A few blogs back I promised a musing on love. I've dropped a few liners, but done nothing serious with the topic.
But it occurs to me that there is one thing I can say about love. It arrives and stays without reason. This is important. There is no one reason for why I love Jenny, or Gillian, or Roland, or Adam, Micah, Georgia, Theo, Jeff, Kathy, Joy, and so on. One can include animals: Cleo, the stuuningly alive Spike, who died more than a year ago. The view from the top of Mount Messenger, the sound of a right-hand surfbreak at Whangamata, the taste of a fresh Thai carrot salad, the feel of the air after a thunderstorm, a distinctive blues song that comes to the ear across a busy street. The moment I start interrogating myself as to why I love any of them, things start diminishing. There can be no single reason, because there are thousands of reasons. And each of those reasons has to do with who I am and what I have become with them in my life. To love Jenny, Gillian, and all the others is, in no small measure, to love myself.
The examination, in other words, is something that makes me smaller. Not the subjects and objects of my care and concern. Me. It has taken me a long time to understand that the best thing to do with love is to simply accept it.
Love can have no conditions placed on it. Love is free, and independent. Love is not a part of me: I am a part of it. Love is an elemental impulse, one that tickles the hindpart of my brain, one that has nothing to do with higher reasoning. It is.
There's a famous line in the Bible: I am who am. It's a supremely arrogant line when put into the context of a god, but it has a refreshing humbleness when stacked up against that most unreasoning of human afflictions, Love. Love is what Love is. Grammatically ugly, I know - but resolutely forceful.
Reading: "Impact", Douglas Preston. Trashy potboiler, but fun. Much like a Tom Cruise movie.
Listening to: Neil Worboys and the Real Time Liners. The kind of blues music you hear across a wind and rain-swept street that makes you yearn for smoke-filled bars, a bowl of red-hot chilli, a bottle of teeth-achingly cold beer, and the close companionship of a better than good friend.
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Things I've Learnt Lately...
I went to meet a new client today. He was, as it happens, an Indian. Very thick accent, in the early stages of dementia, and only ten years older than me. Dementia may be striking him (and his family), but he still speaks (and reads) three languages.
He was seated in front of the big screen tele when his daughter invited me in. He was cross legged, wearing a pair of what looked to be superbly comfortable light cotton pants... and an All Black shirt.
Even before I'd met him, I'd responded to his daughter's "G'day, how's it going, want a cup a tea?" with the thought that here was someone who could end up as Governor General, or Prime Minister, or or whatever in this rather fabulous little country of ours.
If I hear Paul Henry's name once more, I'm going to be physically sick. His nasty little comments should be allowed to fade like an old stain. So, of course, should he. But he won't. One of our three nation-wide radio networks will snap him up. Actually, one wouldn't touch him with a well disinfected syringe. But then, Radio New Zealand National doesn't depend on "fame" to sell its programmes. They rely on quality, and intelligence.
Another thing I learnt: that TVNZ is a disgrace. Its glorious leader Rick Ellis hinted that they might have made a move toward getting rid of PH, because they were starting to lose advertising revenue. Not because it was the right ethical choice to make, but because they might lose some dollars.
A couple of weeks back I hinted that I'd been starting to think about the nature of love. Watch this space, I said.
First observation - and yes, it's taken me a couple of weeks to reduce this to something that I can state with confidence:
The fact that I love someone should in no way impact on their decision making process.
It's taken me a long time to learn that. I have, in the past, sincerely (and stupidly) said things along the lines of "But you can't do that to me. I love you..." and "Come on, do this for me. After all, I love you.."
Hmm. Nope. Doesn't work like that. Love gives. it doesn't take.
Leonard Cohen has it absolutely bang-on: There ain't no cure for love. I've come to understand that, too. I love my Jenny more than life itself - and that has given me the strength of heart to love others. Properly, with no demands, no requirement that the love be returned. Just knowing that such a love is possible, and that I have it within me, is extraordinarily liberating.
I shall share more thoughts when I can be little more coherent...
READING: "The Boys" Comic-book series, by Garth Ennis. very, very good.
LISTENING TO: Jeff Beck. Again.
He was seated in front of the big screen tele when his daughter invited me in. He was cross legged, wearing a pair of what looked to be superbly comfortable light cotton pants... and an All Black shirt.
