person. Nobody is comprised only of 'bad' traits. Really, I think 'good' in this context means 'desirable', and bad, 'undesirable'.

The objects of desire being different for diferent people, I think different people discover the goodness (or desirability) in some people which others cannot. Typically, in our lifespans, it's not realistic to say that we could fall in love with a thousand women. Different men fall in love with different women and vice-versa. If we lived a thousand years, perhaps every person would change sufficiently to appreciate many different kinds of women.
Then again, I'm inclined to think that the idea of "love" loses, or should lose, some of its power if it has been felt for a thousand different people. Love could definitely be felt for more than one other, but it seems to take a while to grow and to die, and if it became something that is felt for a thousand different people, the word probably wouldn't mean as much any more.

Lance Abel said...

^addition:
The illusion that
"our beloved burns only for us, could burn only for us, that he or she has eyes only for us, that we invented love, that love began when we met and it dies when our beloved dies"

That's the kind of illusion which is very very difficult to be under more than once. S, with each new 'love', that love would diminish in intensity. Guess it depends how you define love, what with the division in to companionate love, romantic love, and passionate love. Some aspects must become less powerful with greater number in a lifetime.

Eastcoastdweller said...

I like both of your comments here -- they ring true. Maybe the law of diminishing returns is what Lance was alluding to.

ndpthepoetress Jean Michelle Culp said...

Oh how “love is a many splendid thing”! Surely, just because a Loved one departs rather sadly with death or on their own accord to live apart from us; does not mean in time, that like the seasons - love does not, nor can not spring anew. As for such a probability of Soul Mates, who’s to say that if in fact true – that we all ‘inhale in every breath one of the hundreds of trillions of molecules that Julius Caesar exhaled’, than upon any given birth perhaps many mixtures were inhaled. From the last breaths of Great Poets, Composers, World Leaders, Individuals…. Therefore, couldn’t miniature reflections of our supposed Soul Mate linger inside others; whence met - keep us company and our heart content, even if for a mere while? Least til that day one should actually meet the half that makes them whole?

Eastcoastdweller said...

JMC, that brings one to the fascinating and somewhat disturbing truth that all elements, not merely exhalations, are recycled.

That baloney sandwich you had for lunch could have contained carbon (in the carbohydrates and sugars of the bread) and nitrogen (in the protein of the meat) from my late great grandfather, passing through an intermediate stage as a leaf, a caterpillar, a bird, a cat.

Or from Cleopatra. Or from some ancient, giant cockroach.