Even before I'd met him, I'd responded to his daughter's "G'day, how's it going, want a cup a tea?" with the thought that here was someone who could end up as Governor General, or Prime Minister, or or whatever in this rather fabulous little country of ours.
If I hear Paul Henry's name once more, I'm going to be physically sick. His nasty little comments should be allowed to fade like an old stain. So, of course, should he. But he won't. One of our three nation-wide radio networks will snap him up. Actually, one wouldn't touch him with a well disinfected syringe. But then, Radio New Zealand National doesn't depend on "fame" to sell its programmes. They rely on quality, and intelligence.
Another thing I learnt: that TVNZ is a disgrace. Its glorious leader Rick Ellis hinted that they might have made a move toward getting rid of PH, because they were starting to lose advertising revenue. Not because it was the right ethical choice to make, but because they might lose some dollars.
A couple of weeks back I hinted that I'd been starting to think about the nature of love. Watch this space, I said.
First observation - and yes, it's taken me a couple of weeks to reduce this to something that I can state with confidence:
The fact that I love someone should in no way impact on their decision making process.
It's taken me a long time to learn that. I have, in the past, sincerely (and stupidly) said things along the lines of "But you can't do that to me. I love you..." and "Come on, do this for me. After all, I love you.."
Hmm. Nope. Doesn't work like that. Love gives. it doesn't take.
Leonard Cohen has it absolutely bang-on: There ain't no cure for love. I've come to understand that, too. I love my Jenny more than life itself - and that has given me the strength of heart to love others. Properly, with no demands, no requirement that the love be returned. Just knowing that such a love is possible, and that I have it within me, is extraordinarily liberating.
I shall share more thoughts when I can be little more coherent...
READING: "The Boys" Comic-book series, by Garth Ennis. very, very good.
LISTENING TO: Jeff Beck. Again.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The Shrieking of Fiends
We kill our children in New Zealand.
A year or so ago, our parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove a clause from the Crimes Act that gave adults the right to defend themselves against charges of child-bashing by saying they used reasonable force to discipline the child. The Holy Ones, of course, got up in arms, and, inspired by their snarling and vengeful gods, got up a petition, demanding a referendum to rescind this most sensible and loving of amendments. All very democratic. The referendum was granted, and the voting papers came out, with a thoroughly ambiguous and leading question: "Do you think parents who smack their children for disciplinary reasons should be criminalised?"
Well, it is an impossible question to answer. I, like most people, understand that sometimes a light smack is the last resort, and may be the only thing that will work at the time. So, given those circumstances, I would have to say that no, I wouldn't like to see anyone hauled before a judge.
But what about the person who smacks their child as a second, or even first resort? What if that person "lightly" smacks their child ten, fifteen, twenty times a day? "It's only light smacking, yer onner. No harm done, eh?" Wink wank nidge nudge say no more.
Once, when caught up in a bit of fundamentalist christianity (no capitals on purpose, folks.) , I heard that adage "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and I acted on it. Another couple were in a similar situation to us: young couple with baby, raising our hands in joy to the lord. Sigh. We babysat for them one evening, and - with their permission (spare that rod, people..) - smacked their baby when it cried. I struck that baby once. Disciplinary, you see. Necessary: god said so.
I still have nightmares.
I now read, or hear, that injunction quite differently. I now say spare the rod by putting it away. And then spoil the child. Spoil the little bugger rotten. Loving a child never hurt it, so love that child a little more today than you did yesterday.
I can understand smacking a child, I really can. But I cannot understand the urge to hit a child twice, and nor can I understand why we should want something put back onto our statute books that allows the hitting of a child.
I was one of 13% of people who voted "yes", to keep a smack a criminal matter. The law will be used sensibly, and not vindictively. But it'll be there, and perhaps we'll grow into a nation that looks with repugnance on the violence we mete out to the most defenceless of us.
We kill our children, here in New Zealand. Because we still, deep in our feral hearts, believe that bashing a kid will help him or her grow up.
This is one aspect of our culture that I despise.
READING: "Bodies Left behind", by Jeffery Deaver. My word. More red herrings than a John West canning factory, more twists than a drunken snake's passage across a road. I have found myself saying "Oh, no!" out loud. A lovely piece of storytelling.
LISTENING TO: Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over troubled Water". Still great, after all these years.
WORD OF THE DAY: Discipline. With love, not violence.
MORE HENRY!
A year or so ago, our parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove a clause from the Crimes Act that gave adults the right to defend themselves against charges of child-bashing by saying they used reasonable force to discipline the child. The Holy Ones, of course, got up in arms, and, inspired by their snarling and vengeful gods, got up a petition, demanding a referendum to rescind this most sensible and loving of amendments. All very democratic. The referendum was granted, and the voting papers came out, with a thoroughly ambiguous and leading question: "Do you think parents who smack their children for disciplinary reasons should be criminalised?"
Well, it is an impossible question to answer. I, like most people, understand that sometimes a light smack is the last resort, and may be the only thing that will work at the time. So, given those circumstances, I would have to say that no, I wouldn't like to see anyone hauled before a judge.
But what about the person who smacks their child as a second, or even first resort? What if that person "lightly" smacks their child ten, fifteen, twenty times a day? "It's only light smacking, yer onner. No harm done, eh?" Wink wank nidge nudge say no more.
Once, when caught up in a bit of fundamentalist christianity (no capitals on purpose, folks.) , I heard that adage "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and I acted on it. Another couple were in a similar situation to us: young couple with baby, raising our hands in joy to the lord. Sigh. We babysat for them one evening, and - with their permission (spare that rod, people..) - smacked their baby when it cried. I struck that baby once. Disciplinary, you see. Necessary: god said so.
I still have nightmares.
I now read, or hear, that injunction quite differently. I now say spare the rod by putting it away. And then spoil the child. Spoil the little bugger rotten. Loving a child never hurt it, so love that child a little more today than you did yesterday.
I can understand smacking a child, I really can. But I cannot understand the urge to hit a child twice, and nor can I understand why we should want something put back onto our statute books that allows the hitting of a child.
I was one of 13% of people who voted "yes", to keep a smack a criminal matter. The law will be used sensibly, and not vindictively. But it'll be there, and perhaps we'll grow into a nation that looks with repugnance on the violence we mete out to the most defenceless of us.
We kill our children, here in New Zealand. Because we still, deep in our feral hearts, believe that bashing a kid will help him or her grow up.
This is one aspect of our culture that I despise.
READING: "Bodies Left behind", by Jeffery Deaver. My word. More red herrings than a John West canning factory, more twists than a drunken snake's passage across a road. I have found myself saying "Oh, no!" out loud. A lovely piece of storytelling.
LISTENING TO: Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over troubled Water". Still great, after all these years.
WORD OF THE DAY: Discipline. With love, not violence.
MORE HENRY!
He suddenly felt small and defenceless, and very, very scared.
Adam had stayed behind, watching this man who was being taken from him. Adam shivered in the heat, a violent shudder that wracked his body. His eyes misted over, and he blinked, vision suddenly betraying him again, and again the rage came upon him: the man down there was a stranger, not his father. This man was an impostor, a fraud, some fell creature who picked fussily through the rocks, who was shrunken and frail, not real at all: a phantasm of fading flesh. Adam shakes himself, shivering in the Grecian afternoon, and looks again. His dad, Henry Talbot, looking up at him, and the power of his love is like a blow.
Henry paced the small patch of land where heroes lie in peace, and wondered why he was here. He turned and looked back up the slope at his son. Long and lean of limb, with a golden glow of youth and health that was almost impossible to believe. He eyes filled with tears, and he didn’t know whether they were tears of love, of self-pity, or of fear. He blinked, and looked back up the hill. He paused, shocked, breath snatched from his lips. By the boy: a young woman, glowing in the afternoon light. She’s tall, willowy, dressed in a simple white shift. She looks down at him, and he is sure he can see a golden glint in her eye. Henry loses his footing, and looks down to find the rock that had turned under his feet. When he looks up again, she is gone. He walks up to his son, and embraces him, and says, simply, “Let’s go back home. To Gussy’s. To see Mum.”
“But Uncle Don. The grave?”
“Enough of death, Adam. Enough.”
“Right.”
“That girl.”
“What girl, Dad?”
“I thought I saw a girl standing next to you.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Oh.”
He’s curiously light on the bike on the way back down the coast. Adam is hardly aware he’s there: the pillion in a million. In truth, Henry is preoccupied, his eyes dull and unseeing, his thought as fast as light. He’s relaxed on the motorbike, because he just doesn’t care enough right now. They go straight back to Gussy’s, not even taking the detour to the cemetery where Henry’s uncle lies, his dust mere star-stuff.
That night Henry is lying next to Mary. It’s three in the morning, and neither of them has slept; not because of the heat that thickened the air, nor for any hankying or pankying, oh no! Mary, to be honest, was as randy as a stoat, but Henry had something on his mind that he needed to sort through. He’d been quiet and moody since going away with his son, and Adam had retreated as well. All she knew was that she had to give them time, and they’d come to her. Adam had taken her aside earlier that night, and sobbed as he’d told her how he’d seen his father on the previous sunny afternoon at Thermopylae, and she’d understood precisely: she, too, had seen the shadow over her Henry.
And so she lay in bed next to him, uncomfortably warm, wondering if the heat radiating from Henry’s body was healthy, well of course it wasn’t, and he turned to her, feeling her restlessness, her concern, her love, and he turned and said, “I think I saw Miriam.” And he turned away.
“Who?” She’s shocked. Appalled. Suddenly angry. This is not her Henry! This bloody foulness is stealing my Henry away from me!
“Our daughter, Miriam,” he said, and went on to tell her about his experiences at Thermopylae, at the Gates of Fire. “I don’t want to believe it was her,” he went on, after describing the girl with the glint of light in her eye. “But Adam didn’t see her –“
“He doesn’t see every girl in the world,” she said, her anger fading. He’s kept his scepticism.
“He would have noticed this one, mark my words.” Henry stopped, his mind a-jumble, a-jingle, a-jangle. “Look, this goes against everything I’ve ever thought or –“
“You are a bit fragile at the moment.”
“Not that fragile,” he said. “Not that fragile.” His voice was thin and stretched, and Mary was again suddenly afraid for him. Because he was that fragile, and he didn‘t know it. All at once the ground shifted under her feet, and the colours of her life twisted like smoke in the wind.
What was it they‘d said, those white-coated ravens at the hospital? That they could expect mood and personality changes as the tumour grew?
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Lust
In the ebb and flow of life's tidal pools, there's probably nothing that has ruled my life more than lust. I'm unique in that I share this with, oh, 6 billion other people.
I always supposed that lust would fade as I got older. It hasn't. Certainly, it's not as sharp: lust no longer has that totally involving stupidity to it that it used to have. But it has merely changed. The leopard's spots are becoming stripes.
James Carter, that most maligned and mis-understood of US presidents, famously said "I have lusted in my heart." He was pilloried for that statement, possibly because of its bland honesty. As I recall, the statement came about because he was trying to explain that while he had never cheated on his wife, he understood those who did so. And, honestly, what individual hasn't, at some stage, looked at an attractive other and thought "Well, cor, I can sure imagine doing the horizontal two-step with you.."? Of course we have. Jimmy's problem was his gee-whiz peanut farmer honesty.
There have been times when I have given in to my lusts. I've been a true, if rueful, surrender monkey. Let's be clear on this: I'm not only talking about sexual lust, although that is a bright and shining star on the firmament of desire. Some lusts, I think, are forgiveable. The simple yearning for a dish of boysenberry ripple ice cream on a steamy summer's afternoon: a lust that's easily given in to, even though I have to acknowledge the down-side - that of an extra ten minutes on the exer-cycle. Other lusts are things of fantasy: the cherry red E-Type Jag or midnight blue 1960 Chev Corvette that I will never own, but remain in the back of my mind, skittering insects, informing me of days gone by when such things were not only desirable, but guilt-free. Today, of course, they're simply desirable, but oh so totally carbonny sinful.
Today, with my hair greying and thinning as fast as my waistline thickens, I think of the various women I have truly lusted for. All unattainable then and now, of course, and there is a certain wistful nostalgia in my recollection of those pulse-pounding moments when I thought "if only...".
Such, of course, is the nature of lust. Satisfying it can be such a disappointment. But then, one is not to know that until one has taken steps to scratch the itch.
So today I find my lusts are travelling in different directions. Physical lusts are still there, no doubt: but they are tempered by more intellectual desires. The idea of rubbing brains instead of groins is starting to take the ascendancy.
The flip side is that, oddly, the meeting of physical desires (Yes, sex. I was trying to be elegant. Bull in china shop, you say? OK...) is far more gooderer now than it ever has been. This has an awful lot to do with my wife, who - well, she's worth a lustful thought every now and then. Like any day with a "y" in it.
Lust is, I think, an allowable sin. Acting on the lust is usually not so easily dismissed. Succumbing to the seratonin-stirring blind ambition of lust will almost always bring pain to someone. Lust is, at core, selfish. It's an "I want it, and I want it now!" shrieking that starts in the gonads and bypasses the bits of the brain that ask "Yeah, but what if?".
So, like Jimmy Carter, I have lusted, and will continue to lust. Probably not in my heart, because I gave thast away some years ago. But certainly in other parts of my psyche, there'll always be a gibbering little monkey leaping up and down saying "gimme gimme gimme". The thing is this: will I continue to keep it chained? Ah, sweet mystery of life.
READING: The Robert J Parker western, "Appaloosa". Brilliant. Sparse, spare, dry, laconic... and as good an acerbic comment on nihilism, anarchy, fascism, and Rousseau's social contract as I've ever read. Back to the library for more, please.
LISTENING TO: Peggy Lee "Golden Greats", simply fantastic. And Russell Morris, "Fundamentalist". The greatest unknown Australian ever.
WORD OF THE DAY: Discipline.
More Henry:
Black Beauty
The horse stood at sixteen hands, and was jet black from fetlock to crupper, from crop to crapper. Henry knew next to nothing about horses, and Mary knew even less. She, at least, appreciated their beauty. Henry derided their stupidity. Where they stood the desert stretched away from them to all points of the compass in a dun broadsheet. The air was drier than Henry could have imagined: it scraped his nasal passages like a fine sandpaper, so he wrapped the scarf around his face, leaving only his eyes uncovered. They glinted as grey as wet steel, and Mary’s mind fled to John Mills at the bridge of a destroyer on an Atlantic convoy, grimly shepherding defenceless cargo ships to safety against an implacable foe. Her fancy made her smile.
They were in Tunisia, and were leaving the next day, to start their American adventure. They’d come here from the stark beauty of Greece, where heartache, courage, grief, love, despair, and hope had been released and reclaimed in equal measures. Gabby, all silks and harrumph, had flowered over the pair of them, while Norman, her Etruscan potter, had been a stalwart column for Adam to lean on.
They had arrived at Gabby’s whitewashed villa shortly after midnight, just three days after receiving the confirmation of diagnosis from the whitewashed medicos in the Auckland hospital. All clinical smiles, bleached hair, and clicking stainless steel instruments, their verdict had been as dry and dusty as they would find the Tunisian sand to be. “Sorry, Mr. Talbot. But your doctor was right.”
“Know?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” they replied, mis-understanding his question. It could have been quite the joke, one for the cocktail hour, but not for these boy-oes. So unctuous, so false. Mary had a sudden image of black-cloaked ravens, hunched shoulders, green teeth. Well, in Mary’s mind, ravens have teeth, and they are, by golly, green. Give a little, would you? She was sure, at some visceral level, that these men and women drew strength from the dying, and the knowledge they had of their patients’ mortality. She wondered if they knew as well that they too would, one day, be dust.
Tunisian dust, perhaps.
Stardust, never.
Gussy had become an old lady in the three days of waiting for her son. Her vibrancy was gone, and she wafted her silks and chiffons more from habit than desire or pleasure or a need to cock a snoot at you, buster, you in your black suit and black furled umbrella.
Norman looked at her son, this Henry to whom he had spoken so many times but never met face-to-face, and momentarily hated him for the pain he was causing, then he took himself off, and cursed himself for a fool.
Adam’s bewilderment was total. He had always and ever known his father to be a strong man, a tower, a bastion, a rock against which his happiness and delight and joy and fears would dash, to be tamed and returned with that gentle smile.
He had never had cause to stop and consider the love his parents had for him, or the love he held for them.
Love ya, he’d say to his Mother. Hey, Dad, he’d say to his Father. It was all very well for them! They’d only known him for nineteen years, while he’d known them all his life! God damn him, the stupid old bastard! He had no right to die. Had no right. He’d said little that first night in Greece, bewildered by this stranger who’d turned up. This Henry Talbot wasn’t his father: he’s an impostor! His father isn’t going to die: this man was. Adam resented the grim cloak of mortality this man had brought with him, this spectre of death that arrived, gibbering and shrieking, promising pain, tattered robes fluttering on a bitter wind. He had said little to Henry, a little more to Mary, and had been a sullen spectator at the evening meal, taking himself off to bed early.
Then, the next morning, he woke at dawn, and found his Father standing there in his room, looking at a picture he’d taken, and the painting he’d made from it. His Father, standing there, the pride he felt for his son the artist obvious in the way he stood. Adam looked again at his Father, at this man called Henry Talbot, and in that heartbeat understood love and the death that would take his father away from him.
“It’s good,” said Henry to his son. “It’s very good.”
“I’m not happy with it yet.”
Henry smiled. He knew those words, all too well. He said “Your Mum and I were at the Harrison’s a couple of months ago. Do you remember that painting they bought? The blue skiff on the yellow ocean? Your mother wanted to take it back and finish it.”
“It wouldn’t have been the first time.”
“No,” said Henry to his son, and turned to really look at him. Such a fine boy. Long limbed, with the beauty of Mary’s face imprinted over the squareness of his. He had the Talbot hair, the thick brown mop that would only surrender to heavy artillery. And he has Mary’s eyes: vivid green, with a golden speck in the iris of the left eye.
“Adam?”
“Dad.”
Silence. Then a deep breath from Henry. “You know you’re better than your Mother was when she was your age?”
Adam smiled. “Where you really going to say that?”
Henry stopped, the said “No. Thank you. You’re right - I don’t have time any more to prevaricate. I’d like it if you’d come with us. To wherever it is we’re going. I know I’m asking a lot –“
“I’ll come.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be easy. I just want to take the chance to be with you and Mary for the time I have left. I don’t know how long it’ll be. The doctors say six months, but it could be a year. This thing that’s growing in my head – well, I am long way away from understanding it. But in a way, I think that it’s given me my life.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No. Nor do I. Not yet, anyway. But I want you with me. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but –“
“Dad, it’s all right.”
Henry sat on the bed, and turned his face from his beautiful son, this young Adonis who looked so much like his uncle but who behaved like his mother, this lad who represented all that was fine and good in Henry’s life. “No.” Said Henry, “It’s not all right. I’ve spent most of my life with your Mother, and never known a real day’s unhappiness – well, except for when your sister died. I’ve been content to stand in my Mary’s glory, and never once have I stopped loving her. I tell her every day that I love her, and I never grow tired of it. I think I’ve told Miriam the same, every day. But I don’t think I’ve ever told you, face to face, man to man, Father to Son, that I have always loved you, too. That –“
“Dad. Some things never need saying. You remember when I scored that try against Southridge, the one that stole the game from them?”
“Yes.”
“If you’d seen the look on your face then, Dad, you know that I’d never have any reason to doubt your love.”
Henry sighed, and wondered from where his son had got his wisdom. He‘d certainly never chopped the wood! “But I still should have told you.”
“Perhaps you should,” said Adam. “But you didn’t, and I’m not harmed by that lack. Let’s go somewhere, you and me and Mum, and have a party.”
“What do you say to Tunisia?”
“Why there?”
“Well, that’s where they shot the first Star Wars movie, and where David Lean shot big chunks of Lawrence of Arabia. I think, anyway. And I’ve always wanted to get all dressed up like a Bedouin, like some Sheik of Araby, and ride a horse in the desert.”
“Tell you what: it’s a deal, as long as you let me take you for a ride on a motorbike first.”
I always supposed that lust would fade as I got older. It hasn't. Certainly, it's not as sharp: lust no longer has that totally involving stupidity to it that it used to have. But it has merely changed. The leopard's spots are becoming stripes.
James Carter, that most maligned and mis-understood of US presidents, famously said "I have lusted in my heart." He was pilloried for that statement, possibly because of its bland honesty. As I recall, the statement came about because he was trying to explain that while he had never cheated on his wife, he understood those who did so. And, honestly, what individual hasn't, at some stage, looked at an attractive other and thought "Well, cor, I can sure imagine doing the horizontal two-step with you.."? Of course we have. Jimmy's problem was his gee-whiz peanut farmer honesty.
There have been times when I have given in to my lusts. I've been a true, if rueful, surrender monkey. Let's be clear on this: I'm not only talking about sexual lust, although that is a bright and shining star on the firmament of desire. Some lusts, I think, are forgiveable. The simple yearning for a dish of boysenberry ripple ice cream on a steamy summer's afternoon: a lust that's easily given in to, even though I have to acknowledge the down-side - that of an extra ten minutes on the exer-cycle. Other lusts are things of fantasy: the cherry red E-Type Jag or midnight blue 1960 Chev Corvette that I will never own, but remain in the back of my mind, skittering insects, informing me of days gone by when such things were not only desirable, but guilt-free. Today, of course, they're simply desirable, but oh so totally carbonny sinful.
Today, with my hair greying and thinning as fast as my waistline thickens, I think of the various women I have truly lusted for. All unattainable then and now, of course, and there is a certain wistful nostalgia in my recollection of those pulse-pounding moments when I thought "if only...".
Such, of course, is the nature of lust. Satisfying it can be such a disappointment. But then, one is not to know that until one has taken steps to scratch the itch.
So today I find my lusts are travelling in different directions. Physical lusts are still there, no doubt: but they are tempered by more intellectual desires. The idea of rubbing brains instead of groins is starting to take the ascendancy.
The flip side is that, oddly, the meeting of physical desires (Yes, sex. I was trying to be elegant. Bull in china shop, you say? OK...) is far more gooderer now than it ever has been. This has an awful lot to do with my wife, who - well, she's worth a lustful thought every now and then. Like any day with a "y" in it.
Lust is, I think, an allowable sin. Acting on the lust is usually not so easily dismissed. Succumbing to the seratonin-stirring blind ambition of lust will almost always bring pain to someone. Lust is, at core, selfish. It's an "I want it, and I want it now!" shrieking that starts in the gonads and bypasses the bits of the brain that ask "Yeah, but what if?".
So, like Jimmy Carter, I have lusted, and will continue to lust. Probably not in my heart, because I gave thast away some years ago. But certainly in other parts of my psyche, there'll always be a gibbering little monkey leaping up and down saying "gimme gimme gimme". The thing is this: will I continue to keep it chained? Ah, sweet mystery of life.
READING: The Robert J Parker western, "Appaloosa". Brilliant. Sparse, spare, dry, laconic... and as good an acerbic comment on nihilism, anarchy, fascism, and Rousseau's social contract as I've ever read. Back to the library for more, please.
LISTENING TO: Peggy Lee "Golden Greats", simply fantastic. And Russell Morris, "Fundamentalist". The greatest unknown Australian ever.
WORD OF THE DAY: Discipline.
More Henry:
Black Beauty
The horse stood at sixteen hands, and was jet black from fetlock to crupper, from crop to crapper. Henry knew next to nothing about horses, and Mary knew even less. She, at least, appreciated their beauty. Henry derided their stupidity. Where they stood the desert stretched away from them to all points of the compass in a dun broadsheet. The air was drier than Henry could have imagined: it scraped his nasal passages like a fine sandpaper, so he wrapped the scarf around his face, leaving only his eyes uncovered. They glinted as grey as wet steel, and Mary’s mind fled to John Mills at the bridge of a destroyer on an Atlantic convoy, grimly shepherding defenceless cargo ships to safety against an implacable foe. Her fancy made her smile.
They were in Tunisia, and were leaving the next day, to start their American adventure. They’d come here from the stark beauty of Greece, where heartache, courage, grief, love, despair, and hope had been released and reclaimed in equal measures. Gabby, all silks and harrumph, had flowered over the pair of them, while Norman, her Etruscan potter, had been a stalwart column for Adam to lean on.
They had arrived at Gabby’s whitewashed villa shortly after midnight, just three days after receiving the confirmation of diagnosis from the whitewashed medicos in the Auckland hospital. All clinical smiles, bleached hair, and clicking stainless steel instruments, their verdict had been as dry and dusty as they would find the Tunisian sand to be. “Sorry, Mr. Talbot. But your doctor was right.”
“Know?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” they replied, mis-understanding his question. It could have been quite the joke, one for the cocktail hour, but not for these boy-oes. So unctuous, so false. Mary had a sudden image of black-cloaked ravens, hunched shoulders, green teeth. Well, in Mary’s mind, ravens have teeth, and they are, by golly, green. Give a little, would you? She was sure, at some visceral level, that these men and women drew strength from the dying, and the knowledge they had of their patients’ mortality. She wondered if they knew as well that they too would, one day, be dust.
Tunisian dust, perhaps.
Stardust, never.
Gussy had become an old lady in the three days of waiting for her son. Her vibrancy was gone, and she wafted her silks and chiffons more from habit than desire or pleasure or a need to cock a snoot at you, buster, you in your black suit and black furled umbrella.
Norman looked at her son, this Henry to whom he had spoken so many times but never met face-to-face, and momentarily hated him for the pain he was causing, then he took himself off, and cursed himself for a fool.
Adam’s bewilderment was total. He had always and ever known his father to be a strong man, a tower, a bastion, a rock against which his happiness and delight and joy and fears would dash, to be tamed and returned with that gentle smile.
He had never had cause to stop and consider the love his parents had for him, or the love he held for them.
Love ya, he’d say to his Mother. Hey, Dad, he’d say to his Father. It was all very well for them! They’d only known him for nineteen years, while he’d known them all his life! God damn him, the stupid old bastard! He had no right to die. Had no right. He’d said little that first night in Greece, bewildered by this stranger who’d turned up. This Henry Talbot wasn’t his father: he’s an impostor! His father isn’t going to die: this man was. Adam resented the grim cloak of mortality this man had brought with him, this spectre of death that arrived, gibbering and shrieking, promising pain, tattered robes fluttering on a bitter wind. He had said little to Henry, a little more to Mary, and had been a sullen spectator at the evening meal, taking himself off to bed early.
Then, the next morning, he woke at dawn, and found his Father standing there in his room, looking at a picture he’d taken, and the painting he’d made from it. His Father, standing there, the pride he felt for his son the artist obvious in the way he stood. Adam looked again at his Father, at this man called Henry Talbot, and in that heartbeat understood love and the death that would take his father away from him.
“It’s good,” said Henry to his son. “It’s very good.”
“I’m not happy with it yet.”
Henry smiled. He knew those words, all too well. He said “Your Mum and I were at the Harrison’s a couple of months ago. Do you remember that painting they bought? The blue skiff on the yellow ocean? Your mother wanted to take it back and finish it.”
“It wouldn’t have been the first time.”
“No,” said Henry to his son, and turned to really look at him. Such a fine boy. Long limbed, with the beauty of Mary’s face imprinted over the squareness of his. He had the Talbot hair, the thick brown mop that would only surrender to heavy artillery. And he has Mary’s eyes: vivid green, with a golden speck in the iris of the left eye.
“Adam?”
“Dad.”
Silence. Then a deep breath from Henry. “You know you’re better than your Mother was when she was your age?”
Adam smiled. “Where you really going to say that?”
Henry stopped, the said “No. Thank you. You’re right - I don’t have time any more to prevaricate. I’d like it if you’d come with us. To wherever it is we’re going. I know I’m asking a lot –“
“I’ll come.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be easy. I just want to take the chance to be with you and Mary for the time I have left. I don’t know how long it’ll be. The doctors say six months, but it could be a year. This thing that’s growing in my head – well, I am long way away from understanding it. But in a way, I think that it’s given me my life.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No. Nor do I. Not yet, anyway. But I want you with me. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but –“
“Dad, it’s all right.”
Henry sat on the bed, and turned his face from his beautiful son, this young Adonis who looked so much like his uncle but who behaved like his mother, this lad who represented all that was fine and good in Henry’s life. “No.” Said Henry, “It’s not all right. I’ve spent most of my life with your Mother, and never known a real day’s unhappiness – well, except for when your sister died. I’ve been content to stand in my Mary’s glory, and never once have I stopped loving her. I tell her every day that I love her, and I never grow tired of it. I think I’ve told Miriam the same, every day. But I don’t think I’ve ever told you, face to face, man to man, Father to Son, that I have always loved you, too. That –“
“Dad. Some things never need saying. You remember when I scored that try against Southridge, the one that stole the game from them?”
“Yes.”
“If you’d seen the look on your face then, Dad, you know that I’d never have any reason to doubt your love.”
Henry sighed, and wondered from where his son had got his wisdom. He‘d certainly never chopped the wood! “But I still should have told you.”
“Perhaps you should,” said Adam. “But you didn’t, and I’m not harmed by that lack. Let’s go somewhere, you and me and Mum, and have a party.”
“What do you say to Tunisia?”
“Why there?”
“Well, that’s where they shot the first Star Wars movie, and where David Lean shot big chunks of Lawrence of Arabia. I think, anyway. And I’ve always wanted to get all dressed up like a Bedouin, like some Sheik of Araby, and ride a horse in the desert.”
“Tell you what: it’s a deal, as long as you let me take you for a ride on a motorbike first.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
